Words are maps. They are useful, but they are not the territory. “Success” is one of those words that collapses the moment you examine it. What looks like winning to one person is meaningless or even repulsive to another. The same is true of most labels we reach for autistic, successful, failure, normal, broken. They compress reality so aggressively that the actual lived experience often disappears inside them. Too many people treat these compressed descriptions as if they are reality. The result is a strange kind of confusion: we argue about the map while the ground under our feet keeps moving.
