D – divine words of brilliance. So much to be learned from such an amazing range of people.

I – inspiration, insight, and intelligence. In each and every post.

N – no nonsense. Tells it how it is – whether others like it or not!

O – or, put another way, full of honesty, however hard it is to expose the truth.

S – so many posts, so many authors, so little time. But we need to make the time.

A – awesome reading. I love getting my notifications alerting me to a new post – little nuggets of gloriousness.

U – unparalleled levels of real experience to learn from. Real lives, real experiences, real learning.

R – Rhi, to whom this is dedicated. To her and all her fellow #actuallyautistic bloggers who tirelessly and selflessly write their thoughts down for others to learn from. The autistic voice is powerful indeed. I thank each and every one of you.

AKA I am so naïve

Ok, so I was chatting to a Mum of some several autistic children, and she says something that really made me sit up and listen. She was telling me about how people really need to understand that autism and loveliness are not mutually exclusive. I had to interrupt and ask her to explain – not about what she was saying (as it seemed so obvious to me) but why she felt she needed to say it. It turns out that a frequent occurrence is her disclosing to people that her children are autistic – and their response being “but they are so lovely” – as if the two cannot go hand in hand. This is when I started to feel utterly bewildered. Surely, surely, society at large is not still so far behind in their thinking that one cannot be both autistic and lovely? But apparently, my naïvety is shining through – seemingly at least some people do actually think that.

This got me thinking. Why is it that being autistic somehow denies a person a personality? Because so often, it does. It’s kind of like as soon as someone tells someone else they are autistic then the shutters come down and the person is no longer a ‘real’ person, but an ‘autistic’ person – as if autism is somehow a barrier to being…well, anything, really, aside from being autistic.

Let’s just clarify – I would like to say once and for all but to be fair I thought that society in general had already cottoned on and I have been proved very wrong – being autistic simply means that. It means that one is autistic. Nothing – literally nothing – else can be inferred from the declaration of “I am autistic”, “my wife is autistic” (yes, amazing isn’t it? Women can not only be autistic they can also get married! Shock. Horror. (Sarcasm)), and so on. There is essentially nothing that ties all autistic people together aside from their state of being autistic. There may be all sorts of overlaps, propensities for certain likes and dislikes, similarities, aversions – but aside from being autistic there isn’t anything else one can infer from an autism declaration. Why is this? Because autistic people – wait for it – are actual, real, people with their very own unique personalities, characteristics, idiosyncrasies, dispositions, pet hates, preferences, attributes, natures, virtues, temperaments, attributes, charms – and so on. Yes, all autistic people share being autistic; over and above that, no judgements should be made just because of the disclosure.

Imagine a world where you were judged – for whatever reason, every day, sometimes by strangers – even worse, by people who know you better (and should know better) – in a manner that bears no relation to the real you. I don’t think that would be a very pleasant way to exist. But many autistics do exist so often in this state on that daily basis – sometimes to the point of giving up telling people that they are autistic. This isn’t because they are ashamed of being autistic – far from it. It’s because they get so utterly (and justifiably) fed up with (possibly well meaning) remarks based on ill thought out presumptions that rarely have anything to do with the actual individual. Statements starting with “so that must mean you’re…” are commonplace – and should be banned! Or “so, does that mean you’re good at…” or “so does that mean you’re bad at…” are often the death knell of meaningful interaction. It’s fantastic when people genuinely want to understand the autistic person better – and I think most autistic people are pretty willing to share if approached in the right way – but society simply has to stop making utterly inappropriate suppositions just based on the word ‘autism’. Not only are the suppositions usually entirely wrong, making them in the first place is actually pretty offensive.