Take Me As I Am

You called me stupid.

Maybe not you. Somebody did - a teacher, a manager, a boy in a playground - and eventually me, about myself, in my own voice, which is the version that stuck. And I believed it. Not in a wounded way. I believed it the way anyone believes a conclusion the evidence supports, and for fifty years the evidence only ever pointed one direction.

In midlife I found out the evidence wasn’t wrong. Just the way I read it was wrong.

Yes, I’m autistic.

That means I don’t think like you. My way of thinking is obvious to me. Yours looks strange. So I called you stupid - not because I believed it, but because you had called me stupid first, and that just didn’t make sense.

Because from where I sat, you were the one not seeing it. You stopped at the first step. You did not follow the thing through - what this does to that, and what that then leads to, and where it all ends up two moves later. I could see the end of it from the beginning. But I could not understand why you couldn’t, and I couldn’t understand why you weren’t interested in looking. And yet, I was called the stupid one.

There is a name for this now. Damian Milton called it the double empathy problem: the breakdown between autistic and non-autistic people is mutual. Two groups failing to read each other, not one group failing to read the other. ¹ Crompton and colleagues showed it experimentally - information passes between autistic people as effectively as it passes between non-autistic people, and only degrades when you mix the two groups. ²

Read that again, because it is the argument in one sentence. The failure is in both directions, every time.

But only one of us ever got told he was the failure. That was me. And because I was the only one being told, I believed it - when nobody is saying it back the other way, the evidence looks conclusive.

Yes, I’m autistic.

That means the concepts you absorbed from other people, the assumptions you never had to examine, the things you simply know about how a room works - those are not mine. You cannot really know how I think, what drives it, which patterns my mind runs, or where they land. Sometimes that’s in the same place as yours. Often somewhere else entirely.

But here is the part you don’t see. I cannot think like you. My brain is not shaped the way yours is. You can’t teach me to be you - not because I can’t act. I can act. I am probably better at it than you are, because I have done it every day - every minute - of my life. It’s that the performance never becomes me. It stays a costume, a mask. And it always costs me more than it would cost you.

Yes, I’m autistic.

And that, on its own, does not matter. I can live. You can live. We can be in the same room.

It only becomes a problem when you set about reshaping me into whatever you have decided I should be. Because at that moment it stopped being about me. It became about you.

What I am, and what I am not

The word “autistic” does not mean to you what it means to me. I can show you that in about thirty seconds.

Open an image search for “autistic person” and look honestly at what comes back. ³

Most of it is children. Among the faces that are grown adults, a large share belong to people who are not autistic at all - most visibly, people with Down syndrome, whose faces carry a marker a search engine can actually find.

But the photographs are not the part that should trouble you. Look above them, at the buttons the search offers you to narrow the results. When I ran it, they included Kid. Boy. Cute. Face. Stare. Mild. Just below, among the suggested searches, sat autism face.

Those buttons are not editorial. They are built from what people actually type. So they are about as direct a record as you will find of the question the public brings to this subject, and the question is what does it look like?

There is no answer. Autism has no appearance. You cannot look at a person and see it - not at me, not at anyone. There is a small research literature that has measured subtle differences in facial shape across groups of autistic children, using instruments and group averages, and even read at its most generous it says nothing at all about whether a human being can look at a face and know. ⁴ Nobody can. There is nothing there to see.

So the search does what any system does when a confident user asks it an unanswerable question. It supplies the nearest available answer. It gives you a face, and the face belongs to somebody else.

Be careful with the next part, because the obvious reading is the wrong one. My objection is not that I have been grouped with people I would rather not be grouped with. Those are people. I have no complaint about their company, and anyone who reads this as don’t confuse me with them has taken precisely the wrong thing from it. Two separate wrongs are happening in that grid of pictures. Their condition is being used as stock photography for someone else’s. And mine is being handed a face it does not have.

That borrowed face is a large part of why you do not recognise me. You are carrying a picture. I do not match it. So when I tell you the word autistic applies to me, you hear a claim rather than a fact - because you can see perfectly well that I am not what you were shown.

Then there are the symbols - a puzzle piece, an infinity sign. For decades the word has been attached to the puzzle piece - the missing fragment, the thing incomplete. Gernsbacher and colleagues tested whether that imagery carries the meaning its defenders insist it doesn’t, and found that it does: puzzle-piece imagery evoked incompleteness, imperfection, oddity. ⁵ It was never neutral. People just stopped noticing.

And when researchers ask people to go and find an image that represents autism, the gap shows up directly. Atherton and colleagues did exactly that with 163 adults, and autistic participants were far more likely than non-autistic ones to choose images of isolation, of emotional difficulty, and of being misunderstood. ⁶ Asked to picture the same word, we do not picture the same thing. We picture what it is like. You picture what it looks like.

Then there is television. You have met Rain Man and you have met Sheldon Cooper, and between them they have taught you that autistic people are either savants or comic obsessives. Nordahl-Hansen and colleagues went through screen portrayals against the diagnostic criteria and found what anyone living this already knew: the characters are not representative, they cluster around a narrow and unusual presentation, and they are most people’s only sustained exposure to the subject. ⁷ The authors of that work are careful to note the visibility has real value. ⁸ So am I. But you did not learn about autism. You learned a character, and you have been checking real people against it ever since.

And then there is the loudest confusion of all, the one that does the most damage: the assumption that autism means an intellectual disability.

It does not. Nothing in the diagnostic criteria for autism uses intelligence as a marker. Intellectual disability is recorded alongside autism rather than as part of it - as a specifier in the DSM, ⁹ and as a subdivision in the ICD ¹⁰ - and the only reason either manual has to say so separately is that the two vary independently. The numbers make this concrete. In the most recent large surveillance data, among eight-year-olds identified as autistic who had cognitive testing, 37.9% had an intellectual disability, 23.5% were in the borderline range, and 38.6% tested in the average range or above. ¹¹

So when someone tells you about “severe autism” and describes a person who cannot speak, cannot live alone, and cannot understand their own care - they may well be describing a real person with real and profound needs. What they are not doing is describing autism. They are describing autism and something else, run together, and then handing you the pair as though it were the definition. The Lancet Commission that proposed “profound autism” as an administrative category was explicit that it was doing so to direct services toward people whose needs are being missed - not to redefine what autism is. ¹² The term escaped that intention within a year.

I need you to hold both halves of this. Conflating autism with intellectual disability erases me. It also insults every autistic person who does have one, by treating their support needs as a synonym for their neurology rather than as needs in their own right, deserving their own answer. Labeling their condition as another word because it’s easier to digest, and carries less stigma, less understanding.

While we are here: autism rarely arrives alone. Around 38.5% of autistic people also have ADHD, and roughly 40% will meet the criteria at some point in their lives. ¹³

And about half of us - 49.93%, against 4.89% of everyone else - have alexithymia. ¹⁴

I have to stop on that one, because it is the fact that reorganised my understanding of my own life.

I don’t feel like you either

Alexithymia means difficulty identifying and describing your own emotions. Not an absence of them. The feeling is there, at full volume, doing everything a feeling does to a body. What is missing is the label, and the route from the body to the word.

Geoffrey Bird and Richard Cook put forward the argument that changed the field: many of the emotional difficulties routinely attributed to autism are not tracking autism at all. They are tracking alexithymia, which is common in autistic people and also occurs in people who are not autistic. ¹⁵ Autistic people without alexithymia do not show the pattern. It was never the autism.

Ponder what that means in practice.

You ask me how I feel and I say fine, and you hear evasion, or coldness, or a wall. It is neither. I am running a query against a system that does not return an answer in the format you asked for. I might know three hours later. I might know on Thursday. I might know it as a headache and never convert it into a word at all.

You tell me something terrible has happened and my face does nothing - or I make a joke - and you draw a conclusion about my character. Then two days later I am unable to work, and you draw a second conclusion, about drama.

You ask me if I love you and I say yes. I am not lying to you. But I am not reading a feeling off a dial either - I am giving you the answer that belongs in that slot, the one I was taught goes there, and the definition I was taught has never made much sense to me and I don’t believe in it.

Ask me something else and you will get a real answer. Do I trust you? That one I can reach, and it is a far heavier question than the one you asked. Do I trust you enough to stop performing in front of you. Do I trust you enough to be the actual thing rather than the version I think others want me to be. Do I trust that what I let you see today will not be produced as evidence, as weapon, as your justification the next time we disagree.

And when I touch you - constantly, for no reason, past the point where you find it reasonable - because somewhere underneath it I cannot properly separate close from one.

That is the readout. Not the sentence you asked for.

Which is why the ending, when it comes, is silent. I do not fall out of anything. The mask goes back on, and I stop reaching across the gap, and the touching stops - and by every measure that actually applies to me, the thing you call love has already gone.

You will not notice. You are still listening for the words you know, and the words have always the easy part, for you.

So - it’s not only that I don’t think like you. I don’t feel like you. Or more precisely: I very likely feel it as much as you do and cannot get to it, cannot name it, cannot produce it on demand in the shape the moment requires. And for most of my life I did not know this, which means that every time you read my out of sync response as not caring, I had no defence - because I had checked, and I could not find the caring either, and I concluded the same thing you did.

That is worth saying plainly. The most damaging judgement was never yours. It was the one I made about myself, using your evidence.

What you call my personality

Here is what you did with all of that, and it is the thing I would most like undone.

You watched me, and you built a personality out of what you saw. Difficult. Cold. Intense. Arrogant. Too sensitive. Hard work.

None of those is a personality. Each one is something my brain does naturally - more so under load, seen from outside and given a moral name.

Take the one that cost me the most.

When I get angry - or frightened, or overwhelmed - you will see nothing for a long time. Nothing at all. And then there is a point, and I go from nothing to everything in a second, and afterwards you will tell me it came out of nowhere and was wildly out of proportion.

It did not come out of nowhere. You were not shown the middle, because I was not shown it either.

That is the alexithymia again, doing its work at the worst possible moment. The thing you use to manage your own temper - noticing it rising, and acting early - depends on being able to read the gauge. I cannot read the gauge. I get the reading at the end, when the needle is already against the pin, and by then it is not information. It is an event.

Underneath that sits something better documented than my say-so. Emotion regulation is one of the most consistently reported difficulties in autism, and researchers argue it accounts for a great deal of what gets recorded instead as behaviour problems. ¹⁶ The related executive-function differences are broad rather than specific, on the pooled evidence. ¹⁷ And they sit in exactly the part of the mind that would let a person catch a state early and change course. Autistic young people describing meltdown in their own words describe this same shape: a build-up they could not report while it was happening, then a loss of control they experienced as involuntary. ¹⁸

So, no. I do not need anger management.

I want to be precise about why, because it is not stubbornness and it is not a slight on the treatment. Anger management done properly is cognitive-behavioural therapy, and it works - the meta-analytic evidence is respectable. ¹⁹ But look at what it is made of. You learn to notice the early signs of your arousal. You learn to find the thought that is driving the anger and to restructure it. You learn to apply a calming technique in the window between the trigger and the peak. ²⁰

Three components, and all three assume something I do not have. The first assumes I can see it coming. The second assumes there is a distorted thought at the centre of it - and often there is no thought at all, only eleven hours of accumulated noise, light, interruption and other people. The third assumes a window, and the window is precisely what is missing.

It is a good treatment aimed at a mechanism I do not run. Sending me to it is not help; it is a category error. And when it fails - it does fail - the failure gets filed as more evidence about my character. He didn’t even try.

And that goes for a lot of the mental health treatments you casually hear about - they’re built on people not like me.

Here is another example. It is quieter - and it does more damage.

I need to know what is going to happen. Not prefer - need. Plans made in advance. The same route. The same order. Warning before a change. For me, that is predictability.

You have a word for that too, and the word is controlling.

I understand how it looks. From outside it is a man imposing his requirements on everyone else, and there is no obvious reason the table has to be booked on Tuesday when it could just as easily be settled on the night. So the routine reads as rigidity, the rigidity reads as selfishness, and we are discussing my character again.

What is actually happening is that uncertainty costs me something it does not cost you. A good deal of the anxiety research in autism is now built around exactly this - intolerance of uncertainty sitting underneath, rather than turning up as an incidental feature. ²¹ The routine is not a preference I am inflicting on the room. It is the only lever I have for lowering a load you cannot see me carrying.

Which means that when you break the plan casually - and to you it is casual, because for you it costs nothing - you are not being spontaneous at me. You are removing the one thing holding my day together, and then reading what happens next as proof that I am difficult about small things.

They were not small things. They were the scaffolding that holds my mind stable.

And there is a far end to this that nobody ever follows, so let me follow it for you.

When you tell me I am controlling, what you are asking is that I back off. Stop organising it. Stop needing it a particular way. It is not mine to manage.

I can do that - and I do. But I need you to understand the only route I have to doing it.

The planning is not something I add on top of caring about you. It is what caring about you looks like from in here. If something matters to me, I run it forward - what this does to that, where that ends up, what happens if it does not hold. That is not a habit sitting on top of the caring. It is the same process. I cannot run one without the other.

So when you ask me to stop planning - stop wanting to know - there is exactly one way to comply. I have to stop caring about it.

I do not have a dial. There is no setting at forty per cent, no version of me that is pleasantly interested and lightly involved. It is on, or it is off.

So think about what is actually being requested. Not about a booking, or a holiday, or whose weekend it is.

What does it look like when I set it to zero about a person?

I could keep going, and you could fill in the rest yourself. Needing to be alone reads as rejection. Answering two days late reads as indifference. Saying the true thing plainly reads as arrogance. Every time, the same move is made: something my nervous system is doing gets converted into something my character is doing - and once it is a character trait, it is fair to resent.

That is the part I want you to stop on. Every one of those readings arrives with a moral word already attached. Difficult. Selfish. Cold. Rude. Controlling. Not one of them is neutral. You did not simply misread the mechanism. You convicted me of it.

And a conviction is useful. That is the part that took me longest to say out loud.

If the problem is my nervous system, you have work to do. You would have to learn something, adjust something, hold two ways of being in the same room. But if the problem is my character, you are released. Nobody is required to accommodate a character flaw. You can shorten the conversation, stop extending the invitation, let the whole thing quietly lapse - and do all of it with a clean conscience, because you are not excluding a disabled man. You are declining to indulge a difficult one.

That is what the moral word is really for. It is not a description. It is a permission.

And it is a mirror, which is the part I would most like you to look at. A few paragraphs ago I told you I cannot tolerate uncertainty - that it costs me more than it costs you, and that I build routines to keep it down to something I can carry. That is documented. It is part of the diagnosis. You call it controlling.

But you do the same thing. You just do it with people. Deciding in advance what somebody is, and then staying certain about it, spares you the uncertainty of having to find out - and a fixed opinion about a person is a routine like any other. It does the same job. It gets defended just as hard when somebody tries to move it.

Mine gets called controlling. Yours is judgement.

What the performance costs

I have written elsewhere about masking, in detail, and I am not going to run the argument again here. What matters here is the outcome.

I performed. It did not work. Not “worked less well” - the research is blunter than that. When observers rate brief clips of autistic and non-autistic adults, autistic people are rated worse, and the judgements form in seconds. ²² When Belcher and colleagues tested it directly, camouflaging intent did not predict first impressions at all. ²³ The judgment happened before the performance, the effort bought nothing measurable.

Meanwhile the thing that does measurably improve how autistic adults are received is disclosure - being known, and being known by someone who understands what they have been told. ²⁴ I spent half a century doing the precise opposite, at maximum cost, for no return.

Which brings me to the sentence I hear most, and the one I want to answer properly.

You wear your autism like a badge. Get over yourself. Plenty of people are autistic and they don’t go on about it the way you do.

Let’s look at the second half first, because it is true - and you have drawn precisely the wrong conclusion from it.

Those people are not quieter than me because it costs them less. They are quieter because they are still doing what I did for fifty years - running the performance, arranging a life around what you have made clear you want to see, and paying for it where you cannot watch. You are not describing autistic people who have got over it. You are describing autistic people who are still hiding, at their own cost.

And you are holding them up to me as the standard. You are asking me to be more like the ones you cannot see - despite the destruction the incur on themselves.

The cost of being one of those is not metaphorical. Camouflaging shows up in raised cortisol, ²⁵ in exhaustion reported with striking consistency across the literature, ²⁶ and in autistic burnout - the total collapse of capacity that the people who live it describe as having every internal resource exhausted beyond measure. ²⁷

And at the far end of all of that sits something I am not going to soften for you. Suicide risk among autistic people is markedly raised; a systematic review of the evidence from recent years states it plainly. ²⁸ Camouflaging in particular has been linked to it. ²⁹ The researchers who work on this are careful about why, and so am I: the harm tracks the social position, the stigma and the concealment, rather than the neurology itself. ³⁰ It is not being autistic that does this. It is being autistic somewhere nobody knows.

That is what obedience to your conventions actually costs, and it is the reason I will not pay it any more.

So, no. The badge is not a request for pity. I am not asking you to feel sorry for me, and I would not know what to do with it if you did.

It is a correction. You cannot see me, and you cannot see me because you do not know. For most of my life I treated that as a fair excuse - nobody taught you any of this. Nobody taught me either.

I believe that less than I used to. What I have come to think is that not knowing is comfortable, and that the confidence with which this gets waved away is not quite ignorance. It is protection. Because if you knew, you would have to do something with it. You would have to go back through conversations you have already closed the file on. So the not-knowing gets defended, and it gets defended with certainty, and the certainty keeps your life the shape you like it - a life with only good news in it.

I am not going to stay quiet so that your life can keep that shape.

You think I made it up

There is one more thing that gets said, and it is the one I have found hardest to answer calmly, because it does not come from strangers. It comes from inside my own family.

You have invented this. You are putting it on because it suits you.

Consider what that accusation has to get past. I was assessed formally, by more than one professional, over months, against criteria I did not write. Adults being identified in midlife is not a curiosity - it is common enough to have a research literature of its own, and the reasons it happens are documented. ³¹ None of that moved you.

What moved you was that you did not see it. You knew me for decades and never saw it, so it cannot be real - because if it were real, surely you would have noticed.

Look at what you are actually saying.

You are offering, as evidence against the diagnosis, the fact that the concealment worked. That is not the counter-argument you think it is. It is a description of what I spent fifty years doing, and doing well. One of the studies I cited a moment ago was examining precisely that relationship - between how heavily a person camouflages and how late they are identified. ²³ You did not fail to notice something obvious. I was working, continuously and at the cost I have just set out, to make certain you did not notice.

And I want to be fair here, because this next part matters to me more than who wins at this argument.

I do not fault you for not seeing it. I could not see it either. I had the best view available - I was inside it - and I got it wrong for half a century. If I could not work it out from in here, I am not going to hold it against you that you could not work it out from over there.

That is not what I fault you for.

What I fault you for is the accusation itself. Because notice what it is not about. It is not about me, or the evidence, or the assessment, or the disability. It is about you - a claim that your reading of me, formed casually, across years, with no information and no training, should outrank a formal assessment carried out by people who had both.

That is not scepticism. Scepticism asks questions. This arrives with a verdict already written, and the verdict is the one you were holding before, and the reason it has not moved is that moving it would mean accepting that a great deal of what you concluded about me rested on something you could not see.

Or it is something else again, and I have come to think it might be.

Because if I am autistic, then I am disabled. Not as an insult, and not as a bid for sympathy - as a fact with a legal shape almost everywhere in the world. The international convention on the rights of disabled people, ratified by nearly every country there is, does not define disability as something sitting inside a person. It defines it as an impairment meeting the barriers around it. ³²

I did not choose the word disabled. I do not much enjoy it. But I do not get to opt out of it, and neither do you.

What kind of disability is the part that gets missed. Its origins are medical, and it sits in the developmental chapter of the diagnostic manuals. That is not how it presents. It presents socially. The thing I cannot reliably do is communicate with the society I live in.

And you are that society. Not a spectator to it - the part of it standing in front of me right now. So when I say I have a communication disability, I am not describing a flaw sitting inside my nervous system that you get to examine from a safe distance. I am describing the space between us, and you are holding the other end of it. The research I put at the very start of this writ says exactly that: the breakdown runs in both directions. ¹

Which is why personality is the more comfortable word. A personality is mine. A disability is ours.

Lets imagine two disabilities side by side, because I think the comparison is the whole argument.

You would never tell a man in a wheelchair to get himself up the stairs to your front door.

Be careful with that, because it is not a claim that his life is easier than mine, and I am not competing with him. Inaccessibility is relentless and people are ignorant about it every day of the week. The difference I am pointing at is narrower than that, and it is not about which of us has it worse. It is about what can be said out loud.

You would not ever say it. Two reasons. It would not occur to you, because you can see the stairs and you can see the chair and the mismatch is obvious. And even if it did occur to you, you would never say it out loud - because you know precisely what that would cost you. Society would do more than just frown at you.

You would also know what to do instead, without anybody teaching you. You would help him up today. You would build the ramp for next time. Help now, ramp later. Nobody argues about this.

Now do the same for me.

My ramp is not made of concrete, it is not a list of adjustments you can look up somewhere, and it’s not you thinking you understand what autism is because you saw a TV show, or know another autistic person.

It starts with you accepting that you are never going to understand me. Not with effort, not with reading or study, not with time. That is not a defeat and it is not an insult - it is the ground floor, and everything else is built on it. Because once you accept it, the rest follows on its own: if you cannot work me out, then you have to ask.

Ask what I need. Ask what I meant, when what I said lands strangely. Accept that when I say I cannot, then I cannot for my own reasons, not yours. Be patient with the disability - the actual one, the communication one - instead of treating each appearance of it as fresh evidence about my character. And yes, accept that it is a disability.

Meet me half way.

That is the entire ramp. It costs almost nothing. Most of it is just asking.

What I am offered instead is: learn to be different, try harder, be someone else. Said openly, at a table, in front of people, at no cost whatsoever to the person saying it - because for this disability, unlike that one, society will not have your head. It will nod along.

Then there is the last difference, and it is the one I most need you to hold on to.

If there is no ramp today, the man in the chair can come back on Thursday. The building has not changed. The climb is the same climb.

Mine is not. When you shut me out, I do not simply fail to get in that day. It goes on the heap with every other verdict, and that heap is fifty years deep. So I will probably not come back. And if I do, the stairs will be higher than they were - because you raised them, by turning me away the first time.

That is the part nobody accounts for. The stairs are not a fixed height. Every refusal adds a step.

I know what all of this costs a lot to take on board. I have had to do it myself - and it is not a small thing to ask of anybody.

But I am not going to be un-diagnosed so that you can stay right.

The place the mask was supposed to come off

Work took everything I had. There is no discretion at work; the performance is the condition of the income. So I ran it all day, and by the time I got home there was nothing left - and home is where I put on a different one.

Nobody warns you about the home mask. It is worse than the work mask, and for a specific reason: work supplies a role, a script, a defined end to the shift. Home supplies none of that. There is no job description for being a father, a brother, a husband. The audience has known you for decades and would notice any change. And it is the one relationship that was supposed to be the place you did not have to do this.

A performance like that has an expiry date. Mine expired.

I want to be exact about what I am claiming, because this is the point the this argument rests on. A person needs one place where the mask comes off. Not a friendly place. Not a tolerant place. A place where the mask is not required. If they do not have one, the cost never stops accruing, and it will eventually take everything - the career, the marriage, the health, the identity - and sometimes - the person.

I did not have that place.

Neither did my children.

What I did

I did not know I was autistic until I was well into midlife. My children were raised by a man who did not know.

Here is what that meant. My thinking was the only thinking I had ever had access to.

Do not mistake that for not knowing I was different. I knew. I was told constantly - weird, odd, difficult, too much, and more than once, by people who meant it, scary. That is not a small word to hand a child, or an adult, and I carried it a long way.

But being told is not the same as being explained. Nobody ever gave me a reason. No mechanism, no account of what was actually happening, nothing that would let me treat the difference as a difference. I got the verdict, over and over, with the reasoning left out - and a verdict with no reasoning behind it does not teach a child that his brain works differently. It teaches him that he is wrong. So that is what I learned. Not unusual. Wrong.

And I want to name what that repetition is, because I spent decades filing it under my childhood and leaving it there. That was wrong twice over. It was not only childhood, and it did not stop when my childhood did.

The exams I failed as a student, in subjects I knew inside out. The jobs that ended without anyone ever quite explaining why. The relationships that wore through. Every one of those arrived as a fresh instalment of the same verdict - and each one came with better evidence than the last, because by then the evidence was my own record.

That is what makes it cumulative rather than merely repeated. As a child I had to be told. As an adult I did not. I could read a result, or a termination, or a door closing, and supply the finding myself, in my own voice, before anybody else got near it. You cannot walk out of a situation like that. It travels with you, and it is waiting when you arrive.

A single bad event is one thing. This was not an event, and it was not one bad decade. It was the same finding returned over and over across an entire life - first by the people I depended on, then by institutions, and then by me. That pattern has a name. The ICD recognises complex post-traumatic stress disorder as a condition in its own right: the ordinary trauma symptoms, plus three further things that come specifically from repetition and from being unable to get out. Difficulty regulating emotion. A settled belief that you are diminished, defeated, worthless. And relationships that are hard to build and harder to keep. ³³

Read that list of three again. Then read the section before this one again.

Because those are also, precisely, what you have spent years calling my personality.

That is what I did not see coming. The autism accounts for a great deal of it - the gauge I cannot read, the routine I cannot give up, the tunnel I disappear into. But some of what you file under that’s just how he is was never the autism. It is scar tissue. It is what accumulates in a person who was told what he was, over and over, for fifty years, by people who had no idea what they were looking at - and who eventually got good enough at the job to keep telling himself long after they had stopped.

And there is a difference between the two that matters more to me than anything else here. The autism I would not give back. It is not damage and there is nothing in it to repair. The other part was done to me. It did not have to happen, and I will be carrying it for the rest of my life.

I will be honest about the state of the evidence, because it is messier than I would like. Telling autism and complex trauma apart is genuinely difficult - the two are confused in clinic often enough that researchers have had to survey specialists just to reach some agreement on how to distinguish them. ³⁴ What is better established is that autistic people report trauma symptoms following experiences that do not meet the formal definition of a traumatic event at all. ³⁵ Which is exactly what I am describing. A thousand small verdicts do not look like trauma from the outside. Not one of them was ever meant to be the one that did the damage. They were not supposed to have to be survived together.

That childhood left me with one model for what to do when two people don’t think alike, because it was the only one anybody had ever shown me: find the one who is wrong, and correct him.

So when my children did not think the way I did, I did the thing that had been done to me. I tried to correct it. I explained. I re-explained. I broke the logic down further, and further, certain that if I could only get the reasoning small enough it would go in, because the reasoning was obvious.

I was requiring them to arrive at my conclusions by my route, and treating the failure to do so as a fault in them. The same verdict I had been handed, passed on with the reasoning still missing.

I fought the wrong battle for years. I was the victim of this and I was also, without knowing it and without meaning it, the person doing it. Both are true. Neither cancels the other, and I am not going to use the first to soften the second. My only hope is that they know this at 20, instead of at 50, because it keeps piling up, and 30 more years is unbearable.

So yes - add it to the list of things I have been convicted of. I have added it myself. It is the heaviest thing on there, and it is the only one I do not dispute.

I tell you this for one reason only. If you are waiting to be certain before you change how you handle the person in front of you, understand what you are actually waiting for. I got my certainty. It arrived decades late, and what it bought me was a complete and unarguable account of the harm I had already done. Certainty is not protection. It is a record of what you already did.

“Stop that. People are looking.”

I sway. I make strange noises. I write the same sentence over and over again. There are a hundred versions of this and every autistic person has their own set. And every one of us has been told to stop - by a parent, by a spouse, by a teacher, by a colleague who thought they were being kind.

What you have been stopping is not a symptom. Kapp and colleagues interviewed autistic adults about it, and the finding is consistent: stimming is a regulation mechanism. It is how we manage sensory overload, intrusive thought, and emotion - including good emotion. Participants described it as soothing, as a rhythm that lets the rest of the mind coordinate. They also described suppressing it because of how others react, and described being made to feel belittled when told to stop. ³⁶

So the instruction reads, from the inside: stop the thing that is keeping you regulated, because your regulation is embarrassing to me.

Now, you did not think of it that way. When it was first said to the boy I was, the thinking behind it was one of three things - and I know this because I have thought all three myself.

That it was embarrassing. That it was a visible reminder something was wrong. Or - and this is the one that gets said out loud, because it is the one that sounds noble - I have to teach him how to behave, because the world is cruel and I am protecting him.

I want to take that last one seriously, because it is not a stupid argument. The world is cruel about this. You were not wrong about the world.

But look at what the protection actually produced. I did not learn the world is unfair and I will need strategies. I learned there is something wrong with me, the people who love me can see it, and their job is to keep it hidden. You did not equip me against the world’s judgement. You moved it inside, into the one place I could not get away from it, in the voice of the person whose opinion mattered most.

And now I am fifty-four. And I still get told to stop - sometimes not in words, instead with a frown, or a turned back.

Pause here … just a moment. Because this is the part that invalidates that boy’s scolding. I am not a child being prepared for anything. I held jobs for over thirty years. I have raised children of my own. And I am still told to stop - at a table, in a meeting, in a room full of people who have known me for years.

Whatever that is, it is not preparation. There is nothing left to prepare me for. The lesson was delivered, I sat through it for five decades, I can recite it back to you. So what is being asked for now is something simpler and older than protection, and I think it always was: do not do that where I can see it.

And there is a test for whether it was ever really protection, which is uncomfortable but fair.

If the world is the problem - and it is - what have you spent on the world?

Because changing me is cheap. It costs you nothing socially. Whereas saying something at the dinner table when your brother-in-law does his impression, or correcting the friend who says a difficult colleague is “so OCD”, or declining to nod along to the television character everyone finds adorable - that costs. That makes you the awkward one. That puts a little of the exposure onto you.

I am not going to pretend I don’t understand why you choose the cheap option. I chose it too, all my life, and I chose it about myself. I know exactly what it feels like to decide that being ostracised is not survivable, and to arrange your life around not being. So I am not calling you a coward. I am telling you what I learned by doing the same thing: the cost does not disappear when you decline to pay it. It gets transferred. Someone smaller carries it.

There is an entire industry built on that transfer, aimed at children, and for much of its history its measure of success has been a child who no longer looks autistic. ³⁷ It deserves its own essay and I will give it one. It is not what I am asking you for here.

What I am asking for is far smaller than an argument about an industry. When I start swaying, let me.

Why I go quiet, and why I can’t stop

Two things about me look like opposite faults, and they are the same mechanism.

At your dinner party I say almost nothing. Not because I dislike you. I cannot follow it - the topic has moved three times, half of it is reference I don’t hold, and I have no way in. And I cannot acquire a genuine interest in how the weather is, or where you went on your last holiday, or what that sports team did in its last game. That is not me refusing. I have tried. The interest will not come. So I sit back, and I am bored, and you decide I am aloof, anti-social.

Then somebody mentions something I know deeply, and says something incorrect about it. And I correct them. And then I keep going, past every signal you are sending, and you cannot get me to stop. And you decide I am obnoxious, selfish, egotistical.

Two opposite verdicts, from the same evening, about the same man.

Murray, Lesser and Lawson described the underlying pattern as monotropism: attention that pools in a small number of channels at high intensity, rather than spreading thinly across many. ³⁸ That single account explains both behaviours. The channel is either open or it is not. When it is not, I have nothing. When it is, everything else - your body language, the time, the fact that you asked a rhetorical question - is outside the tunnel and I genuinely do not see it.

I am not indulging myself. I am somewhere I can actually function.

And that is the thing I most want you to understand about my interests, because you have been taught to see them as symptoms. Grove and colleagues surveyed autistic adults and found that engaging with special interests was associated with higher subjective wellbeing. ³⁹

Be careful with that finding, because I nearly used it dishonestly. It is an association, and an association does not tell you why. It is consistent with the interests simply being good - a source of wellbeing in their own right, which I do believe they are. It is equally consistent with something the study was not built to look for, and which took me most of my life to notice about myself.

When the channel is open, nothing else gets in. So far I have only shown you one side of that, the parts I miss; your body language, the time, the question you actually asked, all of it outside the tunnel and none of it reaching me. But it runs in both directions.

The self-hatred does not get in either.

I will say that without the padding, because it has had enough padding for one lifetime. There is a voice in me that has been running since I was a child. It says I am stupid. It says I am wrong, and too much, and a burden, and that everything that has gone wrong is the proof. It is on when I wake up. It is on in the car. It is on at three in the morning when I cannot sleep. And it is in my dreams when I can. That is the complex trauma I named earlier, still doing precisely what it was built to do, decades after the people who taught it to me stopped saying it out loud.

In the tunnel, it is not there.

Not managed. Not quieted. Not reframed by anybody. Gone - because there is one channel open, it is already full, and self-hatred needs a channel like everything else does.

So call it coping, if that is the word you want. I am not going to argue, because it is. Both things are true at once - the interest is good in itself, and it is also the only shelter I have ever had. Those were never alternatives, and I am not going to pretend otherwise to make the first one sound purer.

What I will not accept is what comes attached to coping when you say it. That anything holding a person up must be a crutch. That it is a stage on the way to not needing it. That the healthy version of me would want it less.

It is not a stage and it is not a substitute for anything. It is the one place in fifty years where nobody has been telling me what I am, and that includes me.

And you have spent years asking me to do less of it.

I should be straight about the evidence, because I went looking. There is a developing body of work that treats autistic absorption as flow rather than as pathology, written in part by the people who developed monotropism in the first place. ⁴⁰ And the construct it builds on has, among its defining features, the falling away of self-conscious self-evaluation for as long as it lasts. ⁴¹ So the shape of what I am describing is recognised. What I could not find is anyone asking the specific question - whether the tunnel keeps the trauma out, and whether that is part of why we go in. ⁴² One person over fifty years is not a study, and I am not going to dress it up as one.

Which brings me to something I could not have articulated before I understood alexithymia.

Happiness and sadness are not two ends of one candle. You seem to experience them that way - more of one meaning less of the other, a single dial. Mine are not on one dial. Cacioppo and Berntson made the general case decades ago: positive and negative affect are separable systems, not opposite ends of a single dimension. ⁴³ For me the separation is not subtle. I can be in genuine, complete joy inside my subject while every other part of my life is unresolved, and the joy is not denial and it does not fix anything. It is simply running somewhere else entirely.

So when you see me deep in something and you say at least you seem happy - I am. Fully. And it is not evidence that everything is fine. And when you take the interest away, or make me feel childish for it, or schedule over it because it is “just a hobby,” you have not removed a distraction. You have switched that farkakte voice back on.

Why people leave

I want to follow this to the end, because the end is where people stop paying attention. ⁴⁴

A child read the way I have just described has nowhere to go. They are dependent on the same people doing the misreading. So they adapt. They comply. They work out which version of themselves causes the least trouble and they run that one - and the family, watching the trouble stop, concludes the problem is solved.

It is not solved. It has been hidden - and it’s the material that builds that mask.

Then the child grows up, and adulthood hands them the one thing they never had as a child: the ability to leave.

Estrangement between parents and adult children is more common than most families imagine, and the research is clear that it is rarely one event. ⁴⁵ It is an accumulation. I have not found anyone who has measured how much of it involves autism that nobody recognised (or any other neurodiverse condition), and I looked - so I am not going to imply a number I cannot supply. ⁴⁶

But the mechanism is documented, and it is mutual. When researchers interviewed autistic people and their family members about the same relationship, both sides were getting the other wrong: family members underestimated how much their autistic relative understood, and overestimated how self-centred they were. ⁴⁷ One relationship, two irreconcilable accounts, and neither party aware that a translation was required.

Run that for decades and you do not need anybody to be cruel to produce a rupture. You need only a family in which one person’s distress was reliably filed as bad character - and in which every later attempt to explain it was filed as excuse-making.

That is the part I would ask you to sit with, if you sit with nothing else. From the one side, the distance looks like the injury. From the other side, the distance is very often the first thing that stopped the injuries.

I am not going to tell you where my own family sits on any of this, because it is not only my story to tell. I have already told you what I did. I do not get to decide what it cost.

None of this is new

In 1993 a man named Jim Sinclair wrote to the parents of autistic children and told them something plain. They had not lost a child to autism. They had lost the child they had imagined, and the actual one was standing in front of them, still waiting to be met. ⁴⁸

That was thirty-three years ago.

I have just spent several thousand words saying a version of the same thing, and I expect I will have to say it again, and that somebody younger than me will have to say it after that. That is not a complaint about him. It is a measurement of how little moves.

So I will stop arguing and ask.

Take me as I am

The title is not mine. It belongs to a Christopher Cross song, and what that song is doing is asking rather than arguing - a man requesting absolution instead of judgement, and asking to be accepted in spite of what he has been. ⁴⁹

So let me ask in my own words.

I have been a fool. Not in the way you think, and not only in the ways I could not help. I was a fool who spent half a century perfecting a performance that bought nothing, and who then required a version of that same performance from his own children, and called it love, because he did not know there was another way to do it. I do not get to hand that back. It happened and they were there.

I am not asking to be absolved of it. I am asking not to be held to the fire for the part that was never a choice - for the shape of my brain, for the wrong reaction at the wrong moment, for the swaying, for the silence at your table and the flood at mine.

And I am asking you to notice that this is not a large request.

I have not asked you to understand me. You can’t, and I have stopped requiring it. I have not asked you to think like me, or to feel like me, or to become fluent in something you have no reason to learn. I have not asked you to fix anything, because there is nothing here to fix.

I have asked one thing. Stop judging me by the lens you see yourself through.

Take me as I am. I will never think the way you think. I may not even feel the way you feel. You will not get inside it, and you don’t need to. Just accept that I am not you.

That is all I ask.

⁂

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