Google “autism puzzle piece”
I’ll wait.
That branding is EVERYWHERE?
How’d it get to be that way?
We’re talking about Autism Awareness Month – there’s a lot of work to do here.
One thing that will help.
Let’s do away with this whole ‘puzzle piece’ mentality.
We’re not incomplete.
We’re not missing anything.
We’re not something to be solved.
We don’t look any better when put together.
Of course we want to understand ourselves better, but we’re asking you to understand us!
We’re not puzzling; we’re different.
This round, let’s put down the puzzle pieces. The icons. The ribbons.
We get that it’s still common, and fine, we can work off that common ground.
We’re not something to ‘put together.’
We just want to work together.
The Life Autistic 
I thought the puzzle piece 🧩 meant autistic people were one piece of the multifaceted picture of humanity.
Your point is well taken (and I do love your blog, btw!) As a parent of an autistic child (among other disabilities) I’ve always looked at it more as, I need to learn how to best reach her – because how I reach my neurotypical child is different. In my mind, it’s a little like common core math. I KNOW how to do math, but really struggled to help my kiddo with the common core because I only knew 1 way to do math. Mainstream shows us how to parent — and very little of those “traditional” strategies work for my daughter w/autism. From my perspective, I want to learn/find what I am missing (not that she’s missing anything). Like most parents who have a neurodiverse family, I am still learning. Blogs like yours help that effort so very much.