(And Certainly Not a Developmental Halt!)
For maybe twenty years, I’ve been saying autism is a developmental delay, not a developmental halt.
Something I read today helped me realize that autism isn’t even a delay. I’ve written and spoken of autism as a different trajectory, a separate road. When we fail to meet developmental milestones, it’s because we’re not traveling the same road.
But today it struck me: traveling a different road means we really can’t be called delayed. Are apples delayed oranges?
The freeway is built for speed. Smooth blacktop, painted lines, endless streams of cars all moving in the same direction, at the same pace, toward the same destinations. It’s efficient, streamlined, and relentless. You don’t stop to notice much out there—just keep your foot on the gas, eyes forward, merging when you’re told, obeying the rhythm of the crowd.
The country lane is another world. Winding, uneven, with dips and bends that make you slow down, sometimes whether you want to or not. The air feels different on a country lane. You see the hawks circling above the fields, the wildflowers that grow between cracks, the way the light shifts when a cloud drifts in front of the sun. It’s slower, maybe—but it’s also fuller. You’re not just getting from point A to point B. You’re in the middle of a living landscape, taking in every detail, whether you asked for it or not.
The “Frozen in Time” Hypothesis
I started thinking along these lines after reading Jordan James’s take on autistic development. His metaphor was stark: autism as a kind of halted growth, “frozen” at different ages because of reduced synaptic pruning. In his view, some Autists remain infants in certain ways, others linger in childhood, still others carry pieces of teenagehood into adulthood.
It’s not hard to see why that framing resonates with some of us. Many Autists do describe feeling “younger,” or “out of sync” with peers. There are moments when the world treats us as if we’ve missed a step in growing up—and sometimes, it feels true inside our own skin. The sense of living on a different clock can be powerful, even haunting.
But the science behind this metaphor doesn’t hold up. As Dr. Nicolás F. Narvaez Linares, a pediatric clinical neuropsychologist at the University of Ottawa, pointed out in a comment on LinkedIn, pruning differences are variable, inconsistent, and nowhere near enough to justify sweeping claims about Autistic people being ‘frozen’ in time.
Worse, this conclusion risks being deeply damaging.
Lifelong Growth, Not Arrested Development
I think it’s more complex than the “frozen development due to clogged synapses” picture suggests. My own life has been full of growth—sometimes painfully so. I have changed, reshaped, and unfolded uncountable times. And I keep doing it. I’ve seen the same in Autistic friends, colleagues, clients—people manifesting a wide variety of “flavors” of autism.
In fact, one of the sharpest contrasts I have noticed is this: many allistic people seem “done cooking” by their mid-twenties. Their personalities stabilize, their habits take shape, and their ways of thinking become more consistent.
It’s probably no coincidence that 25 is the age when insurance rates drop and society starts treating people as more settled. For most, the brain has finished maturing, impulsivity fades, and people tend to become more predictable, less changeable.
Meanwhile, we Autists keep shifting. Still evolving. Still surprising ourselves with new insights, new ways of being, new patterns of thought.
Yes, I’m often pegged as younger than I am. I still love toys and cartoons. I carry a streak of naivety (though tempered now by memories of deception and betrayal.) But that doesn’t feel like arrested development to me. Quite the opposite. It feels like an ongoing capacity for renewal, a thirsty sense of wonder, a willingness to grow that doesn’t run out just because I crossed some birthday milestone.
This isn’t a deficit. It’s a gift. Autists have the ability to keep developing and changing all the way to our deathbeds. We are not halted, we are not stuck. We are alive to growth in ways most freeway drivers were never shaped to be.
What the Delay Framework Costs Us
The problem with calling autism a “delay” is that it traps us in a story that was never written for us. If development is imagined as a ladder, with rungs spaced at predictable intervals, then the assumption is that everyone is climbing the same structure and should be climbing at the same speed. In that model, Autists are forever stuck—still clinging to the lower rungs while everyone else rises higher.
That picture is not only inaccurate, it’s dangerous. It feeds infantilization: the idea that autistic adults are “really” children inside, no matter how many birthdays we’ve had or how much wisdom we’ve gathered. It justifies treating us as less capable, less autonomous, less deserving of respect.
And it ignores what is obvious to anyone who actually looks at us: we have spiky profiles. A spiky profile means strengths and challenges—relative to the neuromajority—sitting side by side in one person. Advanced in some areas, slower in others. Sometimes dazzlingly so, in both directions:
You might find a ten-year-old Autist who can recite astronomical data with the precision of a graduate student but struggles to tie their shoes. Or an adult who navigates complex systems of thought yet finds a grocery store overwhelming. You might meet a non-speaking Autist who points at letters with an eloquence that stops you in your tracks, yet who is still treated like a toddler because their sensory and motor issues affect when and how their bodies can show up.
This isn’t “delay.” It’s not a single clock running late. It’s an entirely different rhythm, unfolding unevenly, sometimes ahead, sometimes behind, sometimes on a completely different path, always patterned in ways that don’t climb the standard ladder in the standard ways.
Attention, Not Distraction
Autists aren’t delayed freeway drivers. We’re lane travelers. We don’t simply move more slowly on the same road; we move differently, on different terrain altogether.
On the country lane, you notice more. The road itself demands it. The texture of bark on the cottonwoods. The exact angle of sunlight through a cloud bank. The sound of gravel crunching under your tires, each stone distinct. What the freeway calls distraction, the lane calls attention. We are immersed in the details, saturated by them, compelled to take in the whole landscape.
This is one of autism’s great strengths: sensory depth, environmental awareness, the kind of noticing that catches what others miss. But that same fullness can overwhelm. Just as a country lane can’t handle the crush of freeway traffic without crumbling, autistic systems can be swamped when environments overload us with noise, demands, or relentless pace. That is where disability lives—not in some imagined lateness, but in the mismatch between our ways of perceiving and the structures we’re asked to navigate.
Spiky Profiles Are Terrain
The spiky profile only looks strange if you’re measuring it against freeway norms. From that perspective, it seems contradictory: advanced here, behind there, uneven all over. But on the country lane, the landscape isn’t supposed to be level. It has ridges and valleys, sudden overlooks, unexpected twists. The spikes are not flaws in the road—they are the road.
What’s called “delay” in one domain and “giftedness” in another are simply features of a different ecology. The unevenness is not a mistake to be corrected, it’s the terrain we move through and with. On the freeway, a sudden rise in the pavement would be a hazard. On the lane, a hill is part of the view.
The spiky profile means that Autists often defy simple labels. A person might compose music with exquisite precision yet struggle to keep their clothes clean. Another might master three languages while needing help to cross a busy street safely. These contrasts are not contradictions. They are part of the same pattern—the ridges and valleys of a life lived on a different road.
Different Roads, Different Rhythms
Autism isn’t about lateness. It isn’t about arrested growth, clocks that stopped ticking, or children hidden inside adult bodies. It’s about terrain. It’s about rhythms. It’s about sightlines that open in directions others don’t even think to look.
We don’t move along a single track of “normal development.” We move through our own ecologies—sometimes winding, sometimes steep, sometimes dazzling in their vistas. Our paths aren’t broken freeways; they’re lanes of their own.
Disability emerges when freeway systems are imposed on lane travelers. When schools, workplaces, and public spaces are built with only speed and sameness in mind, they leave no room for those whose journeys are richer, slower, or less predictable. That mismatch—between the way we are built and the way the world is structured—is what most disables us.
What We Bring Back
Freeways will always get you to the city faster. That’s their purpose: direct, efficient, predictable. But the country lane takes you somewhere else entirely. It winds through hidden valleys, past streams no map bothers to mark, into places you would never have found at freeway speed.
Autists are not late arrivals, forever catching up to the crowd. We are travelers of another road. Our journey is not defined by delay, but by difference—by the sights we gather along the way, the details we bring back, the truths we carry from landscapes most people never see.
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