The Middletown Centre for Autism Podcast
The Middletown Podcast features interviews with leading thinkers and practitioners across the autistic and autism community. Conversations are autism-affirming and neurodiversity-informed with a focus on the lived experience and knowledge of our community. Episodes highlight issues impacting autistic people and we share ideas for family members and school staff who are providing support.
The Middletown Centre for Autism Podcast
Someone Like Me with Clem Bastow and Jo Case
In the latest Middletown Podcast, we chat to Australian authors Clem Bastow and Jo Case about “Someone Like Me”, a new anthology of autistic writing that they have edited. We talk about how the book came about and the importance of real representation.
📚You can find out more about the book here: https://www.vervebooks.co.uk/bookpage.php?isbn=9780857309266
Welcome to the Middletown Podcast. I'm Kat Hughes, I'm a researcher at Middletown and I'm also autistic. In this episode I chat to Clem Bastow and Joe Case. They're Australian autistic writers who've created an anthology of nonfiction writing by autistic, gender diverse and women writers. It's called Someone Like Me and it is a beautiful book that features well-known writers like Nisha Dolan and Lucy Rose, as well as a friend of the podcast and a lovely person, fergus Murray. The pieces in it are all so different, but they all capture something very true about being autistic. I talked to Clem and Joe about how the book came about and how very important real representation is for autistic folk of all ages. I hope you enjoy our chat. Well, thank you both so much for joining me on the podcast. I'm delighted to have a chance to chat with you. The first thing I wanted to ask was where did the idea for the book come from?
Speaker 3:Well, this one I have to handball to Jo, because it all started with Jo. Yeah, I've just been thinking that I would like a book like this to exist for a really long time. I realised I was autistic a really long time ago, probably like 16 years ago, and there weren't very many autistic women, let alone autistic non-binary people. When I realised that I also was autistic, I really wanted to find, I wanted to read about people like me, and I have found very little, and I work in publishing. So you know, I just kind of kicked around this idea in my head for a while and then I got a job at publisher and as a publisher and was able to commission things and my first thought was to do this. So I contacted Clem and said would you like to co-edit an anthology like this with me? And Clem wonderfully said yes almost immediately. So then Clem and I were kicking around the idea for quite a while and tried to get it going a few times, didn't we?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I was in a similar boat to Jo. I mean, I guess I had a slightly different experience in that I had written an autism memoir. But I think, since my book had come out in 2021, I was sort of aware of the fact that there was a kind of a growing I don't know, it was like that was becoming a new monolithic story, the kind of later life very diagnosis framed, you know, and in some ways that's what I wanted my book to be like, that, you know, I wanted it to be really more of a kind of non-fiction book for people who were using my experience to explain aspects of autism that maybe were new to them, whatever. But since that had come out, we'd had, particularly in Australia, a number of other quite high-profile memoirs which were kind of covering similar territory and although, you know, obviously everybody's story is really important.
Speaker 2:I was really excited about the project that Jo had suggested because I thought here's another opportunity to push the conversation forward and to give autistic people and, like Jo was saying, particularly autistic women and gender diverse people the opportunity to not talk about diagnosis if they didn't want to, you know, to kind of it's like okay, we understand that autism is this highly clinicalised. You know, it's very hard to avoid in some ways. But there are also all of these other incredible experiences that autistic people have. Where wouldn't it be great if they could write about that without having to go. As the DSM says, you know, dot dot, dot. So yeah, I was very excited when Jo asked.
Speaker 3:And I should say I didn't actually publish it, even though I found it was when I was a publisher, because it didn't get up that time. But we published later down the track with an Australian publisher, UQP, who were excellent, and now we're just delighted to have an expanded version of the anthology with Verve in the.
Speaker 1:UK. So yeah, and how did you go about finding so many brilliant writers? And then even more difficult, I would imagine twiddling down those submissions.
Speaker 2:Oh, the wiggling was so hard. Yes, yes, we were really lucky. Jo suggested what I think ended up being a great idea, which was that we had some writers in mind already, and some of those people were not necessarily, you know, professional literary writers, but people that we sort of wanted on board. And then we also had the opportunity to then kind of throw the doors open and have a submissions process, and that was really fascinating because a lot of the time we would get, you know, sort of one or two or three or four essays that were quite similar, you know they would be about certain topics just covered in different ways, and so it was a really hard process because they were all great, like they're really you know, that's not us being kind of falsely like effusive Like it really was difficult because a lot of them were so good, and so it was sort of a question of going this is good. Is it good for what we're trying to do with this book, you know? Or is there another home for this piece?
Speaker 3:um, absolutely it was really hard yeah, and it was also about how everything sat together, like when we were commissioning people, because it was about half commissioned and half um coming in through an open call-out. This is for the initial batch of the anthology. And then, of course, there was the other layer with working with Verve to find six new contributors from the UK and the US, and Verve did a lot of work with that and I think and Clem and I yeah, it was a real team effort, wasn't it? Clem?
Speaker 2:It was great yeah, it was very collaborative the whole way through, I think, which has been really nice, like both in its initial Australian incarnation and then working with Verve as well, like it's been very. Yeah, I think that's been really beautiful and I think to me that's like that's kind of autistic culture too, Like I think the fact that, yes, it has been a very because you know, when we were, when we were putting it together, I guess Joe and I were also coming at it from different angles too, which was really interesting. I think I was really, freshly out of a PhD, feeling very political about, you know, autistic writing and and so you know I was like this is what I think we should be looking for and you know, jo had different ideas and it was really nice to kind of meet in the middle and challenge both of our kind of preconceptions about what we wanted that book to look like.
Speaker 3:Absolutely and actually nearly.
Speaker 3:Every time I go back and revisit it, which I usually do before we have a chat, like I'm struck by how well that collaboration and those conversations worked, because I can see both Clem and I in there and there were like some essays that we were both like, yes, we need to have these ones, and some topics that we both really wanted to have, and but there are other things where I mean we all love all of the essays in there, but in terms of, especially conceptually, when we were thinking about what we wanted it to be, we had some I some great conversations, like Clem says, with um.
Speaker 1:You know Clem wanting it to be well, we both want it to be diverse, but Clem, I think, is the one who really pushed for it to be diverse in form as well, which is terrific, uh, and yeah, we both had different contacts in terms of writers that we knew as well, so I feel like it's just, yeah, it was great to have to have that collaboration, yeah, yeah yeah, and you can feel it as you read it, and one of the things that that I kept thinking as I was reading through the book is sort of the idea that I mean, I don't know how many times as a kid, as I was reading through the book, is sort of the idea that I mean, I don't know how many times as a kid, as I was growing up, I was told that I was a bad communicator and I think it's something that as autistic folk we constantly hear, but then something like a book like this it's so nuanced and there's so much in it and so many different perspectives, and then there are so many autistic people creating things in so many different ways.
Speaker 1:So I was wondering kind of how you guys felt about that sort of stereotype around autistic communication being bad do you want to lead autism expert Clem sure, look, I think it's, it's so common and and it was partly.
Speaker 2:you know, part of my PhD research was looking at my own experience as a screenwriter and the ways in which some of my approaches to screenwriting were in inverted commas autism discourse, which is this idea that comes from non-autistic people that we are bad communicators. And you know I don't like to defer to studies, but there have actually been some terrific, very neuroaffirming studies recently which have found that it's not true, that actually autistic communication is really complex and diverse and works great. And the issue is when a non-autistic person comes into the frame which is sort of flipping it on its head. But I think it's very common that we communicate through writing too, because you know, I mean I am generally, you know, a pretty verbal person, but there are times when speaking is really difficult for me. You know, to do something like this takes a lot of rest and not talking the rest of the day, and I think that's very true of a lot of autistic people. And so we do tend towards texting, you know, emojis, writing emails. You know I've only recently kind of come to enjoy speaking on the phone at 43.
Speaker 2:So I think that was part of it, and I think that you know, like Jo was saying before, I guess, what my approach was too was this idea that autistic writing itself as a literary form can and does have this really interesting, you know way of kind of embodying autistic experience on the page.
Speaker 2:So, again, those sorts of communication styles and expressive styles that are often, you know, wrong or bad, like repeating ourselves, you know, lots of segues, like enormous sentences, lots of brackets, lots of, you know, all of those things which are, yeah, kind of literary manifestations of the way that we communicate too, which I find so exciting. And so, yeah, that was a big part of what I was looking for when we were kind of coming together and trying to work out what the essays would look like. But, yeah, I think that's a huge part of it. I mean, of course, it's always a double-edged sword, because then you have a book like this and people go, oh well, they must not be very autistic, you know, because, look, they can write these essays, which is just a classic and luckily hasn't really happened much, you know, with the initial, with the first edition of the book, but, um, but yeah, I think it's a.
Speaker 2:Really, I think you're right, it is definitely, um, something that we were sort of trying to challenge, you know, know, in a sort of indirect way, I think.
Speaker 3:Absolutely and I feel like it's kind of reflected across the book in all sorts of different ways. You know like there's at least one essay that touches on, you know, damien Milton's double empathy problems. So you know that we don't have it's not that we don't have empathy, you know, as we have a different kind of empathy or that we, just because we communicate differently, we react to different things and the autistic people between each other have just as much empathy as non-autistic people when they're communicating. And I actually think Caitlin McGregor's essay, in which Caitlin writes about their experience with a speech pathologist who is diagnosing them and part of what they have to do, of course, is kind of, you know, diagnose whether their communication is normal or proper or right it's just such a brilliant illustration of um and kind of gentle piss.
Speaker 3:Take of that idea of like, proper communication and I just I just loved it for that um, but also like what Clem was saying in terms of forms as well. I mean from some of the writers who one of the pieces, for instance, that I was really surprised by in terms of how it came back in form there's a YA author whose novel about with an autistic ADHD protagonist I'd really liked and Anna Waitley and I'd asked. Anna was one of the people who we'd asked to contribute and Anna came back and said can I co-author a piece with my friend Kate Gordon, who's also autistic, and that's one of the pieces near the front of the anthology, which is this terrific parallel conversations that are about the thoughts that are going on underneath. You know the surface when there is something like what I think about when I'm having a conversation and when everyone else has a conversation that's right.
Speaker 3:That's right. And the fact that it's just so layered in that it's their thoughts underneath the layer of a conversation, but also they're set parallel. So it's like you know, I just love that. And Amanda Tink's piece as well, which is like fragmented and it's like kinship in its four voices and they all come together and tell one story, but you can also identify which voice it is, if you want to, through the footnotes, and so with both of them, it's this wonderful autistic thing of communication that is both separate and collective at the same time, and I really love that. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's beautiful that piece that you mentioned, the sort of both voices together. That really struck me when I was reading it, and the fact that it takes on sort of the concept of imposter syndrome is something that I haven't talked about so much but I have never seen represented before, which is just beautiful. Yeah, and are there other kind of myths around autistic experience that you were kind of hoping to address through the book?
Speaker 2:All of them. Well, I mean, that was what was interesting about having the open call, was that?
Speaker 2:you know, I guess both Joanne and I had things that we were hoping to cover, but it was sort of you roll the dice a bit and you see what comes in, and so I think, in a way, we had some really interesting experiences that maybe wouldn't have necessarily occurred to us. Um, to include or the or the that even you know we had experienced ourselves, and I think that's what's really powerful about it too. It is such a kind of diversity of experiences on many levels, you know, not just in terms of how all the individual writers experience autism, like there are obviously other intersecting aspects of their realities that are at play as well. But yeah, I think that was a big one, I think for me. You know, my interest in autistic writing is in part that idea that it's sort of pedantic, you know.
Speaker 2:I mean, well, my piece I sort of leaned into that. I wanted to write about info dumping and, you know, information sharing and all of these things that are typically, you know, especially when younger people are being diagnosed. That's kind of what they're looking for. It's like are they trying to have conversations with you about things that you're not interested in? And I think that's a really interesting tonal register. Is was allowing people. To you know when we made the call and also to the people that were commissioned. You know we said you don't have to write about autism Like you can write about how some aspect of your experience is sort of filtered through that, that um.
Speaker 2:And so I think I think, as a result, that that gives the book a really interesting texture, because, yeah, some people are really directly saying because I'm autistic, I experienced, you know, xyz. But then other people are sort of writing about things in a quite um, you know that it's sort of autism adjacent um, or it's, it's, it's autistic by virtue of. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3:Sorry, clem, go on, no, no.
Speaker 2:I find it hard to shut up once I start talking, speaking of info dumping Jo over to you.
Speaker 3:Oh no. Well, a great example of that is Julie Farrell's piece, which is one of the essays in the International Edition, and it's just this beautiful meditation on stargazing and on how that's linked to Julie's relationship with her father, who taught her to love it, and it's just this deep, really lyrical, deep dive into a special interest which was also exploring other things, and it very subtly talks, talked, about being autistic. I think. It just referenced it in a few lines, I think, but it it also was entirely autistic.
Speaker 2:Um, so yeah and actually sometimes, oh sorry, no, go on, when two autistic people have a conversation. I think the other thing you know then that's that's something that came up a bit in the editing process was working with the writers to say to them it's okay if you want to cut, because occasionally there would be an explainy paragraph. You know where they would sort of suddenly be in this different voice, and it's definitely a thing that we all have to reckon with, this idea of the non-autistic reader or the neurotypical gaze, and I think sometimes what was really cool was being able to encourage them. If you'd like to cut this, let's just hit the ground running. Like you don't have to say I was diagnosed on the whatever of March, you know 2000 and something, and that's why I have this experience, because often once they you know once, once that paragraph was sort of done and dusted, then it completely explodes into life in a really different way.
Speaker 2:So that was, I think, a really rewarding part of the editing process too, was to kind of give people the permission, I guess, to go hey, you can write, you know what you'd like to write, and you don't have to kind of put the general readership hat on.
Speaker 2:And funnily enough. I guess the irony of that is then, I think they are more accessible in a way, because it's sort of it's so true to those people's voices that you can't help but be moved and engaged by that, whereas I think sometimes you know, I look back on writing my own book there was a lot of explaining where I was still and this was like, yeah, 2021, so I was writing it 2019, 2020, still so much that you had to kind of explain about autism because there was a lack of understanding generally, and I think there's obviously still a real, you know, a general lack of understanding, but I think it's better than it was. So there were some instances where we could say you don't actually have to define autism or this particular autistic experience. You can just embody that through telling your story.
Speaker 3:True, and also and this maybe goes back a little bit to the autistic communication question it's like part of that too, too, is it always depends on the context in which you're communicating in. So, because within the context of an anthology which is explicitly about autism and or explicitly autistic voices and that in the introduction, frames it in that way and does a little bit of the unpacking in there, it's okay, you know you don't need to do that unpacking. You don't need to. You know you can go into it or you cannot. There, it's okay, you know you don't need to do that unpacking. You don't need to. You know you can go into it or you cannot, and it's fine, you're still going to be understood and read. Whereas, like, I adapted my piece in the collection or did a version of it for newspaper here and I had to go back and unpack a few things that I hadn't actually in my essay and it was because I'm writing for a general readership, and so what was it that I had to unpack?
Speaker 3:I had to say what autistic burnout was. It hadn't occurred to me that I had to explain what that was, even though my day job is all about getting academics to explain exactly what they're talking about for a general audience. So, yeah, sorry, I've gone off track there. Perfect.
Speaker 1:Bit of an idea. Were there any places where you felt kind of particularly represented by the submissions that came in?
Speaker 3:Yes, yes.
Speaker 2:Yes. Next question yes, absolutely. Yes, yes, yes. Next question yes, oh, absolutely. It was really. I think what was kind of amazing was how you would just I mean, I can't speak for Jo, but I suspect she had a very similar experience to me, where you would be reading ones and just going oh, me too, me too like and they were often experiences that you hadn't.
Speaker 2:You just sort of couldn't even comprehend that somebody else had had, and I think that that was that was something really special about it. Um, yeah, you know, it was just for me. Actually, it was particularly working on the new edition with Verve. Um, lucy Rose's piece about wanting to be a fish and a mermaid. Growing up I was just like, is this my diary? You know, I was reading it, going with the same age, having the same experiences, you know, in the bath with goggles, on trying to turn into a mermaid, like just things like that. I think that that is something that was really powerful and it was really exciting, because that's obviously what we want a reader to experience of the book. But for us to have that experience even during the editing process was wild.
Speaker 3:Yeah, there were so many points in the book that it was often like just little things across essays. And then there are some essays that entirely you just read and you know, like Anna Waitley and Kate Gordon's piece on imposter syndrome, I did go, wow, that is exactly how my brain goes underneath the surface of a conversation. I've never seen it set out quite so viscerally, like I felt it. And then there are other bits, like in Amanda's essay, where it allows kinship, the one with the fragmented voices, um, the idea of I mean, this is such a simple thing but it she just beautifully encapsulated that experience of lying awake, um, rehashing conversations. Um, in fact, I think um, les murray, the australian poet who was autistic, is one of the people whose voices is in there and I believe that that was like les saying that somewhere and then amanda echoing that. So it felt like it was this triple echo, you know um also caitlin's piece, um, that I just talked about with that.
Speaker 3:Um, that meeting with the speech pathologist and the pathologist telling you know being quite patronizing about how you know they did conversation wrong. That really. Um, when my son was diagnosed, I just remember being in some specialist conversations that I just wished I could protect him from where. You know. It was that kind of like you need to teach him how to be normal and I didn't want to do that, so that really kind of struck me from that perspective. And then there were other pieces that made me think about, like Nisha Dolan's piece about autistic writing and what autistic writing is, which course is like conversations that Clareman and I have now been having for like two years across working on this, but what is it?
Speaker 3:Yeah, it was a great kind of like next step in that conversation. Like Nisha talks about how they don't, how she doesn't like show, show don't tell. As an autistic writer it's like often it is in the telling, in the voice in your head. And I'm actually a big fan of Nisha's first novel, exciting Times, which for me, like it just really resonated with me because it's got so much of that, you know, that voice inside your head that's having this entire world going on, that nobody's you know aware of, and just analysing everything. And you know Nisha says something about that, that analysing. That is autistic feeling sometimes and I was like yeah that's right.
Speaker 3:So I love that and Danny Stewart's piece on autism and time. I'd never thought about my relationship with time as particularly autistic, apart from in the obvious executive functioning way, you know, like if I know that I have to go to a meeting in half an hour, I might set a half hour alarm for myself because I just I don't trust myself to keep an eye on it. But Danny's essay also talks about it in a much larger sense and I love this is one of the things where Clem was like we should have something about autistic people in time because that's a thing, and I was like oh really Okay.
Speaker 3:And then when I read the essay I was like, oh, I get it now on this deeper level, especially that idea of that autistic people are living in, often living in the past, present and future all at once and just toggling between them constantly. Because I am always doing that and have always been told off for that, like my mum. Why?
Speaker 3:don't you live in the present. Why are you thinking about this? And it's like, oh, it was actually just so beautiful and freeing to think that just is who I am. I'm going to let go of trying to fix that. It's never going to happen.
Speaker 1:So sorry, that's um so much to identify with, is the answer but like it is, it's astonishing, and I found it myself as I was reading through. And and you say Lucyoses, and for me I always thought. I was going to turn into a wolf at some point, so it may yet happen.
Speaker 2:You know, I'm still hoping I might still turn into a mermaid.
Speaker 1:But there were so many points in the book where I was kind of like, oh, like I was relating to them and then suddenly, oh, I'm crying now. Okay, let's stop and think like, oh, I'm crying now. Well, okay, let's stop and think about why I'm crying. And I think it was because, like, there were so many things that I had just never seen represented before and that's so important, I think. And did you have any ideas on sort of? Are we thinking about what the importance of that representation would be for readers?
Speaker 2:yeah totally and and and a big part of it too, obviously, is the diversity you know from a um in terms of expanding, because I think you know Caitlin wrote a really interesting essay about, amongst other books, my book and and the kind of emerging sort of new monolithic, autistic voice, being this kind of middle-aged, you know, pretty, pretty middle class, white, usually a woman, you know.
Speaker 2:I mean at the time my book was published I was still kind of trying to be one and now I, now I understand um, so, so I was like, well, but yeah, so part of it was trying to look for that diversity of experiences, um, in terms of, yeah, people who are, you know, racialized, like people whose whose backgrounds are really not what we get to see a lot of in in the, I guess, media representations of autism, and obviously we're limited by who who sent their work in. You know, there's, there's so many more experiences that we didn't get to include just by virtue of them. Um, you know, not having ended up on our desks, but that was, that was was a really big one for me because I sort of thought, you know, having the privilege of being someone who, you know, in Australia at least, had a fairly high profile book about autism, you, know, I have a.
Speaker 2:PhD now. Okay, well, I've got this platform. Like, what do I do with it? I don't want to write another book about myself. Do with it. I don't want to write another book about myself, like you know. But can we? Can we kind of leverage that to to kind of include more people? And I think that that is something that I'm really proud of with the book.
Speaker 3:Yeah, same, and it was really great, I think because Clem, like I, was quite immersed in the writing community as an autistic person, having like that's just like practically the only thing I'd do to read and write um so I had some good people who I knew I wanted to approach for that. But Clem is much more immersed in the autism community and so I had this great diversity of contacts there and I feel feel like that really helped with us getting a diversity of voices in there too.
Speaker 1:Were you kind of thinking about your readers as you were putting it together and did you kind of have hopes of what autistic readers would get from it and non-autistic readers would get from it, or was there kind of a difference between the two?
Speaker 2:Yes, I think one of the things that was sort of interesting was, yeah, juggling the extent to which we were writing, or sort of writing or editing, to the autistic reader versus the non-autistic reader, because in some ways, autistic people tend to read almost everything about autism. Yes, there's sort of there's kind of a built-in audience there in a way, in part because there is such a kind of dearth of decent representation. So anything that is, you know, even kind of remotely representative obviously people flock to. But I think it was interesting in terms of the non-autistic reader because, like I was saying earlier, there is a bit more understanding now and I think in the last five or so years, you know, there have been better representations of autism in screen media.
Speaker 2:Again, you know they're still largely pretty white, but definitely in terms of like gender, you know, things like Geek Girl or the Quinny character on Heartbreak Highlife. I think they have been really useful in expanding people's understanding of how autism can manifest and kind of, I think, expanding there was a. There was a kind of a brief period around the kind of early 2010s where, you know, there was this emerging understanding of the fact that autism can look different in girls and women, and then there was this dangerous time where it sort of became very binary and it was like okay, there's boy autism and girl autism, and the reality is I know plenty of men who have the so-called you know, female profile and vice versa.
Speaker 2:And then obviously there are, you know, non-binary people and trans people and blah, blah, blah. So I think that things have improved enough that we felt like we didn't have to do so much hand-holding for the non-autistic reader and, realistically, it's not a book that's just going to drop out of the sky into a non-autistic person's hand like there's a.
Speaker 2:There's going to be a reason they're looking to read it, which is either they're just interested in it, but maybe they know someone autistic, you know, maybe someone in their family is autistic, maybe they wonder about themselves, um, so yeah, I think, you know, like Jo said earlier, we were able to do a bit of the heavy lifting with our introductions, to kind of lay down some basic ideas, that then you know that the writers could sort of feel like they didn't have to do that um explaining in a way that you know, maybe five or ten years ago you would have really had to kind of scaffold into every essay yeah, and I think we had conversations quite a lot like at different stages in the book's production, um, thinking about exactly that balance didn't we claim of?
Speaker 3:yeah what, what of making it the best book it could be for the autistic reader and being as true as possible to the autistic writer's experience as well, but also making it accessible to non-autistic readers who you know, that that discoverability kind of element, um, and there's a real tricky balance to that, I think. But we tried to not, yeah, we tried to make sure it was always going to be true to the experience of the autistic reader and writer first, I think.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think part of that broader appeal also was leaning on the literary value of the book. So that it's not just a series of you know Wikipedia entries about autism. It's their essays that have value as literary works, and I think that was something that we really were very keen to kind of reiterate across the process, because I think in that way, in an ideal world, you know, then that does broaden the audience because it's not just a book of non-fiction in inverted commas I mean it is but it has a kind of literary value to it that is working on a number of levels, I think.
Speaker 2:Like it's just good writing, you know it's a good book, but it's also expanding people's understanding of you know the autistic canon I guess, um, and that idea of circling back to what we were saying earlier. You know autistic communications styles, like just to circle around, which is something that autistic people love to do. But yeah, I think that that the kind of literary quality of it to you know literary non-fic I guess was was a really important one, because that then we thought that does expand that out to people who are just interested in reading literary non-fiction. You know it's sort of almost an additional audience.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, and it was. I mean, we got a grant for it to pay the contributors from Creative Australia, which is, you know, like our literary arts board, and from that it was. You know, part of the application in the first place was that they were going to be high quality pieces of writing and we'd submitted a list of some of the writers who we were going to include. So, yeah, it was kind of nice to have that as a touchstone to like keep going. Okay. Well, this is what we'd planned.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, and it's beautiful. It really is and I think it feels like you trust your reader. Wherever the reader is coming from, I think you trust them to do some work and and bring their own sort of perspective to whatever it is that they're going to be reading, which I think is beautiful as well and then my very last question for you, which sometimes the hardest question if you could go back and give your younger self a piece of advice, and what piece of advice would you give?
Speaker 2:oh my god, um, that's a tough one.
Speaker 2:I feel like I would take this book and actually it's funny how, you know, I mean, and there's one piece which is explicitly about time traveling, um Kai Ash's piece about going back in time to give his younger self some advice, but like, I think, yeah, I think that's that is a bit of a thread through the book of the kind of what I know now versus what I understood about myself as a young person, which is true even for the people who did have official you know, in inverted commas autistic knowledge.
Speaker 2:You know, some of the people who we commissioned and who applied, you know, were diagnosed as kids.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think it's really interesting that even their experience, because often I thought I don't know about you, jo, but as someone who was diagnosed later in life, there is that sort of mourning and you feel like you missed out on understanding yourself. But so it was actually really affirming, in a way bittersweet, to then also read that even the people who knew still struggled, you know, it was just a different kind of struggle. So I think I think that was something really powerful in reading a lot of the essays to kind of go, actually it might not have been that different, you know, even if I had, yeah, like it would have been maybe good in some ways and and presented different problems and and I guess that was something I looked at in my book it's like, well, yeah, it would have been good to know at eight, but what would I have been then stepping into in the 80s like it wouldn't have been, would have been not neuro affirming, you know unless I was really lucky.
Speaker 2:That's such a good point for him. Yeah, it's like we have this kind of coulda, woulda, shoulda. You know wouldn't have been great, um, but I think to read some people's experience in this book and go, okay, well, actually it was quite hard for them. Even with that self-knowledge and that sense of autistic pride, is a very hard one.
Speaker 3:Because I think.
Speaker 2:Often I look at younger people and I go, wow, they seem so, you know, assured in their autistic identity, in a way that I feel like I'm still kind of grasping towards.
Speaker 3:I always think you're so assured in it? So, there you go it's better than it was it's definitely look, it's all.
Speaker 2:I think it's a real process and I think you know, um, I think this book actually has been a really nice stage in that understanding of of myself as well.
Speaker 3:So I sort of feel like I've it's been writing the whole way because, you know, I wouldn't have been diagnosed if I hadn't been working on a script with an autistic character that then led me to, you know, stare into the mirror a bit and then, through writing my book and my PhD and then working with Joel on this, I think they've kind of added more complexities to that sense of self-knowledge yeah, I, I think, okay, I'm going to say that I agree, like I, I agree with what Clem said, but I'm going to give you a really basic answer which is less intelligent, which is just my like the dumb self that's like when I was growing up I masked really heavily in the sense of trying to be like the other girls at school and I I had a close group of friends I now realize were all neurodivergent and what happened is that and I was really good at school, I was like a nerd at school and you know my mum's an English teacher and, um, when I was in like year nine, my friend, one of my friends, was like we're going to be popular now and.
Speaker 3:I think which you know, obviously never happened, but I think she was better than me.
Speaker 2:I think she was more.
Speaker 3:ADHD and not very autistic, but it kind of my flicking a switch was going, I'm going to okay, so I'm a nerd and people don't like me or you know, and so I'm now going to act up, I'm going to do badly at school and I just wish that I hadn't done that, because you know I don't have a degree.
Speaker 2:I'm like Clem, who has a PhD, but I did come very late to it. I have there's asterisks on that. I did drop out of uni three times, so I you know I don't actually have a bachelor's degree. So I sort of yeah, I got my master's thinking that the vaudeville hook was going to drag me off the stage as soon as they knew I wasn't actually a post-grad, do you?
Speaker 3:know my job? I, yeah. So I think that maybe if I had known what was going on for me, like if I'd known more about myself, then maybe I would have known not to flick that switch so hard, you know, and maybe I would have done it. To flick that switch so hard, you know, and maybe I would have done it, isn't it so?
Speaker 2:hard. My version of that was my 20s, you know. I just was like I sort of observed. I always describe it as like there's that scene in ET where ET is in the in the bedroom and he's he's watching the kids be mean to each other and it has this look of like oh, you know, this is how it is on earth. And I think that was me. I would you know. I don't regret it in a sense because it ended up. You know I ended up where I am now.
Speaker 2:But I was a music journalist and so I sort of observed that to be a music journalist you had to be a huge bitch, very similar to Caitlin Moran's story actually, you know, like the how to build a girl. I really responded to because I felt very seen by that and.
Speaker 2:I. So, yeah, I agree, jo, I think I that's. That is the one kind of I wonder kind of thing for me is is would would that masking have been so, um, yeah, so different from who? I think I actually. Yeah, it's like I've come to understand about myself, is that? Actually I'm quite a softy, you know. I mean, I like to be funny, but I don't think I am naturally a mean person and it was a. I do kind of look back in a way and it feels a bit bittersweet that I spent so long trying to be that because I thought that was what you had to do, yeah, so yeah, I think.
Speaker 2:I think, if we can just get two copies of someone like me, put them in a time machine thanks so much for listening to the podcast.
Speaker 1:This is a conversation-based interview designed to stimulate thinking and hopefully support the development of practice. It's not intended to be medical or psychological advice. The views expressed in these chats may not always be the view of Middletown Centre. If you'd like to know more about Middletown, you can find us on X at Autism Centre and Facebook and Instagram at Middletown Centre for Autism. Go easy until next time.