Chronic Illness In Review
This week’s panel takes the long way around to a simple idea — that the labels we use to sort each other are, at best, a starting place, and that the most interesting parts of a person tend to live just past where the label stops. Nick, Beth, Soso, and Steph sit with guest Stefan Pasek — a Polish-born writer in Minnesota with PDD-NOS — and let the conversation move from “normal versus abnormal” to “common versus less common” to whether bucketing humans does any of us any favors. By the time Stefan starts explaining how he writes, the labeling debate has resolved into something more useful: a portrait of one specific person doing one specific kind of careful, rhythmic work.
The first long stretch of the conversation is about being seen, not categorized. Stefan describes a college professor who simply treated him like a real person — “He treated me like a real person. And a lot of the other ones almost — they babied me.” Soso pushes back on the word “normal” when Stefan uses it, arguing for “common” and “less common” as terms with less judgment baked in, and Steph adds the parental layer: her 18-year-old son, also neurodivergent, takes pride in the word neurodivergent because it distinguishes him, and resists the move to flatten everyone into “we all think differently.” The panel doesn’t resolve this tension; they sit with it, which is more honest than choosing a side.
Nick’s contribution is to name what happens when labels become the goal instead of the work. He calls it “gamified mental health” — a system in which “the reward is you get a cool new label at the end and you can have like 500 different buckets that you can fit into.” He frames this against his own two years of group and individual therapy, where the question wasn’t which categories he fit into but, in his words, “Who is Nick, and what makes Nick himself?” Beth backs the critique with a harder example: someone close to her who collected diagnoses but never did the work the diagnoses pointed at. The argument lands as a quiet warning — diagnostic curiosity without follow-through is just collecting.
Stefan, who studied behavioral psychology and is the only autistic voice in the room, then does something the discussion has been building toward: he gets technical about confirmation bias. People come to him with a preconceived notion of what autism looks like, and “their brain’s gonna shut that out and interpret my behavior to fit their preconceived notion.” His proposed remedy is unfashionable but durable — more conversation, not less. “I’m a big believer in that the solution for bad speech is more speech.” He’s quick, importantly, to draw a line between formally defined cognitive biases and the looser sense of “bias” the others have been using; one of the small pleasures of this episode is watching the guest correct the hosts’ terminology with no rancor and a lot of precision.
Then the show pivots, and the best section starts. Asked how his autism shapes his writing, Stefan walks the panel through a practical theory of prose rhythm: English’s stressed-unstressed pattern, why iambic meter feels like marching, why Edgar Allan Poe’s reversed stress makes “The Raven” feel creepy and Shakespeare’s iambs do not, how short-sentence sequences and well-placed commas can raise or lower a reader’s heart rate. Once a month he turns a Disney movie into a Poe horror story; sometimes his friend Mac sets the result to music. Nick, who originally studied music composition, recognizes the framework instantly. The takeaway is not “autism is a superpower” — Stefan never claims that — but something more specific: the same pattern recognition that made school socially brutal also made him a writer who hears prose the way other people hear music.
Stefan Pasek writes short fiction (under 300 words) and poetry at stefan.substack.com, much of it built from prompts his readers send him. The episode closes with the usual Seascapes meditation from Beth and self-promotion from the panel — Steph’s Freedom Over Fascism, Soso’s CPTSD-and-fibromyalgia-positivity work, Beth’s faith-and-spirituality writing, and Nick’s continued dismantling of the manosphere here at Sick of This Shit Publications. But the lasting image is Stefan reading his own drafts out loud during revision, listening for whether the syllables fall right. It expands what Chronically Illing Out has been doing all season: showing chronic illness and neurodivergence as starting conditions for a person’s specific craft, not the whole story.
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Nick’s Notes
I’m Nick Paro, and I’m sick of the shit going on. So, I’m using poetry, podcasting, and lives to discuss the intersections of chronic illness and mental wellbeing, masculinity, veteran’s issues, politics, and so much more. I am only able to have these conversations, bring visibility to my communities, and fill the void through your support — this is a publication where engagement is encouraged, creativity is a cornerstone, and transparency is key — please consider becoming a paid subscriber today and grow the community!
