Our History in a Minute

Stimpunks started as a refusal to accept systems that demand disabled and neurodivergent people burn out, mask, or disappear just to survive. Created by and for neurodivergent and disabled people, Stimpunks exists to turn lived experience into practical meaningful support to help you advocate.

What began as storytelling and publishing quickly grew into mutual aid, creator grants, paid research, and practical field guides designed for our real lives. We start from a place of trust in people’s abilities, pay contributors properly, and design with those most affected in mind, because when something doesn’t work at the margins, it usually isn’t working at all.

Stimpunks is here to help people stay alive, keep their authenticity, and build something better together.

Our History in a Page

Stimpunks began as a refusal.

A refusal to accept neuronormativity as neutral.
A refusal to accept harmful therapies.
A refusal to accept harmful pedagogy.
A refusal to let autistic and neurodivergent knowledge be extracted, sanitized, and resold without care for the people it comes from.

Stimpunks was created by and for neurodivergent and disabled people. It emerged from lived experience inside systems that consistently failed us—schools, workplaces, healthcare, research, and nonprofits that talked about inclusion while designing for everyone but us.

From the beginning, Stimpunks rejected the idea that awareness alone is enough. Awareness does not pay rent. Awareness does not stop burnout. Awareness does not keep people alive. Stimpunks chose a different path: direct support, mutual aid, and lived knowledge, grounded in the reality of our disabled lives, trying to survive in an ableist world.

What started as a publishing and storytelling project quickly became something larger. The site grew into a living ecosystem of field guides, essays, scrollytelling explanations, and practical tools that translate neurodiversity theory and community-shared experiences into real-world survival strategies. Not “inspiration porn”. Not deficit narratives. We create usable knowledge—written in plain language, designed for tired people and structured to reduce cognitive load.

Stimpunks also became a funding vehicle. We began providing mutual aid, creator grants, paid research opportunities, and living-wage work to neurodivergent and disabled contributors—because the people most harmed by systems are the people most qualified to redesign them.

Over time, Stimpunks formalized its values: authenticity as a survival right, self-determination over compliance, transparency as a default, and harm reduction as a guiding ethic. We named systems of power instead of pretending neutrality. We documented how schools, workplaces, and institutions fail at the edges—and why edge cases are stress cases that reveal harm and inequality.

The website itself became part of the work. Stimpunks experimented with neurodivergent-friendly layouts, scrollytelling, visual chunking, and “lily pads”—colored content blocks that let readers pause, skip, or go deeper without penalty. The medium mattered as much as the message. Accessibility was not an afterthought; it is the whole point.

As Stimpunks grew, so did our scope. The project expanded into learning spaces, transparency logs, public accountability practices, and long-term visions for neurodivergent and disabled-led education and community infrastructure. Our core message has remained: real help, delivered directly, with dignity.

Stimpunks is not a brand, we are not an awareness campaign. We are a living, evolving community of mutual aid and cultural resistance—rooted in the belief that surviving bad systems is not a personal deficit, and that disabled people deserve not just to survive, but to shape the world we live in so we can thrive.

We are still building. Together.

Timeline

Origin — Refusal
Stimpunks begins as a refusal of neuronormativity, awareness-without-action, and systems that treat disabled survival as failure.

Early Work — Storytelling With Teeth
Publishing and scrollytold essays translate neurodiversity theory into plain language, survival-focused knowledge for real lives.

Shift — From Awareness to Aid
Stimpunks expands into mutual aid, creator grants, and paid research, centering direct support over symbolic inclusion.

Build — Designing for Tired Brains
The site evolves with neurodivergent-friendly layouts, lily pads (colored content blocks), and accessibility-first design—because how we share knowledge matters.

Formalization — Values in Practice
Naming systems of power, defaulting to open, and paying disabled people for their labor become explicit commitments.

Now — A Living Ecosystem
Stimpunks operates as a neurodivergent and disabled-led hub for mutual aid, learning, research, and culture—built in public, accountable to community, and always growing.