I can’t trust myself

I started my civil service career on the Fast Stream (an accelerated development programme for graduates) which meant from the very start I was thinking about whether I could get into the Senior Civil Service. Getting from the Fast Stream to SCS would mean a minimum of two and a maximum of four promotions depending on whether any grades were skipped, so I’d envisaged myself as a promotable sort of person. It’s not unknown for there to be a certain self-confidence about Fast Streamers which reflects this belief. (There’s an explainer on civil service grade structures here if you want one.) I got my autism diagnosis when I was half way to my goal and working as a middle manager, and already things were a struggle. So while the diagnosis was brilliant in explaining a lot of things about me that I’d blamed myself for, it also made me feel that I couldn’t trust my own judgement. I was always going to be reliant on colleagues to help me pick up neurotypical nuances and sometimes would have to trust them more than I trust me.

Many are called, but few are chosen

The title of this post is a quotation from St Matthew’s Gospel Chapter 20, verse 16, and it’s also what a previous manager said to me when I asked them about promotion prospects. Their point was that many people feel qualified to do leadership jobs, but few actually have the opportunity to do so. Some autistic professionals fear leadership as too stressful, although I’ve not found it to be so, and may not even put themselves forward. Others may have had bad experiences of rejection in the past and fear putting themselves through it again. What I have found particularly difficult myself is that, in common with many autistics people, I’m not particularly good at job interviews. To get a leadership role you need not only to feel able to do it, but to convince others you can too, and that can mean overcoming assumptions about autism.

Presuming that you have felt able to give it a go, and may even have had an autistically-ideal job interview, and you don’t succeed – what then? This is when I remember the quotation I’ve used as a title here. As an autistic person I tend to overthink everything and blame myself for it in excess of what’s reasonable. It can be hugely liberating to remember that factors outside my control – including luck – can play a part. I’ve noticed that autistic colleagues have the same problem – following an unsuccessful application or interview, the person will beat themselves up for what they did “wrong”. It won’t cross their mind that success or failure might have been outside their control.

Worth the wait?

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.

Help and Defend Us

Autism carries a lot of stigma and autistics are suffering minor (or major) aggressions and cruelties every day in every country in the world. It’s wonderful to know how many more people are getting diagnoses as I’ve seen this New Year, but that means there are ever more people who would appreciate a bit of help, support and allyship from those around us. There are lots of turns of phrase in our language that aren’t great for autistic people ranging from the well-intentioned mistake to fairly naked prejudice. What follows is a collection of ones I’ve personally encountered in the last five years in a range of settings. If you hear these – please consider politely trying to change the language – the many autistics in society around you will appreciate it!

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.

What is my life now?

Realising you’re autistic can lead to a re-evaluation of your life to that point. It certainly did for me and has done for a lot of my autistic friends, colleagues and contacts. My identity was shaped by and around events in my past when I’d acted in an autistic way that had been misinterpreted by me and everyone else. When I failed to make friends quickly at school or university, that wasn’t because I was an anti-social, lazy person – it was because I was autistic. When I tended to skulk in my room at big family events or sit in a corner reading, that wasn’t because I was unaffectionate or didn’t know what was expected of me – it was because I was autistic. I could give a lot more examples but you get the pattern – the things that had defined my identity at school, in my family, at university and at work, turned out to be caused by something other than what I’d thought.

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.

The Flip Side

Disabled people are the ones who need to be protected – the able-bodied have the strength and power. Disability is a marker of weakness and victimhood, right? Well no, although in some circumstances it can be. Speaking as an autistic person, I am deeply irritated by the (sadly prevalent) attitude that autistic people are poor little “children” who need to be figuratively patted on the head and protected from real life. I am very happy to have the protection of the law against discrimination on the grounds of disability, but that’s about levelling the playing field. I am an equal human being with everyone else, and that means I can be just as powerful (or weak) and troublesome (or helpful) as anyone else.

Showing the way

You may well have resolved to do many exciting things in 2023 – in which case good for you. Suppose you’ve resolved to do a sky dive for charity – as some people do. When it comes to it: what gives you the confidence to actually jump out of the plane? Is it the knowledge of the physics of how the parachute works, the intellectual certainty that you’re deeply unlikely to die doing something that’s become almost common place, or the sight of someone else jumping out successfully first? I’ll bet it’s more seeing someone lead the way (and be fine) than it is the intellectual rationalisation. There’s a world of difference between knowing something’s possible and actually seeing it happen. That could be skydiving or achieving a leadership role or anything intimidating. It makes the world of difference to see someone do what you’re going to do, and particularly to know that they had the same sort of life experiences and difficulties you have.