We're All a Little Bit on the Spec…" No. Stop. We're Not.

You know that thing people say? That well-meaning, kindly-delivered, absolutely-said-with-good-intentions thing? The one that somehow manages to be both sweet and completely wrong at the same time?

Yeah. We're going there.

This week's episode is about a single sentence. One sentence that keeps coming up since the autism diagnosis. And why - despite the best intentions behind it - it needs to be gently, firmly, lovingly retired.

Buckle up. It's a short one. But it might just change how you respond next time someone tells you about their diagnosis.

The podcast with the unspeakable name. Back again. Apparently. (Much to my surprise) 

Transcript

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Hello and welcome back to the podcast with the unspeakable name. Today's topic myths, lies, and truths about neurodivergence and neurodiversity. In the last episode I talked about ADHD, or rather my campaign to avoid being associated with those four letters that in my head meant lazy, messy, unfocused, try harder, must do better, potential not applied, could achieve so much more if he only just got his shit together. And at the end of that episode I said that in this episode I want to talk about a particular sentence. A sentence that people keep saying near me, or at least aloud around me, anyway, especially since the autism diagnosis. A sentence that is always said kindly, always said compassionately, gently, always said as if it's a helpful thing to say, and that sentence is Well I mean we're all on the spectrum somewhere. No we're not. And that's the bit that makes that kind of conversation quite awkward because when I say I'm autistic and someone says, Oh well we're all on the spectrum somewhere what they're trying to do is to be nice. They're saying, Well, don't worry, you're not that different from me. They're trying to close the gap. It's friendly. It's not intentionally ignorant or rude. But what they accidentally do is just erase the gap completely. And the gap is is the point. Autism is not a collection of cute personality traits. It's not I like books and I don't like parties. It's not I'm a bit socially awkward. It's not I like routines. Those are human traits. Lots of people have those traits. Autism is what happens when a cluster of those traits are turned up to the max so often and so long that they actually shape your entire life. It shapes how how you communicate. It shapes how you experience noise, light, touch, crowds, it shapes how you form friendships, it shapes how you recover from social interaction, your career, your mental health, how tired you are, how safe you feel, how you think about yourself. It shapes everything. So when someone says we're all on the spectrum, what I want to say is you get tired, I get exhausted. You get distracted, I lose whole flipping days. You feel awkward with people sometimes. I have studied human interaction like it's a separate species. You find loud places annoying, I find them incredibly stressful. You have hobbies, I have obsessions. These things are not the same in scale. They're not the same in cost, and they're not the same in consequence. And this is the key point. The difference between a trait and a condition is the level of impairment and impact on the neurodivergent person's life. Everyone feels sad sometimes. That doesn't mean everyone has depression. Everyone gets worried sometimes, that doesn't mean everyone has an anxiety disorder. Everyone forgets things, that doesn't mean they have ADHD. And everyone has a few autistic like traits, that does not mean everyone is on the autistic spectrum. If everyone's on the spectrum, then the spectrum stops existing because it doesn't mean anything at all. And if the spectrum stops meaning anything, then the people who are actually autistic lose the language by which they can explain themselves to themselves and others. And language matters. Because language is how you explain to an employer why you might need written instructions instead of verbal ones. It's how you explain to your partner why you need quiet time after a social event, or why when you get home from work you want to hide in your phone or a game or something, anything other than another human being, even if you love that human being very, very much. It's how you explain to yourself why you have spent forty years thinking you are lazy, broken, rude, intense, too much, too quiet, too odd, too sensitive to something and to something else. The diagnosis for me didn't make me different. I was already different. I had been different my entire life. The diagnosis just gave me the correct instruction manual. And when someone says we're all on the spectrum, what they're really saying is your instruction manual and my instruction manual are just the same, don't worry. But they're not. And that's not a bad thing. Different is not bad. Different just requires understanding. I don't want to be told we're all the same, I want to be understood as different. Because pretending we're all the same doesn't create inclusion, it creates silence. It creates a situation where the people who are struggling the most are told their struggle is just normal life and just get on with it like everybody else. Real inclusion is not saying we're all on the spectrum. Real inclusion is saying I believe you when you tell me your experience of the world is different from mine. What do you need? That's the question. Not oh, we're all about a bit like that, aren't we? What do you need? I don't want to be treated differently, I want to be understood differently. So no. We are not all on the spectrum. But we are all trying to live together in the same world. And some of us are doing that with a different set of wiring, a different set of challenges, and a different set of strengths. And the moment we stop pretending those differences don't exist is the moment we can actually start understanding each other properly. Thanks for listening.