As an autistic person I often wish I could know the future – then I could psyche myself up for it. But of course I can’t, and that leads to worry and uncertainty. Given uncertainty, my autistic brain tends to default to the worst possible option. So I like to know what’s going to happen next. That might be prior warning about a small thing like what’s going to be for lunch or making a plan for what I think it is going to happen. I don’t like surprises – particularly sensory or social surprises – so if I don’t know what’s going to happen I try to work out all the options of what could happen. That can quickly lead to being overwhelmed by far too many options to work with. And that’s a recipe for paralysis.
Tag Archives: Surprise
What happens next?
As an autistic person I often wish I could know the future – then I could psyche myself up for it. But of course I can’t, and that leads to worry and uncertainty. Given uncertainty, my autistic brain tends to default to the worst possible option. So I like to know what’s going to happen next. That might be prior warning about a small thing like what’s going to be for lunch or making a plan for what I think it is going to happen. I don’t like surprises – particularly sensory or social surprises – so if I don’t know what’s going to happen I try to work out all the options of what could happen. That can quickly lead to being overwhelmed by far too many options to work with. And that’s a recipe for paralysis.
Pulling the rug from under me
A colleague used the expression “the dreaded rug-pull” in a seminar I was in for Neurodiversity Celebration Week and it struck me as a wonderful expression for incapsulating part of my autistic experience. There are times where I fail to pick up a coded message or an implication, and later realise I’ve been getting everything wrong. It’s particularly humiliating when the thing I’ve failed to pick up is a criticism or a rejection. I’ve also had several managers who were so subtle or nuanced in giving constructive feedback that I had no idea they wanted something to be done differently until they criticised me for ignoring their feedback all year. Possibly as a result of a lifetime of experiences like that I can now have self doubt so extreme that my automatic assumption is that I’m wrong, leading to me setting aside everything I’ve ever believed in a split second because I trust what I’ve just heard more than myself. It’s a bit like having the scaffolding that I rely on to cope with the world knocked away, but in mental rather than physical terms.
“The Dreaded Rug-Pull”
Have you ever had the rug pulled from under you? If you’re autistic like me you may well be visualising a cartoon scene of a character literally pulling away a carpet from under another, but what I’m meaning is those moments when it feels like everything has changed and the world has shifted on its axis. For example – you might have been feeling that things were going basically OK at work, when a colleague says “we’ve been putting up with you for years but we don’t really like you”. In that moment, the whole landscape of how you thought the people around you related to you (and each other) shifts, you’ve lost your figurative footing, and are lost, fallen over and humiliated. I’ve used an extreme example but my autistic life has been full of moments when I’ve felt as though everything has suddenly rearranged itself in a new shape and I doubt everything I previously thought I knew.
Autistic Civil Servant 