I could tell you my life story through the changes in my name, the countries I lived in, and the possessions I lost. But this book is not about my life story but the stories I love to tell. It is about the lives of the people I met, with whom I connected and learned. If you ask me to summarise who I am in one word, most days, I will say, “learner”. Any other day I will say “storyteller”. I made learning a habit in my life. Every occasion is an opportunity to learn something new, and I love to share my learning.
Storytelling is what connects me with strangers, makes them acquaintances and perhaps friends.
This book is an invitation to connect and become friends. That is why I am telling you things I have learned with some extraordinary young people over the years. The first of them was my little brother José (also called by the nickname Sessé), who was born two years after me. The medical professionals assessed his development as a child and labelled him “exceptional”. At the time, this was the kindest word to describe a child with a learning disability. José has an unclassified developmental delay, a mismatch between chronological and cognitive age.
Other young people who taught me immensely were my primary school pupils. I was a primary teacher for several years and learned incredible things with the children. Although this book is not about my former pupils, I need to mention them still. Because being their teacher affected me and, years later, shaped my research project. It inspired me to listen to the research participants in the same dialogical way as I did with them.
In the first chapter, I introduce some research participants. Their stories gave colour and shape to my thesis. It resembles a graphic novel more than a doctoral report, and I love that aspect. They created self-portraits using the materials of my research method. I turned their stories into fiction and gave them new names to protect their identities. I borrowed a small part of that fiction to share a glimpse of what I learned with them.
In later chapters, I share different people’s stories and what they taught me. I share my conversations with young people about their experiences of autism. I tell the story of how I took stock of what I learned and created the Tangram Method.

You will meet seven experts by experience whose stories are the foundation of the method. They are strong teenagers who identify as autistic, who informed the construction of this approach.
This book is not meant as a manual or guide. It is a collection of stories to give insight into autism and its many facets and divergent outlooks.
Dr Hannah Belcher argues that to reduce the need for autistic people to mask, it is crucial to raise awareness among non-autistic people of neurodivergent ways of being. Similarly, I advocate that raising self-awareness can empower neurodivergent people to recognise their masking/camouflaging and make autonomous informed choices about them.