The first year after diagnosis

Earlier this week I wrote about the five year anniversary of my autism diagnosis and why I didn’t realise sooner that I’m autistic. This post is about that first year of diagnosis and how things changed. They weren’t great straight away by any means, but over that first year of diagnosis I got some reasonable adjustments in place at work and also did some rethinking about my career and what was possible for me.

Getting some adjustments

Once I had my autism diagnosis I told my manager about this new information and wondered what reasonable adjustments might be available. There weren’t a lot of resources about what reasonable adjustments might help autistics in an office workplace then but I did know that a fixed desk and noise cancelling headphones might help me. I discussed those with my then manager and they very quickly agreed to designating a desk for me by the wall (so as to have consistency about where I’d be and what sensory input I’d be getting) and also kindly helped organise my then-department paying for noise cancelling headphones for me. I knew those were a possibility because one of my autistic mentees had them and just cutting down the background office noise was transformative.

It’s been my experience that managers are very open about provision of possible reasonable adjustments when you get an autism diagnosis but they don’t really know what to offer. That’s one of the reasons I created this list of autism reasonable adjustments as some suggestions that autistics or their managers might like to consider.

Adapting myself to the new knowledge

Knowing I was autistic gave my access to a lot of potentially useful information in the form of books and memoirs by fellow autistics as well as blogs and discussion on Twitter. Those things had been there beforehand of course, I just didn’t know that they applied to me and that they might be useful. In particular, reading about the experiences of other autistics gave me some new information about what neurotypical people meant when they said particular coded phrases or non-literal things. Part of the problem of not having a diagnosis was that I didn’t know what I didn’t know, so I hadn’t previously thought about all the meanings I was missing as a result of being autistic. I presumed that I was communicating effectively but that the world was just cruel or nonsensical. Finding out that actually there was a lot of communication I was missing made it all make more sense, although it was rather depressing to realise I was disabled and had some form of communication function missing in my brain.

Now at least I recognise that I have a kind of “blindness” to certain forms of communication. If something makes no sense to me I can recognise that I’m just not getting it in the same way that I wouldn’t understand if information was communicated in (say) Mandarin. It’s just not a language I understand.

Rethinking my career

The knowledge that I was autistic also made me rethink my idea of what my career could or should be. I’d come into the civil service on the Faststream, a graduate recruitment scheme which aims to identify people with the potential to progress to the Senior Civil Service (SCS) but I had not reached that point. Others seemed to be progressing ahead of me and finding job applications and interviews easy where I found them near impossible. I concluded that this was because autistic people couldn’t really be civil service leaders – it was quite right and fair that I wasn’t getting anywhere in my career because I had the wrong type of brain to succeed. That was rather depressing but also a bit liberating because at least it meant I could stop beating myself up for what my disability prevented me doing.

Un-rethinking my career

Since the time I’m describing four years ago, I’ve come to realise that although my thought process was completely understandable, it was wrong. Autistic people can be successful leaders, but we may need some adjustments to be able to thrive. We also need role models to show that it’s possible. I thought I couldn’t progress post-diagnosis because I couldn’t see openly autistic civil servants around me. I certainly could find any openly autistic civil servants who were senior to me then who could have helped me work out how to make the most of what’s possible with an autistic brain. In the last few years I’ve started being a lot more open about my own situation so that the autistic people who are like I was four to five years ago – newly diagnosed, fearing that career progression is over – don’t have to think they’re the first one to have to go through all these thought processes. There are actually quite a lot of us in the civil service and in the work place in general. I’d like to get to a point where we all feel confident enough to be open about our autistic identity so the newly-diagnosed have a ready-made support community to join.