#as a pattern-obsessed autist i can relate to the effort

[lavender-wiitch]

RIP robert smirke you would have loved pokémon

#i imagine him wrapping his head around thinking “oh but you see the desolation is super effective against the web #as a pattern-obsessed autist i can relate to the effort #the magnus archives #TMA #the magnus pod #robert smirke #the entities #smirke's fourteen #smirkes 14 #the fears #tmagp

[butts-bouncing-on-the-beltway]

As per usual, I was talking to a client this week about autistic cognitive processing and I felt the sand shifting under my feet. So I come here to you Tumblr to do my own autistic cognitive processing in the hopes of better serving myself and my clients.

I have known for a long time that I can't process my thoughts and emotions verbally. This is what sometimes leads to me getting frustrated, "stuck," and increasingly pressurized towards my meltdown threshhold when I'm trying to express a half-formed thought or need. This is why I often choose to process my cognition in writing. It allows me to sift about in the sands of my mind, sliding to and fro, checking and rechecking, until I find what I need.

There is something to the capacity to shape my communication more freely and without the preesure that I put myself under which often leads to stammering, stuttering, aphasia, confusion, and my inability to hold something as ephemeral as language in my head long enough to manipulate it like clay with my hands. Words are not my brain's mother tongue in the first place, and it can be a welcome relief to truly take the slowed pace I need to translate my thoughts into a language others will understand.

Some others. I am well aware of who I learned my translation process from and of how that has made my translations inaccessible to some of the very people who share my brain.

The thing is, to learn to speak at all when your brain processes this slowly takes enormous effort. To learn to CHANGE your speech is back breaking. I have been trying for fifteen years.

Autistic cognitive processing pace and the disabling ramifications aren't things we talk about often. It's one reason some of us become obsessed with having back up plan upon back up plan (because we literally cannot think fast enough to keep up with the demands of our lives). It's one of the fastest paths to burnouts and meltdowns. It's part of why we are unable to keep up with the demands of social interactions, especially in large groups (too many social cues moving too quickly to be processed at pace and we drop the ball in the moment even if we realize later).

Because the pace of our cognition is chronically slowed, we are chronically disabled socially, emotionally, cognitively, etc, and we are forced to spend an incredible amount of mental and physical energy either compensating for that, recovering from it, or both. That is energy and resources neurotypical people get to spend on other things in their lives, maybe a project or hobby, a relationship, hell, just relaxing.

There can be upsides to it. This slowed cognition seems to be related to how the process of bottom-up analysis functions during cognitive processes in Autistic folks' brains. That bottom-up analysis is a really interesting cognitive processing style that seems to be responsible for increased pattern recognition! So a lot of how we're able to analyze, learn, understand, mimic, etc based on pattern recognition is thanks to this processing style. It helps us take in a holisticly detail oriented view of the things we look at, which can (with support) make us great researchers, investigative journalists, and inventers.

But while the upsides have become more discussed as we've become more willing to see Autism itself as neutral (a very good thing in my opinion), we sometimes forget the other side of the coin.

I often find myself trying to brute force my way through my processing pace. It always ends badly. And that's really the trouble. I can talk most of the time, but I can talk A LOT faster than I can process my thoughts. So most of the time my words are just. Garbage. Sounds. If you ask my to speak to you, you are asking me to fill up soundwaves because realistically my brain moves at about 25% of the speed of the conversation.

It's why as a clinician I have to be so incredibly careful what I do and say and how I hear my clients because I *truly* am processing what the tell me at auch a significant delay. It can sometimes be days later when the information truly settles into place.

The same is obviously true in my personal life! It can take me days or even weeks to figure out what a single thought or feeling means in the context of my own life because I have to process that often entirely alone or just on paper. Not because no on one WOULD help me I have people in my life who would be willing but because by the time talking to someone would be any help, I would have basically figured it out enough to just say it out loud and I don't really need their help by then. There are rare exceptions to this when I do definitely seek help but it can be so frustrating to be trapped, voiceless, in your own emotions.

I don't have a framework for this, only the suggestion to embrace the slowness. I have found that when you are not constantly fighting against it all the time, it feels a little more like home, a little more like it's working FOR your instead of AGAINST you.

#actuallyautistic

[catwings-writes-things]

do you have a favorite character to write?

That’s such a difficult question to answer, because I love them all for different reasons! So, the short answer is “no,” but the long answer (rambling about why I like writing each of them) is below the cut.

Jon is probably the easiest character for me to write, for the simple reason that I already talk like that. His character voice, word choice, and dark humor and sardonic observations come very naturally to me. It’s also fun to write him when his thinking about something is completely off base—canon Jon is the “not lying, just wrong” variant of unreliable narrator to fascinating effect, and I’ve had a lot of fun playing around with that.

Helen is fun for the opposite reason: her mode of thinking is so completely alien to me that writing her has me constantly questioning my most fundamental assumptions about the world (and occasionally getting frustrated when I recognize that I’m stuck in an assumption or thought pattern that Helen wouldn’t share, but have literally no idea how to move beyond it). Helen reminds me a lot of one of my dearest friends, and one of my goals in writing this fic was to externalize my efforts to understand—or at least accept and make peace with—her point of view. Well, it’s working. (You know who you are. I love you so much.) And, of course, there’s the eternal struggle that is writing a Spiral creature’s movement and mannerisms. I’m doing my best 😂

Mike is great fun to write for a combination of the above reasons—a lot of his thought processes and style of intelligence is deeply familiar to me, but other aspects of his thinking (and especially speaking) are deeply unfamiliar. I share Mike’s logical/patterns-based intelligence, his tendency to respond to fear by researching the hell out of whatever is frightening him, his tenacity to the point of obsession, his messed-up relationship with pain and his body in general, his horror of the Spiral, and his love of the Vast, especially the sky/heights/falling aspect (the paragraph in Mike’s statement about his feelings on fairground rides is one of the most relatable things I have read in my entire life). However, while we’re both very autistic, he’s semiverbal and I’m hyperverbal with only occasional periods of speech loss. Writing Mike’s dialogue is always a challenge, and one I generally approach by writing out what he’s trying to say and then taking out all unnecessary words and sentences (and then some, depending on the situation and how much time he’s had to think about it, if any). I sometimes forget to do this, and I’m sorry about that. But I love writing Mike because noticeably disabled autistic characters (or characters with any sort of mental/emotional/cognitive disability, really) who are actually characters and not just plot devices are so, so rare in media, to a deeply frustrating extent, and I’m happy to contribute even a tiny bit towards fixing that. Also because he’s awesome and I love him.

Harriet is fun because at this point, she’s basically my oc, but does technically exist in canon, so I do have something to go on. Talking too much more about why I love writing her would be spoilers for upcoming chapters 😈, but for now, let’s just say that she’s full of contradictions, and that, of all the members of the Squad, she’s both the kindest and the cruelest. She’s fascinating and I adore her, and I’m so very proud of how she’s turned out.

Oliver is delightful for several reasons, and one of them is that he’s probably the closest thing this group has to a normal person? Which kind of helps normalize avatarhood in general, both for the readers and for Jon (you can see this most clearly at the end of chapter 2). My joke about Oliver’s character concept is “guy who got appointment-in-Samarra-ed so hard he just stopped driving,” and I really do think that’s at the core of it—Jon is still struggling with his situation and with what he is, to some extent, but Oliver tried everything he possibly could to escape his own and it backfired spectacularly. Oliver has had it driven in again and again that he can’t change anything, that what happens will happen and there’s no point in fighting it, and he’s made his peace with that and decided to be content with his life anyway. Very Stoic of him, in the original Greek philosophy sense. I appreciate that.

Which leaves Karolina. She’s fun to write for a multitude of reasons, including but not limited to her blunt approach to comfort (which, for Jon, tends to be remarkably effective). If I want someone to just say what everyone’s thinking already, it’s gonna be Karolina. Her extremely matter-of-fact style of dealing with problems (and the positive and negative consequences thereof) is fun to explore, and—yes—the fact that someone in-universe can recognize the Dracula parallels brings me an unreasonable amount of joy.

Thank you for the ask, friend! Best!

#the jailbreak squad #the jailbreak verse #asks and answers #anonymous

[scrawnytreedemon]

Neurodivergency, and Sephiroth

Right, I’m going to see if I can try and explain why this reading appeals to me.

For some background, I’ve watched a full silent LP of the OG, watched Advent Children, and am largely familiar with his characterisation in Crisis Core(though it gets a bit patchy in some areas). I am not familiar with his characterisation in KH, Dissida, or any other spinoff appearances.

I’m going to be looking at this with an autistic lens, as, hey, I’m autistic, however much of these patterns aren’t exclusive to autistic people by any means and thus are fairly applicable to other labels.

This is an explanaition on why I find this element worth considering, and while I hope that others can relate or take away something from this, in many ways it is highly personal and not intended to be a decleration on Sephiroth’s ‘true nature,’ as it were. I’m not claiming that this was intended by the writers-- Infact, I’d be very surprised if they considered it, at all --As many of the traits he exhibits could be brushed aside as due to his upbringing.

That being said, let’s get into it!

1. Alienation

A common thread in neurodivergency, autism in particular, is some form of alienation. This doesn’t necessarily mean being outcast-- I, for one, have been largely accepted by those around me, and yet there is still that sense of being ‘other‘ that’s always been there, long before I even had a word for it.

Now, of course, in Sephiroth this is more related to his lineage, and how it’s expressed in... well, everything. Even still, I find value in expanding that, and considering just how getting the sense you’re implicitly divided from your peers.

There is, of course, the matter of Sephiroth’s literal isolation-- However, as fun as those scenarios are to play around with, I don’t think Sephiroth was raised wholly, or even mostly in the labs. The reason being that it would be nigh impossible to have hid just what made Sephiroth different, especially knowing how observant he is. It’s clear that Sephiroth had had extensive contact with other children, as epitomised by the line:

“I knew ever since I was a child, I was not like the others. I knew mine was a special existence. But this is not what I meant!” 

Sephiroth was painfully aware that he is different, even if he didn’t know exactly how. It is at once an oddly thrilling, and lonely sensation. Thrilling, because-- Hey! --You can do and see things others can’t and/or wouldn’t; and lonely, because it makes it hard to relate to others or have them relate to you.

2. Socialisation

I would like to start off by saying that, while I find it a tad more faithful and endlessly less grating than Sex God Sephiroth, Sephiroth is not a complete and utter social failure. While it’s clear he has difficulty articulating emotions and understanding others, it’s very clear even still that he knows how the game works, and knows how to play it.

This is going to dip far more into speculation territory, so buckle up.

A thing that, perhaps, I don’t see talked about often enough online when it comes to neurodivergent experiences, is that many things that are considered ‘normal‘ get experienced as systems that we need to actively learn and maneuver-- Socialisation especially!

Now, of course there is always some degree of social interaction being a give and take, a step forth and step back, regardless of neurotype, but it’s dialed up far more when you deviate from ‘the norm.‘

If I can give my own example, a thing I struggled with when I was little was humour! Not because I didn’t find things funny, or didn’t know what it was, but because I had issues grasping at the machinations of what made something funny. This lead to alot of nonsensical jokes that left my siblings confounded, until I picked up a joke-book, and started analysing from there. It was mostly alot of puns, which! Due to their simple structure, are a great way to learn the basics! I didn’t even know this was unusual, until my mother pointed it out to me years later.

And that method goes for alot of things.

Sephiroth, above all else, is observant. He makes efforts multiple times throughout the OG and Crisis Core to check up on others and ask how they’re doing. He asks Cloud how he feels returning to his hometown, and about seeing his mother, and urges Zack to check up on Aerith in Crisis Core, to name some notable examples. Even if you get the sense that his attempts are, perhaps, a little ungainly, it makes it clear more than anything that Sephiroth tries.

I think the reason that people have leaned alot more into the overly-awkward perception of Sephiroth in recent times, is because it humanises him. I feel there’s been far more of a shift within fandom to focus on the mundane, on relatability, on humanity. A veneer of endless, effortless confidence really isn’t that sexy anymore-- When sexual-appeal even comes into the matter, at all.

That being said, this section more than anything, I think, is very easy to brush aside due to his... interesting upbringing. Depending on how you construe the timeline, Sephiroth got sent to war as early as twelve, and wouldn’t have had much of an oppurtnity to develop these skills in a healthy and timely manner.

Even without that, a degree of social awkwardness is far from exclusive to any particular neurotype-- It’s the way it arises in him, though, that piques my interest.

3. Analysis and Obsession

This... I think, is the one where I’ll be grasping at straws the most.

While, yes, the obsessive research demonstrated in the OG during the Nibelheim incident and even before that to a lesser extent in Crisis Core could be some indication of a degree to absolutely immerse yourself in a subject in that Very Autistic WayTM, more than anything these are brought on by dire circumstance(the former especially by the question of his very humanity), and as we don’t see Sephiroth as a child, it’s uncertain as to whether he displayed these behaviours as such and to this degree under ‘normal‘ circumstances.

Even so, I get the feeling that Sephiroth is very analytically-minded, in a very Stranger In A Strange World sort of way(not in any way referring to the 1961 novel by a similar name, lmao). I get the feeling he’s the type of person to pick up some highly-esoteric text just for fun and come away with a menagerie of strange and unusual and obscenely specific factoids that he’ll remember for the rest of his life.

Like, someone might mention a topic offhandedly, and though he’d keep his mouth shut because He’s Like ThatTM, a slew of all the little bits and pieces he’s seen or read on the matter over the years would just jump to mind.

What I’m trying to say is, I think Sephiroth would take joy in painstakingly pouring and mulling over topics that not many people would have the consideration nor the mind to hold any long-term, inimate interest in.

If the last point was easily brushed aside, then this one you’d merely have to breathe and it’d fall apart. Nonetheless, I feel that within fandom’s current common framework with how we perceive Sephiroth, this wouldn’t be too much of a stretch.

I, however, want to make it clear that I can see the issue with labelling Sephiroth as neurodivergent. He could all too easily fall into the cliché of cold, emotionally and socially-inept, often rather callous depictions we see all too often in the heavily-neurotypical media that sees us as Missing Something; less than. Things have gotten better, but even still, there’s such a tendency to flatten us down to the things we can’t do, or lawd as us Potential Einsteins in spite of it-- Which, just, while it happens, on the whole it isn’t very helpful or realistic to expect this from us.

We are by no means a monolith, and while I take comfort in the idea of a neurodivergent Sephiroth, I understand that for some, it can feel like taking on a label to a character that vaguely fits the stereotype, and thus, perhaps, insinuating that to be autistic you have to look Like That-- And when it comes to villains in particular, it’s all too easy to dip into demonisation.

This isn’t even getting onto some of the issues that’d have this fall apart, were we to look at other symptoms. The first that comes to mind, and one that even I, as innocuous as I am, experience: sensory overload.

While it is entirely possible that Sephiroth learned to deal with it accordingly in life, or was forced to surpress it, because Shinra’s Science Department(cough cough Hojo) has been shown time and time again to force its subjects into little boxes and blame them for any failures expressed, the fact is that such a symptom could make fighting on the battlefield downright impossible.

Again, this is something that could’ve been given a ‘solution‘(as much as you can or even should think about long-term surpressing your basic thresholds), it nonetheless remains an issue.

I just hope that, on the whole, this served as some food for thought.

TL;DR: Sephiroth is autistic because I Vibe With It.

Also, happy Disability Pride!

#ffvii #sephiroth #character analysis #theory #scrawny speaks #ff7 #autism #neurodivergency #scrawny draws

[catboymuqing-moving]

HERE’S WHAT I THINK ABOUT DOUG’S POWERS sorry it’s extremely long i have a lot to say

ok as a description of doug’s powers i really like

1. ability to understand and produce any language he’s ever been exposed to, including codes

2. a mutant level ability to recognize and interpret patterns

i used to be kind of a purist about the language thing because writers would try to pass off literally anything as a language and say he understood it, which lead us down some dark fucking paths where nothing meant anything. like when he said “i can hear the language of reality” my eyes rolled so hard it shifted Earth’s orbit and now we have 367 days in a leap year

but if pattern recognition is part of his power it gets way more interesting, and more forgivable when shit gets insane. his “addiction to the internet” was stupid, but it was interesting! because it was his powers that wouldn’t let him stop trying to connect everything to everything to everything. it’s a really natural extension of language ability, which is 80% pattern recognition in itself, and i love that.

it’s also a GREAT subtle downside to an otherwise totally fucking baller mutation. he can recognize and understand patterns at a superhuman level, but his brain sometimes won’t let him stop until it’s satisfied or he’s dead? it’s a great recipe for conflict and disaster of all kinds, and honestly it’s extremely relatable as someone with autism (it’s part of why i think doug is autistic which is a whole other essay)

i also like that he’s good with computers not just because of his mutation but because he just... is. i don’t think it’s always something writers always get right, though. we’ve see a fair amount of doug talking directly to computers, out of his mouth, in english, and they’re not even always AI. and yet, the computer magically understands him and does what he wants it to do. he communicates emotions with a sentinel, he talks a security system into opening up. but his power is LANGUAGE AND PATTERNS, not communication. when he’s typing code, understanding how the system all works together so he can break it down, that’s when it makes sense. he’s not a WIZARD. he’s still constrained by the physical limits of technology. how are you going to speak english to a computer with no intelligence and no microphone and have it understand you? i KNOW it doesn’t happen as much as i probably think it does, and honestly sometimes it’s fine i know powers get stretched and that’s the fun of comics, i like seeing him do cool ridiculous stuff, but to me it often feels like kind of a cop out when writers don’t know how to deal with a situation involving technology

the other thing i love though, and i’m glad we’re getting into this in depth in 2019, is his ability to create languages. we saw him do it for amara that one time, and it wasn’t really touched on again, but i’m kinda obsessed with it. i like the idea that him doing that is a combination of his mutant ability and his regular old brainpower.

in fact i like the idea that his more in depth understanding of languages takes effort in general and that it was something he had to learn. like, exposure is the whole thing. he didn’t wake up one morning as a database of every language in existence- he just understood everything he read and heard automatically, and found that after enough time he could produce whatever language he was interpreting as well. the database of language built up quickly, but is always going to be growing as he’s exposed to new languages.

also, formally learning about linguistics must have been his first and biggest endeavour as a mutant. he would’ve understood it all intuitively as he read about it, caught on quicker than anyone ever has, but it wouldn’t be knowledge he already had. like, in the beginning he would’ve just heard someone speak russian and known what they were saying. in his mind he would know all the grammatical rules, syntactic structure, etc. but he wouldn’t have been able to put those words to it until he learned. he also would’ve had a hard time producing a new language without any formal knowledge of linguistics, so i like the idea that he puts in effort

i might add some more thoughts to this later but i’m falling asleep

#doug #p

[kaleidographia]

[Reflection] The Final Piece of the Puzzle

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I spent the new year at my cousin’s beach house, overlooking the warm waters of the Southern Brazilian coast. Inside the open plan kitchen/living room, cooled by the chilly ocean breeze, we gathered round for one of our old family pastimes: six pairs of hands, or seven, or eight, depending on who dropped in or out, deftly sorting through piles of tiny pieces, seeking out shapes, patterns, colors, snapping them together; little by little, a skeletal frame emerges, blocks of attached pieces sliding from hand to hand, a box passed around the circle, an auntie asking “does anyone have this corner?” — from a jumble of one thousand units, a picture comes together within a few hours. Someone presses down on the final piece, locking it into place. We take a moment to appreciate the results of our efforts, congratulate each other on a job well done, and then tip the board back into the box, scattering the fragile creation into its constituent parts.

 This memory of communal jigsaw puzzle solving goes back as far as my conscious awareness can reach. Almost every family function involves a coffee table spread out with a freshly opened puzzle box. Sometimes everyone sits down to solve it, but often it’s left as an open challenge, with solvers drifting towards it in between coffee, cakes, gift exchanges, and naps. It could take hours, or it could take days, but eventually it is finished at whichever leisurely pace it requires.

In an old home video, a 2-year-old me delightfully solves a wooden toddler puzzle, excitedly showing off my skills to my parents. From then until this most recent holiday gathering, puzzles have been a part of my life, whether they be jigsaws, logic exercises, sudoku, or videogames. Beyond the thrill of intellectual challenge, puzzle-solving is intertwined with a sense of community and belonging. It’s as much about getting together with loved ones to solve a problem together as it is about solving the problem itself. Some families play games, some watch movies, ours solves puzzles. It’s how we enjoy each other’s company.

 As I write this, it is April 2nd, Autism Acceptance Day. On this day, and throughout the month of April, autistic people warn of the dangers of Autism Speaks, an organization that treats autism as a disease to be eradicated, as opposed to a neurotype inseparable from our own personhood. Among its many problems, Autism Speaks uses a puzzle piece symbol, historically representing autism as “a puzzling disorder”, at other times evolving into other meanings, such as “the complexity of treating autism”, “the diversity of autistic people”, “the missing part that makes autistic people incomplete”, “trying to put together the pieces of the disordered mind”, “solving the mystery of autism”. Regardless of what meaning is in common usage, the autistic community rejects this symbol; with few exceptions, the negative connotations are too great, its iconography too closely associated with an organization which has done us far more harm than good. 

 This breaks my heart. 

 I know my individual feelings can’t erase the damage this symbol has done to our community, or the hurt it has caused my fellow autistic friends. Even I take a step back whenever I see a puzzle piece, suspicious of the intents of the user, as it often indicates someone who hasn’t taken the time to talk to and understand autistic people. But the puzzle piece is a symbol so special and significant to me, I want to open up a space to reclaim my own meaning. 

 When I think about being autistic, I don’t think about the difficulty recognizing people, the overwhelming sensory sensitivity, or the auditory processing issues requiring subtitles on most things I watch. Those are part of my life, sure, but they’re not “me” — not like the drive to research a special interest, the excitement of infodumping, or the elation when I see an airplane fly overhead. It may be a cliche, but those traits that make me a so-called “little professor” are the defining traits of my autistic experience, and suppressing my autistic traits suppresses everything I love about being myself. 

 That includes the puzzle piece.

 I can see my traits in my paternal lineage. I don’t know whether my family is autistic, or if they would ever identify as such. It doesn’t matter to me, because when I’m around them, solving a puzzle, that’s when our bonds are at their strongest. It’s about problem solving, but most importantly the pure enjoyment of immersing ourselves into a meticulous task, the meditative quality of a good hyperfocus. When we solve a puzzle together, we are materializing the traits that make us who we are: people who care deeply about something and then give that something everything we have. We are not “putting together the pieces of a broken mind” — we are using our uniquely developed minds to put together the pieces of the things we love. We are creating. 

 It’s discovery. It’s pattern-seeking. It’s making something happen purely because it gives us joy. The finished puzzle never stays that way for long. It doesn’t have any practical use. In it goes, back in the box, hours of work breaking apart, because the joy wasn’t the end result, it was the process. And the process is what I love, and the process is who I am. Whatever I am doing, work, school, or personal projects, I find my pleasure and fulfillment in the process; hammering out the details is a pastime, not a chore. It’s the drive, the repetition, the coming back to something left unfinished, the letting the mind decide what it wants and then letting it be. 

 I know every autistic person is different. Many people will not share my experience, and that’s okay. But rather than focusing on what I am not, I want to focus on what I am, and I think many people can relate to the idea that passing for neurotypical means severing the parts of us we love. For me, that means pretending that I don’t love sinking myself into a task that requires sorting through mountains of identical-looking pieces. I have to avoid looking like I pay too much attention to any one given thing, because that’s obsessive, inflexible and bad, and to shut up about my special interest because everyone’s sick of hearing me go on about a subject nobody understands. This is what the misuse of the puzzle piece symbol feels like to me; shut up about the positives of autism, we want to medicalize your neurotype and strip away what makes your life enjoyable. 

 Look, it’s not easy, I get it. I don’t enjoy meltdowns or sudden nonverbality or being unable to rip myself from a task to the point of starvation or misreading a social situation so badly I humiliate myself. But among autistic people I’m normal, we understand each other as fluidly as allistic people understand each other, and I am sure an allistic person living in an autistic-only world would feel just as disoriented. It’s contextual, and the context of our stories and our symbols depends on who is scrutinizing us and why. If Autism Speaks represents a shadow over my community, and the puzzle piece represents our dehumanization, I can’t do anything to change that. But I can keep puzzles to myself. 

Because the joy of my life is all about sitting around a table at my cousin’s beach house, and the moment someone presses that final piece of the puzzle into place.

Photo: The partially completed puzzle we solved over the holiday break.

#actually autistic #actuallyautistic #autism #Autism Speaks #other media #puzzles #Reflection

[gaiatheorist]

“We’re all on the spectrum.”

One of my old managers had evidently heard the phrase ‘On the spectrum’ in relation to autistic spectrum disorders, and decided to use it randomly in relation to anyone he found a bit odd. Head-fuck there, because one of the many and varied indicators of ASD is a person deciding that they are ‘right’, and everyone else is either like-them, or wrong. My linear-logical flow-chart head has decided that the former manager in question wasn’t autistic, he was just a bully. (That’s why I had to ‘boss’ him, to show him that, despite him earning three times what I did, I wasn’t going to show him my belly. That didn’t entirely work to my advantage, because I ended up with a lot of additional workload, “Just cast your eyes over this for me?” I’m a pedant of a proof-reader.)

I have been guilty, in the past, of using a similar phrase, but in a contextually correct manner. Similar, not that lazy, throw-away ‘all on the spectrum’, mine was more nuanced “If you look hard enough at anyone, you’ll find traits consistent with autism.” Boring, procedural side-waffle, that to be diagnosed with an ASD, you have to fulfil the ‘triad impairments’, ever-shifting, but generally grouped into communication, social interaction, and restrictive or repetitive behaviours. (Damn and blast, I wrote an absolutely stunning overview of some ASD training I had at work in about 2003, that’ll be lost now.)

Lazy stereotypes abound in relation to autism, that we’re ‘all’ Rain-man, that we’re ‘all’ unable to socialise, or form attachments, that we’re ‘all’ idiot-savant, with some super-power sort of skill. Autism is not astrology, we’re not ‘all’ watching out for falling pianos, or expecting good news from afar because we’re labelled ‘Virgo’, or ‘Leo.’

In the same way as it being impossible to be ‘a bit OCD’, or ‘a bit pregnant’, a person can’t be ‘a bit autistic’, you’re either on the spectrum, or you’re not. I once worked with a student, and, after literally years of trying to access the right support for him, his Mother casually dropped into conversation the fact that he’d been seen by an educational psychologist, who had suggested ‘borderline autistic traits’. Puberty hit, his hormones went haywire, and we had a student displaying a plethora of traits-consistent-with-autism, but, because there was no formal record of an AS diagnosis, we had to start from square one, in a chronically under-funded CAMHS system. Numbers aren’t my thing, but I think he had five ‘allocated’ workers in a period of about a year and a half. I pushed through his Education and Health Care Plan, which was way above my pay-scale, I badgered CAMHS to keep trying, to accept that this boy really wasn’t coping, and said he was ‘fine’ because he thought that was the ‘right answer.’ He wasn’t the same as the boy who threw his bag up trees, and hid under tables. He wasn’t the same as the girl who screamed. He wasn’t the same as the boy who would spend hours walking around trees when he should have been in lessons, or the boy who genuinely believed he was Dennis the Menace.  

Over the years, I worked with hundreds of children, possibly thousands, some had confirmed diagnoses of ASD, some showed multiple traits, but had no diagnosis. Some, we managed to process through the convoluted and complex CAMHS teams for interventions, some we didn’t. Personally, I slipped through the diagnostic process at school because my traits were mostly productive, and the unproductive ones were attributed to other factors. (I’m smirking, at the memory of the Child Psychologist trying to use a visualisation technique with me. “Imagine the bad man in a bubble, imagine him floating far, far away, becoming smaller, and smaller until he’s gone.” “Yeah, no, the bubble has burst, and now everything is covered with him.” You can’t put a person in a bubble. I used visualisation techniques with some students, the undiagnosed-ASD ones couldn’t do it.)

My current verbal diagnosis of ASD makes sense. (Lazy stereotype about autistic people craving order- most humans crave order.) It also makes sense that other-issues historically have muddied the water, and that more recent issues have made the situation even more complex. Migraines, sensory issues, IBS, PTSD, sporadic anxiety and depression, then brain injuries. It also makes sense that, as a high-functioning female, I was able to mimic and mask, to work around my difficulties as not to burden other people. Until I wasn’t. The masking and passing always took additional effort, as the second neuro-psychologist phrased it ‘At what cost?’ The brain injuries made it very clear that I had multiple sensory issues, because I had to re-learn my masking behaviours, it wasn’t that the brain injuries had ‘caused’ the issues, they’d always been there, I just had more available cognitive capacity to conceal them. I’ve always had issues with ‘smells’, my brother used to buy ‘Pacers’ sweets, and then breathe the spearmint-smell onto me, knowing perfectly well it would trigger a migraine, that was before 1985, I remember the sweet-shop. Bright lights, flickering lights, even the noise light-bulbs make, I can tell when I’m really unwell, because I can feel the heat from light-bulbs on my face. ‘Scratchy’ fabric in clothes, or clothes that are too tight around my throat, garish patterns on clothes make my eyes feel sick, the ex found it hilarious that I referred to most of his ‘going out’ shirts as ‘clothes that would give me a migraine from the other side of the room’, it wasn’t funny. (Argh! The DAMNED striped shirts that the m-i-l insisted on buying him, I was the only one in the house that ever ironed anything, ironing striped shirts made me feel nauseous.)

I’ve never been a big fan of being touched, except in certain circumstances, first aid courses were a nightmare, and I’m that one who freezes rigid when people try to hug me. Lazy stereotype, which Tim Minchin knows not to be true, “If you have this vaccine, you’ll get autism, and you WON’T LIKE HUGS!” I’d totally let Tim Minchin hug me. That ‘could’ be attributed to the PTSD, there are reasons I’m not much of a hugger or a kisser, but that doesn’t necessarily explain my aversion to touch-in-general.   

Everyone is not on the autistic spectrum, people may exhibit traits consistent with autism, but that doesn’t make them ‘a bit autistic’, my ex wouldn’t eat sandwiches if the ingredients were in the ‘wrong’ order. He wouldn’t drink out of blue mugs, and he had several million hobbies, and obsessions,  my loft and shed are still full of his crap, He wasn’t autistic, he was just a prat. My step-father wanted my mother to keep the house to his very high standards, which caused arguments, but he wasn’t autistic, my mother was just a slattern. My father had an over-inflated idea of his own importance, and all-who-opposed-him-were-wrong. I worked with a teacher who brought the same sandwich for lunch every day, strawberry jam, no butter, actually, thinking about her communication style, she might have been autistic. I’ve worked with people who are incredibly neat, with people who became genuinely distressed if anyone moved things on their desk, I’ve worked with people who couldn’t read body-language, or would bang on about their chosen topic, and not notice people virtually climbing out of the windows to escape.  In isolation, these behaviours, habits, and choices do NOT mean that the individual is ‘on the spectrum’, they’re just a bit odd. (Odd as in peculiar, not as in ‘Oppositional Defiance Disorder’, that’s a whole different kettle of worms.)