Am I scary?

Autistic people have different brains – it’s like we’re on a different operating system – and many people don’t realise how many autistic people they meet in their day to day lives. (1-2% of people at least are probably autistic – so you are likely to have met an autistic person today.) Things that are different are scary because you don’t understand them so well and people who are different may respond differently to how you expected. This is what it’s like the whole time being autistic, incidentally – having to cope with people who respond in a different way to what we expect.

More than one person

The Coronation tomorrow is going to be very much about the two people – the King and Queen Consort – at the centre of proceedings. But an absolutely vast number of other people have been and will be involved. Being a figurehead is all very well, and all nations need one, whether a monarch or a president or something else. But really almost nothing is actually about the figurehead so much as the group as a whole. One person may appear to take credit – by being crowned or just by having their name on a piece of work – but nothing really stands alone. Self-promotion in the professional world means saying “I did this” but for an honest and literal minded autistic it’s almost impossible.

How can I take credit?

Writing about performance reviews I talked about how difficult it can be to talk about your achievements if you’re ruthlessly honest about what’s down to you alone. Selling yourself means saying “I did this” but almost everything in life is down to a team of people not one individual. If you’re an honest and literal minded autistic you quite probably won’t be able to take credit for anything because it wasn’t yours alone.

Selling yourself

Training on selling yourself will probably focus on encouraging you to be authentically yourself but the best version of yourself, to be clear about your strengths, and about what you personally (rather than a team you’re in) have achieved. But if you’re autistic that simple and positive-sounding set of suggestions comes with a bunch of problems.

Can you sell yourself?

Writing about performance reviews seems to have touched a nerve – I’ve had feedback from autistic contacts that the concept of “selling themselves” is completely alien and impossible for them. I dare say if you’re a well-intentioned neurotypical manager (and so many people are!) you’re thinking: “everyone finds selling themselves hard – some interview training should sort that!” And in the case of most people – neurotypical people (specially if they have a number of characteristics of privilege such as male gender, white race, being fully abled) it probably will. But with autistic staff it probably won’t. And that’s a hard truth to get your head round.

What have you achieved? Um… dunno…

I recently did my end of year performance review with my manager who is kind, supportive, and good at working with my autistic brain. I went through the inevitable moment of not having any recall of anything useful I’d done in the year. (This is in spite of the fact that I’d prepared in advance – autistically – and had a lot of notes. My brain is just NOT good at remembering positives about me.) Mercifully my manager didn’t give up when I finally came out with the equivalent of “um… I did some stuff…” But we autistics really can struggle to remember positives and spell them out in any but the most processy of terms.

The dreaded performance review

So – have you done anything useful in the last year? If you’re autistic your first response may be for your mind to go blank. Clearly you haven’t done anything useful at ALL. After a bit of grubbing around in your memory you come up with the fact that you wrote a report on paperclip filing in the Walthamstow or something equally uninspiring. (If you’re an inspirational paperclip filer in Walthamstow – please accept my apologies.) What was the result of your report? Well – some people may have read it, or more likely they deleted it unread. So – in fact – have you made the world a better place in the last year? It doesn’t look like it.

Awkward attitudes

A colleague of mine is neurotypical and has an autistic son of school age. For this colleague, autism is the enemy. It took the neurotypical child they imagined they had and – in the run up to diagnosis – turned that child into a problem. They grieved for the neurotypical child they’d imagined they’d had, and lamented all the things they feared this strange “new” autistic person wouldn’t be able to do. (This colleague has bought into the stereotype, not knowing many adult autistics.) Autism makes their life difficult – there are tears and tantrums, problems with school, picky eating. Parenting has become exhausting. My colleague is exhausted, fighting this “enemy” autism which has “taken” their child. It’s not fair on their other children that the autistic child takes so much time and attention and that the parents are always so stressed. My colleague feels like a warrior or a martyr struggling heroically with this terrible situation.

And them expressing their sense of themselves – while doubtless true for them – is hurtful to me.

Speaking an awkward truth

It might seem to most that attitudes to autism outside the workplace – particularly relating to autistic children – shouldn’t affect work, but they do. A colleague of mine is neurotypical and has an autistic son of school age. For this colleague, autism is the enemy. It took the neurotypical child they imagined they had and – in the run up to diagnosis – turned that child into a problem. They grieved for the neurotypical child they’d imagined they’d had, and lamented all the things they feared this strange “new” autistic person wouldn’t be able to do. (This colleague has bought into the stereotype, not knowing many adult autistics.) Autism makes their life difficult – there are tears and tantrums, problems with school, picky eating. Parenting has become exhausting. My colleague is exhausted, fighting this “enemy” autism which has “taken” their child. It’s not fair on their other children that the autistic child takes so much time and attention and that the parents are always so stressed. My colleague feels like a warrior or a martyr struggling heroically with this terrible situation. And them expressing their sense of themselves like that is hurtful to me.

Labels

As an autistic I have a complicated relationship with labels. I’m extremely happy to label myself as “autistic”, although I’m also aware that sometimes I might be judged unfairly on the basis of that label. I hear others saying “I don’t like labelling people” and I agree with that in some contexts, but not others. We are all different, and a label can be used to hurt and exclude, or to affirm an identity and include in a group. That’s the serious part. But as an autistic person I also have a strained relationship with the labels that come in the back of clothes. There are autistic bonding experiences when one of us suddenly discovers another who has the same issue; the recognition when another autistic person says “isn’t the feeling of a label on the back of your neck just MADDENING?” can be one of those. It might sound trivial but having the sensation of a label bothering you can make it virtually impossible to concentrate until the dratted label has been cut out.