The App I Needed as a Child

Aaron Wahl on autism, his grandfather, and the island that gave him the courage to build a bridge of understanding between people. The highlighted sections explain the neurological differences of autistic people that underlie the experiences described.

I still remember my grandparents' carpet clearly. The one under the dining table. I remember lying there, feeling the soft fabric against my skin. My grandparents' apartment was the only place where I felt safe. No matter how loud the world was, how incomprehensible for a child who had sensed from the very beginning of his life that he was different.

My grandfather was an assistant pastor in Nebel. Amrum was the island of my childhood. When I think of safety, I think of him. Of his calmness. Of the fact that he never forced me into anything my mind couldn't understand. He was simply there. And he accepted me as I was.

If you're lucky, you have people like that in your life. People who don't expect the child to behave like everyone else. Who don't try to accustom it to a normality it cannot neurologically comprehend.

Then a terrible accident happened. My grandparents were hit by a drunk driver. My grandfather was dying. We were no longer allowed to see him. At ten years old, I wrote a final letter to him and read it at the funeral service, in St. Clemens Church, where he himself had once been pastor. On Amrum, we threw the letter into the grave.

In that moment, something broke inside me. And something closed that I thought would never open again.

How Attachment Works in Autism

To understand what happened over the next 24 years, I need to explain how attachment works in autistic people. Because it works differently.

In autism, much is based on logic. You seek patterns and consistency in life. That provides safety. Attachments are more selective, but considerably deeper. In children, attachment forms through consistent, safe experience and then solidifies into something permanent. In adults, a conscious decision can precede the emotional bond. In both cases: this attachment remains as long as its foundation has not been disproven. And it takes a great deal to disprove it.

In non-autistic relationships, attachments often fade with time, with distance, with new experiences. Feeling regulates the bond. And feelings change. After a breakup, the pain subsides. After a move, contact falls away. After a few years, you hardly think about people who were once important. In autism, this doesn't happen. The attachment remains at full intensity. No matter how much time passes, no matter how much distance grows. You don't think less about someone because you haven't seen them in a while. You think just as much. Or more.

For many families, partners, and friends, this is precisely the key: what looks like stubbornness, an inability to let go, or a lack of flexibility is in truth a depth of attachment that doesn't diminish. This applies to partners, to friends, and to children and their parents.

My grandfather was that person for me. His consistency, his calmness, his unconditional acceptance. From this, a bond had grown that could no longer be dissolved. Then it was severed one-sidedly by death. But the bond itself was not revoked. It remained. Open, unresolved, with no possibility of closure.

For 24 years, the child inside me kept his heart closed.

Being Wrong

What followed were years in which I learned that who I am is not right. Not through a single moment. Through thousands.

It feels as though the world is too loud, too fast, too incomprehensible. You perceive so many stimuli and can barely find rest.

Almost all non-autistic brains filter automatically. The hum of the refrigerator, the buzz of the lamp, the conversation at the next table: all of this is filtered out before it reaches consciousness. In autism, this filter is absent. Everything arrives simultaneously, at equal volume, and the brain must consciously process each individual stimulus. This costs energy. All day. Every day.

Every conversation is translation work. Every word you say is chosen, has its place. But the world's response is: too direct, too much, too different. Even though you are principled, loyal, fair. Even though you keep promises and stand by decisions, even in the greatest storms.

At some point you become silent. Those who don't speak cannot be misunderstood. Unless it becomes too much inside, then there are moments when everything has to come out. And then that, too, is wrong. So you become even quieter.

And so a core belief settled into my self-image, burning itself deep: I am wrong. How I think, how I feel, how I communicate. All wrong.

The Hopeless Case

At 11 years old, I sat in a therapist's office for the first time. Not because I wanted to. During my school years, I was there three to four times a week. Always without being asked. I sat in offices and was supposed to talk about feelings I had no access to. Therapist after therapist turned my case away. Too complicated, they didn't know how to help. I received over ten different suspected diagnoses. None of them were correct.

At school, I was bullied. Not always openly, but consistently perceptible. I was made to understand that I was different and didn't belong. I had one friend, Markus, and a handful of boys who tolerated me. Better stupid comments than complete loneliness, I thought then. Today I would decide differently.

At 16 came the working world. Filled with expectations that a standardized world places on a person that I could not meet. I lost my apprenticeship because a new boss arrived and I couldn't look him in the eye. Sometimes I fixate on a point when someone speaks to me because I need to filter what's being said.

Autistic brains don't process spoken language in the background. Tone, facial expressions, word choice, background noise: everything must be actively sorted. Looking into the other person's eyes is an additional stimulus that overloads this processing. Looking away is not rudeness. It is a necessity in order to be able to listen at all.

This was not seen as a neurobiological characteristic. It was judged as disrespect.

At 18, I sat across from a clinic director who told me that in my case, it was no longer about improvement. Only about how I could live with my condition. Hopeless case. That's what the file said. What followed was assisted living, court-ordered legal guardianship, a social phobia that made it impossible for me to leave the house for years.

At 20, I was placed on permanent disability. I was twenty years old. Secondary school diploma, no vocational training, no university degree. And a legal guardian who made decisions for me. Yet I had always had the wish to work with people. Because of my grandfather. Because he had been a pastor and I had seen what that meant for the people around him. That bond was still there. Open. Unresolved.

Give Up or Fight

There came a moment when I had to make a decision. The most important of my life. Do I accept that the system has written me off as a hopeless case and take that on as my own? Or do I fight my way out?

I fought.

My first goal was my own bank account. That sounds small. It took three months. When you're under legal guardianship, you're not allowed to manage your own money. Three months for something every 18-year-old accomplishes in half an hour. But it was the first step on a path that belonged only to me. A beginning.

Slowly, painstakingly, and mostly alone, I fought my way out of disability status, permanent incapacity, and assisted living. There were no shortcuts. Every step had to be fought for.

Learning What I Was Missing

At 26, the correct diagnosis came: autism. It explained everything. Retrospectively, completely, logically. Why the world was so loud. Why I thought the way I did. Why I function the way I do. It was not an illness but a neurobiological characteristic. But what that means and how it connects to the feeling of being too much, I only learned much later on Amrum.

When no government office and no counseling center could help me anymore, I found a training environment that did something different from all previous therapies. No talking about feelings. No sitting in an office. Instead, practical, physical training. Learning emotions the way you learn sports. And speech training that taught me to speak again. Not adapted, but as myself. The first time, more tension released than in 16 years of therapy combined.

In that environment, I met Kristina, the director. She was the first person in my life in whom I recognized myself. I sat across from her and thought: she thinks like me. She didn't see my way of thinking as a deficit, but as something that could be strengthened. She and her team reflected my strengths back to me for years, long before I could recognize them as strengths myself.

Nearly every success I have achieved since then goes back to what I learned there. Not talent. Training. Combined with my stubbornness to not give up after failures and to stand by my decisions regardless of circumstances.

The Way Up

I gave my first talk in a small room, in front of a handful of people. My hands were shaking. My voice too. I talked about autism and about what can change when you show a person their strengths instead of holding their weaknesses against them. Afterward, someone came up to me and said: "That helped me." That sentence was the beginning.

There were more. Companies, universities, Rotary clubs. Over 130 talks in three years. My autobiography "Ein Tor zu eurer Welt" (A Door to Your World) was published by Droemer Knaur, with a foreword by Prof. Tony Attwood, one of the world's most renowned autism experts. I spoke on ARD and NDR. In 2025, I was recognized as WEconomy Diversity Leader in the field of neurodiversity.

Each of these steps would have been unthinkable for the boy who couldn't leave the house. Each one became possible because someone showed me what I could do and gave me a safe environment, instead of holding against me what I couldn't.

But life tests you.

The institution that had given me so much had to close. And then I almost died. An untreated diabetes complication. My body developed severe infections, my blood values were catastrophic. Only because a doctor's appointment was coincidentally moved forward by two weeks was it discovered in time.

Had the appointment not been rescheduled, I would not have lived to see the following Monday.

After the emergency surgery, I was bedridden for months. Bedridden, in need of care, over 230 kilos. Everything stood still.

And then the decision: give up again or fight again.

I fought. Again. I went to the gym. At over 230 kilos. The fear of other people's stares was enormous. The shame of starting like that. But I went. The next day again. And the day after. Since then, I haven't missed a single training session, unless I was too ill. Five times a week. 85 kilos in 11 months. And an environment at the gym that welcomed me from day one, without ever making my weight an issue.

And I got my dog Finna. I have a special relationship with animals. They accept you unconditionally, as you are. No translation needed, no explanation, no filtering. Finna was there. And that was enough.

But Hamburg became too loud. The big city, the stimuli, the noise. My nervous system needed something different.

Back to Amrum

In October 2025, I moved to Amrum. To where my grandfather had once been pastor. To where I had walked around as a child. Where in 2013, for the first time in 13 years, I visited his grave and in the silence of the island created a plan for my life. A plan I then actually carried out.

Amrum did something I hadn't expected. In the quiet of this island, I encountered people who mirrored me. In whom I recognized myself.

And then, after decades, I was allowed to feel for the first time that I am not too much. Not wrong. Not too direct, not too different, not too difficult. But exactly right. Just as I am.

Those who have never experienced feeling fundamentally wrong cannot measure what this moment means. When after 35 years, the conviction that has burned itself into every corner of your self-image suddenly goes quiet. Not through an argument. Not through therapy. But through a person who looks at you and with whom you sense: here I don't have to translate anything. Here I am right.

These encounters opened something in me that I had believed closed since my grandfather's death. For 24 years. My heart was allowed to open again. Not because I had planned it. But because this place and these people showed me that the bond with my grandfather had never been broken. That what had grown in me as a child still held true. And that I was capable again of opening myself completely.

From this moment grew the courage to build something. And the wish that other children wouldn't have to wait 35 years for this experience. But could have it as early as possible.

Autistic Mirror

In Germany, between 500,000 and 840,000 autistic people live. The number of unreported cases is considerably higher. The waiting time for a therapy place is two to seven years. The waiting lists are, according to the Federal Association Autism Germany, "closed nearly everywhere." On a North Sea island, there is probably even less.

Autistic Mirror is the app I needed as a child. It explains to autistic people what is happening in their brain. Not what they should do. Not what they should feel. But why. Why the world is so loud. Why a change of plans feels like a system crash. Why you spend three days thinking about a situation that was long over for everyone else.

Autistic brains cannot voluntarily end thought processes that have begun. An unresolved situation continues running in the background. Not as rumination, but as an active cognitive process that consumes energy until it is completed.

A second mode explains to the surrounding people what is happening in the autistic brain. For parents who don't understand why their child reacts to certain stimuli. For partners who want to learn that withdrawal is not rejection but self-regulation. For siblings who grew up with the imbalance.

For friends who want to understand rather than guess. For employers and colleagues who want to recognize that an employee doesn't leave the room out of disinterest, but because their nervous system had no other option. For teachers who need to know the difference between defiance and overload. For caregivers and therapists who want to reassess their approach. For everyone who is close to an autistic person and has so far only guessed what is going on inside them.

When a child breaks down in the supermarket, it is not a tantrum. It is a neurological discharge. When a colleague suddenly leaves the room, it is not rudeness. Their nervous system had no other option.

The app does not accuse. It explains.

From the very beginning, one thing was most important to me: that this app is completely safe to use. Autistic people have had enough experiences with systems that harm them. This app must not be one of them. A three-layer verification system checks every single response before it reaches the user. 556 automated tests cover all user groups. A crisis protocol detects signs of distress and immediately shows support resources. 20 external testers, autistic adults, parents, scientists, and therapists, reviewed the app. An independent QA audit was passed.

The app under no circumstances recommends methods that suppress autistic behavior or enforce normality. It does not diagnose, does not give medical advice. No tracking, no data collection, GDPR-compliant. Ten messages per day are free. Each message incurs real costs that I finance myself. Because this app needs to exist.

The Bridge

What I wish for is a bridge between people with differently functioning brains. A bridge where you meet in the middle, at eye level.

These are not character flaws. It is a neurobiological characteristic. The autistic person cannot change it, but you can try to understand them.

For 17 years I have learned how to build bridges between people. In talks, in conversations, through my autobiography, through every single encounter that showed me that understanding is possible. Autistic Mirror is the attempt to translate this knowledge into a tool that does not depend on my physical presence. That is available around the clock.

So that autistic people no longer feel wrong, but like people with a neurological characteristic that has reasons and is explainable. So that those around them can understand what they see. And so that a child who today lies on the carpet under the dining table and senses that it is different, learns sooner: you are not wrong. Your brain works this way. And there are reasons for it.

Amrum gave me the courage to build this. Through the connection to my grandfather, which was never broken. Through the quiet my nervous system needs. Through people who opened my heart. This island made possible what the big city could not.

I want to share my path with it. And from here, make a difference in the world.

Aaron Wahl lives on Amrum and is a member of Rotary. His autobiography "Ein Tor zu eurer Welt" (A Door to Your World) was published in 2019 by Droemer Knaur.