To celebrate National Inclusion week, education actuary Sally Calder has written a blog series on neurodiversity, with a focus on autism. In part one, she shares what makes her who she is. The six-part series covers self-identification, diagnosis, stigma, and strengths and challenges. She also highlights what we, in the spirit of inclusivity, can all do to support neurodivergent individuals.
I’m going to tell you a story. It comes with a warning because it ends on a cliffhanger. For most of my life, I have never fitted in. At one point, I seriously questioned whether I was an alien in a world populated by humans. What do I mean by that? There’s a long answer and a short answer.
Here are 20 aspects of my personality:
Not physically, but in a manner I can’t articulate in words.
And I mean, really lose track. I’ve forgotten to eat, drink, and go to the loo. I’ve been known to look up from my book or computer and realise night has been and gone. My throat will be dry, I’ll be so desperate to go to the loo it hurts, and that screeching outside is the dawn chorus.
So much so that everyone around me thinks I’m a grumpy old woman (OK, I’ll admit to some of that). These can be a fly buzzing in the distance, a dripping tap next door, or someone repeatedly clearing their throat in the office. I’ll have to fight the urge to swat or slap them.
When out with friends or colleagues I always struggle to hear what people are saying, so I mostly stay out of conversations. I’ve never understood why everybody else can hear and I can’t.
My hearing isn’t rubbish – far from it – but I cannot filter out background noise. With this comes a feeling of inadequacy. After asking people to repeat themselves several times, I give up, for fear of causing offence by continually asking. I’ll settle for nodding and smiling in appropriate places to pretend to join in.
Memories, for me, are vivid, brightly coloured images. In my head, when working on numbers, I see them lined up in a row in front of me. I also see calendars and weekdays lined up in a row.
And by that, I mean a room that’s already got more than two people in it.
After lockdown, I struggled with the concept of interacting in person again. I suffered from guilt and self-loathing on hearing everyone talk about how wonderful it would be to meet again when I felt the exact opposite.
I love giving presentations, and if it’s a topic I’m hyper-interested in (such as the Actuaries’ Code and APS X2), I’ll talk for hours. But in the minutes before it begins I flit between excitement and a desire to run screaming to the nearest exit.
When delivering presentations, I have silent voices in my head talking through my planning notes. I’m aware ‘silent voices’ is a contradiction, but I don’t actually hear them. They’re more like thoughts talking me through my planning notes while I deliver the presentation.
I sometimes recall the names and life histories of people I met briefly years ago. If I remind them, they’ll think I’m a stalker. (This was how someone described me when I said I’d recalled their name from a tutorial). I often pretend not to remember to appear ‘normal’.
Conversely, I can forget things shortly after being told, and miss ‘obvious’ points. I often have to ask several times, before the point sticks.
I do this before events where I’m likely to meet new people. To me, everybody else got the memo on how to ‘do’ social stuff. The small-talk instinct was coded into their DNA, but I was left off that stage of the assembly line.
I can blurt out things in conversations, which are unfiltered and come across as tactless. Or I’ll interrupt people because I struggle to pick up on cues for when it’s OK to speak.
I’m continually reflecting on things I’ve said in conversations and worrying whether I’ve put my foot in it. I’ll replay conversations in my head, running over potential faux pas in order to ‘do better next time’, which can be exhausting.
If I’m going anywhere, I have to run through every detail of the journey in my mind, preferably with pictures, to mitigate anxiety. This is even worse when I’m driving.
When quips are made at work or at home, I’ll often take them literally. Or if comments are made literally, I’ll wonder if they’re jokes, and feign laughter to fit in, even if I don’t ‘get’ the joke. In other words, I can’t always tell the difference.
When I was a child, I watched Tony Hancock’s The Blood Donor with a friend. When she told me Tony Hancock had taken his own life, I thought she was telling a joke and couldn’t understand why it was funny. But I laughed anyway to be ‘normal’, not realising it was true.
Questions and phrases that to most people are straightforward can completely baffle me. I remember getting into trouble at school when a teacher thought I was being cheeky to them. They had pointed to a row of sums in my workbook and asked, “What are these?” I said, “They’re sums.” They got so angry that they physically threw me across the room.
I was regularly punished for not following ‘simple’ instructions that I couldn’t understand. During my early school years, I was written off by the teachers and headmaster as being stupid and deliberately obstructive. This persisted until I clicked with a maths teacher when I was about 10.
Don’t get me started on management speak! Not only do I dislike it, I simply cannot understand it. Phrases such as ‘blue sky thinking’ ‘socialising’ ideas, and ‘squaring the circle’ are as alien to me as my obsession with enchi-pastel royal pythons is alien to others.
Until last year, I viewed all the points above as evidence that there was something fundamentally wrong with me. I’ve spent my life trying to mask these characteristics, or laughing them off and portraying myself as an object of ridicule, as a coping mechanism.
I’ve had to play along and give the appearance of a functioning human to survive.
I’m autistic.
Cue the Eastenders duff-duff-duffs.
In my next post, I’ll dig into my identity a little more, and chat about the stigma associated with autism. And I’ll explain what autism means to me and whether it is, in fact, a superpower, not a disorder.
National Inclusion Week is a week dedicated to celebrating inclusion and taking action to create inclusive workplaces. Learn more at National Inclusion Week 2022.
