For a long time, I moved through the world feeling like I was watching it from a slight distance — close enough to see everyone, never quite sure how to step in. I know now that’s a common thread for late-diagnosed autistic people: you spend years sensing a gap you can’t name, studying connection like a language you were never handed the grammar for. What I didn’t expect was that the distance would eventually become a gift — a vantage point.
That vantage point is where the Fellow Humans collection comes from. The central image is the earth seen from far above: concentric rings of blue and green, a small bright center, everything held inside one circle. From that height, the things that feel so enormous up close — the borders, the differences, the reasons we decide someone isn’t ours — simply disappear. There’s just one blue-green sphere, the only place we know can sustain life. And the whole of human experience — every joy and ache there is — is being lived out on it, all at once, together.
That’s the whole quiet argument of this collection — a reminder I needed as much as anyone: the person beside you is carrying an entire inner world, as vivid as your own. For those of us who feel everything, that truth can be almost too much — we pick up on the ache and the joy in people whether we mean to or not. Fellow Humans is my way of turning that sensitivity outward, into something like tenderness. I brought it onto a beach towel on purpose, too — towels live where people gather, at the lakeshore and the crowded edge of summer, and I love the idea of a quiet reminder of our shared humanity resting on the grass while strangers become neighbors for an afternoon.
So that’s Fellow Humans — drawn from a distance, made for closeness. However far apart we can feel, zoom out far enough and we’re all on the same small, spinning, blue-green stone together. For the ones who feel everything. 🦚
See Fellow Humans for yourself.
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