How to change the world

It’s all too common for autistic people to be victimised, which is an extremely bad thing, but how to change it? Autistic people can be total prats ourselves, and we’re capable of bigotry and just as many bad things as any other human. So it’s not that we’re poor little people who need the world to look after us like helpless children. It’s easy to get very angry about the ways in which the world is cruel to people who are different and that anger can be absolutely right. But anger may not be the best way to change things right now.

I get very angry about a lot of things – including how my fellow autistics get treated all too often. But in order to change that I (we) need to persuade the world to see us as fully human. Boring, normal and ordinary. And shouting angrily at people may not be the most persuasive way to do that. We’re approaching the season of the Christian year when people thing about how their lives could and should be better: the season of Lent. It’s a big trait in Christian thinking that rather than telling other people off, you should sort yourself out first. Being an example of how the world ought to be is more effective than wagging a finger. And I’m fully aware that Christians are not always particularly good at doing that and self-righteously wagging a finger at other people is sooo much more fun than being a better person yourself. So much, so human.

A parent’s take on diagnosis

Autism diagnoses only really became an option for children in the last few decades and for adults even more recently than that. In recent years there’s been an massive increase in diagnoses for all ages and genders – which is a big improvement from the perception that it was only something that applied to young boys. It’s not that autism has become more prevalent – it’s that society has got better at acknowledging that it exists. More and more people are coming to understand why it is that they may have struggled at work and with socialising. Having spent a significant portion of their brain all their lives trying to manage and conceal undiagnosed autism, they had less left than other people for doing work and life stuff.

Holocaust Memorial Day

I wasn’t going to write anything specifically about Holocaust Memorial Day because I feared intruding on a grief that isn’t really mine. (So far as I know I have no Jewish or Gypsy, Roma or Traveller heritage, am not gay, and nor has my family been involved in any genocide that I know of.) However, I did know that the Nazis killed a lot of people with disabilities and that let me to some research. And that research led me to a heart-breaking quotation from a talk given by Professor Edith Sheffer on Autism and Disability in Nazi Vienna.

Getting past the 3am worries

You wake up in the night and remember that thing that happened the day before. Or the week before. Or in some cases the year before. Perhaps you gave a presentation at work. 99.9% of the presentation was fine – possibly even excellent. But you tripped over your feet on the way to the podium. Or got your bosses’ name wrong. Or dried up in response to a question. You accidentally clicked through two slides at once. Something trivial that in no way invalidated the excellent presentation. BUT. At 3am all you can think of is the burning shame and embarrassment of the thing you did wrong. Your colleagues all saw you trip over – they’ll never be able to take you seriously again. Or your boss now thinks you’re an idiot because you got her/his name wrong. That stakeholder will never believe your organisation again because you couldn’t answer his/her question. That skipped over slide contained the answer to all the world’s problems and because you skipped over it the world will end and by taken over by aliens/zombies. Does that sound relatable? Because I do it all the time.

An Epiphany

The Epiphany in the Christian Church is when we remember the visit of the wise men (or “Magi”, or Three Kings if you’re thinking of the carol) to the baby Jesus. The wise men were philosophers from abroad who had followed a star, travelling from the East. The significance of this day is that God was revealed not only to his own people (such as the shepherds who visited the Holy Family at Christmas) but to foreigners too – and thus the whole world. We use the word “epiphany” to refer to any great revelation or realisation about the world or ourselves. For me, realising that I was autistic was emphatically an epiphany, and that is quite a common experience. It’s possible that someone reading this might have been wondering why the experiences of autistics seemed to chime with something within them. This might even be the moment of epiphany when they come to realise that actually it’s not that they’ve been a bad person their whole life, but that they’ve had a differently wired brain.

An Autistic New Year

I would like to start 2023 with the assertion that “autism” is not and must not be a dirty word. It is not a shameful thing to be autistic or to have an autistic family member. It is hopefully becoming a normal thing to have autistic employees and, quite possibly, managers and leaders. Autistic people can be clever and strong and brilliant or complete and total prats, just like anyone else. We don’t have superpowers – we are people who have strengths and weaknesses just like all other people. Some of us need round the clock care, and some of us need holding back from annihilating crass people on Twitter with our wit (Greta, I’m looking at you). Most important of all – we are everywhere. If around 1-2 people in a hundred is autistic, then you know a lot of autistic people. Everyone does. Some people are autistic. I hope to spend this year helping the world get over it.

Who will rid me of this turbulent autistic?

There are important people, and less important people, right? There are people you look up to and whose authority you respect, and people you expect to do as you tell them. This is expressed by rank or grade hierarchies (such as we have in the Civil Service) or by some people having power and others not, or indeed by The Class System. Neurotypical brains seem to navigate these hierarchies instinctively – they can calculate the correct level of deference due to (say) someone rich or famous or in charge, and adapt their behaviour accordingly. Autistics not so much. My autistic brain is a bit of an egalitarian absolutist, treating everyone as an equal, which can be great for mixing it up and challenging authority, or can lead me to being a right pain to those whose position leads them to expect respect.

What I want for Christmas

“A dog is for life, not just for Christmas.” Everyone probably knows that slogan discouraging people from giving pets as gifts without preparation. If you’re the kind of person who finds themself in church at this time of year you’ll also have heard “God is for life, not just for Christmas” or similar. That’s encouraging you to build your Christmas religious faith into the whole year rather than just giving it a good go once a year. Special days are hugely important for humanity, but the really powerful things in life – whether caring for a dog or living your beliefs – have to be done every day and not just on the high days and holidays.

What’s this got to do with autism? I wanted to write about something really special for Christmas and the most special thing I can think of is my dream of how I want the world to be. And what I want is for autism to stop being special and rare (like Christmas) and start being boring. I want autism to be accepted as a day-to-day thing in the same way that many other characteristics have come to be over the years. Not interesting at all and certainly not worthy of comment. If I may, I’ll illustrate with some examples.

Nothing without love

It’s all too common for autistic people to be victimised, which is an extremely bad thing, but how to change it? Autistic people can be total prats ourselves, and we’re capable of bigotry and just as many bad things as any other human. So it’s not that we’re poor little people who need the world to look after us like helpless children. It’s easy to get very angry about the ways in which the world is cruel to people who are different and that anger can be absolutely right. But anger may not be the best way to change things right now.

I get very angry about a lot of things – including how my fellow autistics get treated all too often. But in order to change that I (we) need to persuade the world to see us as fully human. Boring, normal and ordinary. And shouting angrily at people may not be the most persuasive way to do that. We’re approaching the season of the Christian year when people thing about how their lives could and should be better: the season of Lent. It’s a big trait in Christian thinking that rather than telling other people off, you should sort yourself out first. Being an example of how the world ought to be is more effective than wagging a finger. And I’m fully aware that Christians are not always particularly good at doing that and self-righteously wagging a finger at other people is sooo much more fun than being a better person yourself. So much, so human.

Love it!

The stereotype that autistics have no empathy leads on to the stereotype that we are incapable of romantic love, which is definitely not the case. It might be that an autistic seeking a partner is more likely to find them at a club or interest group than a pub or a nightclub (both of which can be overwhelming to the senses) but there’s absolutely no reason why they shouldn’t find one.

Being socially clumsy, or literal, can make romantic love more problematic but not impossible. My own experience has been that the difficulty in picking up hints (or telling the difference between honesty and manipulation) sets you up for humiliation, but if you’re sufficiently determined that can be overcome. The autistic tendency to be very all or nothing can also add challenges – if you see things in extremes (you see people you know as wholly good or wholly bad, for example) then as soon as the beloved does something even slightly wrong they fall off their pedestal into the “wholly bad” category. So if you’re the kind of autistic who is looking for perfection and will settle for nothing less, your chances of success butt up against human reality. Relationships depend on compromise and flexibility and those are not automatically autistic strengths. Nonetheless, although it may well be more difficult for an autistic person to find and keep a partner than a neurotypical person, many succeed and are very happy.