I’m sitting on the floor in Julie’s living room in Brussels, surrounded by the cheerful clutter of her younger son Neo’s toys. She’s across the room on the couch, sharing pieces of her life. An old black cat weaves around my legs, hopeful.

We’ve met several times now. There’s a quiet familiarity building between us.

As I listen, the fragments of her past begin to form a picture, stark and complex. She speaks of her school years, a time marked by a profound sense of being out of sync. “Children are cruel to each other, it’s impressive,” she states, matter-of-factly. The active mockery began around age six or seven, coinciding, she notes, with when she started speaking. Before that, kindergarten is a blur, but primary school playgrounds are vivid. “I used to turn around in the playground, alone,” she recalls, “having a bit this feeling of depersonalization. I was feeling a bit alien.”

It was there, spinning in her own world, that the isolation started. “The worst part of it is that I didn’t understand, because I didn’t feel like I was doing anything wrong.” She’d bring chewing gum to school, hoping for connection. “Kids were coming to take all my chewing gum and they were nice for a little while but then they would immediately start mocking me again. The next day, I was repeating the same steps… I just wanted kids to stop making fun of me.” The dread of break time became a constant shadow. “School was an atrocious experience for me.”

This feeling of being an outsider wasn’t born at the playground. Julie’s early life was steeped in instability. Her parents struggled with drug addiction, often absent, leaving her and her older sister adrift. Between the ages of five and seven, while her mother was in hospital receiving methadone treatment, Julie lived in a cité de l’enfance – a children’s home. Her sister had faced institutional placement even earlier.

Memories of her father, who died when she was young, are scarce but sharp. She recalls being extremely selective with food, a common trait in autistic children. One refusal led to violence. “He got angry and hit her so hard that she fell from the high chair.” She pauses, then adds with a wry smile, “I don’t miss him at all… I have a photo of him, he was also red-haired like me. My mother tells me all the time how much I look like my father. Well, anyway.”

Julie didn’t speak until around age six or seven, communicating through an invented language only she understood. But when words finally came, they emerged fully formed, elaborate, almost adult-like. This sudden fluency baffled others. Children mocked her; adults accused her of pretending. “I went from non-verbal to a very elaborate language,” she explains. This disconnect between her inner world and outward expression became a recurring theme.

Educators, lacking even a basic understanding of autism, tried to “cure” her tendency to walk on tiptoes by making her walk in straight lines. They saw her spinning, her difficulty with social cues, and labeled it “intellectual disability.” It was her mother who fought this label, insisting on mainstream schooling, though the bullying persisted across multiple schools. The feeling of being “a bit strange, a bit like an alien” solidified long before she had the concepts, like autism, to make sense of it.

Growing up navigating poverty in Charleroi, a city in the South of Belgium, and the chaos of her home life pushed Julie towards the streets and into precarious situations. Early dysfunctional relationships inevitably leave marks, shaping trust and intimacy. An older man offered shelter, then exploitation – photographs escalating from revealing poses to nakedness, to sex. She was still a teenager, discovering years later that these images existed online.

She married young, had her first son, Quentin. That relationship lasted 13 years. Another followed quickly, bringing her younger son, Neo, but soured as her partner struggled to accept Quentin and became controlling. Painful separations became part of her story.

When I ask about her support network now, she hesitates. She feels disconnected from her family. Moving away from the social precarity of her youth was a conscious choice. She mentions two women who are active in the support network for people with autism in Brussels. Other persons with whom she meets regularly and goes out? Not really, she says.

Julie’s disinterest in conventional socializing isn’t born from anxiety, but from a lack of appeal. “Socially, to make friends, you have to go to places where there are people and interact… that doesn’t interest me,” she says. Group meetups, even those for autistic adults, didn’t resonate. Her preferred interactions revolve around her deep interests: autism and psychology, or the occasional dive into the Star Trek universe. She prefers to connect through focused, meaningful discussion rather than broad social mingling.

Her life now centers around her two sons, Quentin (15) and Neo (3), both autistic. I ask her if she thinks that being autistic helps her parent autistic children. She gently corrects my premise – she can’t know the alternative. But she acknowledges what professionals have observed: her intense focus and deep knowledge allow her to be highly attuned to her children’s needs, recognising early signs others might miss. “I think it’s because I have limited interests and I’m very focused,” she suggests.

Watching her with them, I see this attunement in action. With Neo, who wasn’t yet speaking when I started working with Julie back in 2023, there’s a profound, almost intuitive connection. “Even if he doesn’t look at me, even if he doesn’t call me mom, the relationship with my son is very gratifying,” she says. Her parenting style leans towards collaboration and soft nudging rather than control. I watch her negotiating with Neo, who is reluctant to leave the park and go back home. She is talking to him all the time but does not attempt to steer him away or constrain him. She is not giving commands.

With Quentin, now a teenager testing boundaries, the dynamic shifts. He’s tactile, seeking physical interaction she finds challenging, yet she meets his playful taunts with her own, accepting his energy, sometimes amused, sometimes momentarily ruffled. It’s the universal dance of parenting a teenager. He feels safe enough to be goofy, annoying, entirely himself around her.

Of course, like any parent, she experiences exhaustion and frustration. Managing her own stress while navigating the needs of two children on the spectrum is demanding. Yet, amidst the complexities, there are moments of pure, uncomplicated connection.

Observing Julie navigate her world offers less a narrative of overcoming adversity and more a quiet study in self-possession. There’s a striking lack of pretense in how she engages with life, an unwillingness to expend energy performing a version of ‘normal’ that doesn’t align with her own logic or interests. Instead, her focus is directed, almost fiercely, towards what holds meaning for her – the intricacies of autism, the attuned connection with her sons, Star Trek, or other worlds that capture her imagination.

And here we are. The camera zooms out. It’s a lazy autumn afternoon, we sit on the grass in the park near her apartment. Neo, a whirlwind of blond curls, chases the soap bubbles Julie blows, his laughter bright. He seems fragile after past health scares, yet vibrates with energy. When tiredness sets in, Julie reads the signs and pulls him close to nurse. We sit in the quiet glow of the late afternoon sun, a moment of peace carved out for all of us.

But these are just my words. My perception. What about Julie? How did she experience our meetings, our long discussions, the camera directed at her, even these paragraphs? It would be strange to talk about inclusiveness and not include her voice. So I sent her the text above and asked if she could write her own account. And this is what she wrote.

“Florin asks me to react to his experience of our meetings. This is a particularly difficult task for me because it’s very broad, and I like guidelines that allow me to limit my choices and decision-making. It makes me anxious, like every project or task that leave too much leeway, too many decisions to make. Even making a choice can generate anxiety and an inability to take action. I like guidelines that give me a sense of control; it’s part of how I function and it manifests itself just as much in the most mundane daily activities as in more complex and motivating projects like this one.

Although I’ve been a photo model for years, these moments with Florin are nothing like any photoshoot I’ve ever experienced. It’s not about playing a fixed role, but rather, being myself, in my familiar surroundings, with my own particularities, sometimes flaws, sometimes strengths.

During the first two meetings, the idea of forgetting about the camera and just being myself intimidated me more than the idea of posing and pretending to be someone else. But Florin was patient and reassuring, not to mention that his project immediately appealed to me. I found it interesting; it’s a reunion between photo modelling and autism. Modelling was an important part of my youth, an activity that helped me no longer feel so ashamed of myself, because of the abuse I’ve been through. Autism has always defined me but was only able to identify and name it nine years ago. Autism has controlled my existence, my perception, my interactions, my judgments, but I had no control over my autism before this word, this diagnosis, was imposed on us, on my family.

Even though it largely defined my eldest son and me, I had only a very vague and erroneous idea of ​​autism. For me, it was something taboo and rare. I found the notion of disability sad, and I felt sorry for the people involved. The idea that I could be disabled? Never ever! In fact, I remember, around the age of 16 or 17, after a photoshoot with another model, I would systematically move aside and rock back and forth. It was an irrepressible urge. The other model came closer and said to me, “Stop rocking, it makes you look disabled!” At that moment, I felt insulted and ashamed to be perceived as such. I was, without realizing it, disability-phobic. And all my life, I’ve had to overcome these kinds of remarks that made me feel so inadequate. I didn’t perceive the oddity of my behavior, but others did, and this was a motivation for harassment, insults, exclusion, mockery, and violence.

So, from that day on, I learned that swinging wasn’t good and that I had to wait until I was alone to satisfy my need. I had to stop sucking my thumb in front of others, avoid expressing my thoughts, avoid constantly looking at the ground and saying hello to every passerby on the street, walk around in circles and pace back and forth, and ask the same questions over and over again. Throughout my youth, I tried to suppress certain behaviors, without really succeeding. I hoped to protect myself from the nastiness of other children.

But back to the present, and to the Autism Stories project. Florin is the artist in this project, the photographer. But for me, he is, above all, the parent of an “adotist” – an autistic adolescent. One senses in him a real desire to respect the people behind his lens, well before that of the technical precision of the photographs. He understands and adapts. I was able to overcome my apprehension very quickly. During our meetings, I even forgot about the project itself.

I was able to share intimate experiences from my past and present. Sometimes I fear shocking him or that he might not believe it all, so much so that my life is worthy of a novel, a mixture of precariousness, abuse, mistreatment, and resignation.”