The cry that didn't come

Think Autism Melbourne 2026. A reflection

At the end of every conference we’ve run, there’s a moment I’ve learned to wait for. The room empties out, the chairs go still, and somewhere in the packing up it lands on me. Relief, exhaustion, and something close to grief, all at once. I usually cry. Quietly, in a corner, or in the car on the way home. That’s how I know the day meant something.

This time it didn’t come.

I kept waiting for it. I wound the cables, stacked the chairs, said the last goodbyes, drove home. I sat in the quiet expecting the wave, and it never arrived. For a day or two I thought something was wrong with me. Maybe I’d gone numb. Maybe I’d finally done this enough times that it stopped reaching me.

Then I worked it out, and it’s been sitting with me since.

The cry didn’t come because the day didn’t end.

The room was bigger this year. Not just more chairs, although there were more chairs. It was bigger because the conversations were bigger. We weren’t talking about awareness anymore. We were talking about why autistic burnout keeps getting treated as a personal problem when it’s often a systems problem. We were talking about entrepreneurship, ageing, parenting, intersectionality, and what happens when decisions get made about us without us in the room.

Maybe that’s because the day wasn’t really about autism. It was about systems. About the gap between how autistic people experience the world and how the world is still organised. Every panel found its way back there eventually.

A cry is what you do at the end of something. You let it out because the thing is finished and you can finally feel the weight of it. But I don’t think this is the end of anything. I think we’ve spent four years building up to a starting line and only just crossed it. When we opened the floor at the end of the day, nobody wanted to leave. People stood up to keep talking. That isn’t how endings behave. The conversations in that room weren’t conclusions. They were the first serious draft of questions we’re going to be living with for years. How do we stop treating autistic burnout as a personal failing instead of a systems failure? Who is still missing from the room because our services, our research and our policies were never built with them in mind? What happens when autistic people stop asking for permission to participate in the economy and start building it themselves? How do we support autistic parents, autistic elders, and autistic people whose experiences sit at the intersection of culture, gender, disability and identity?

So I’m not crying. I think that’s the point. You don’t grieve at the start of something. You take a breath and you get to work.

I’ll be honest, part of me misses the cry. It was clean. It told me the day was done and I could rest. This feeling is messier. It’s the low hum of knowing the work is bigger than I am, and that it’s going to keep being bigger, and that this is exactly what we wanted.

To everyone who was in that room, thank you. You made it too big for one good cry, and I can’t think of a better problem to have.

First published on Substack, 30 June 2026.