The Autists: women on the spectrum

School is an artificial environment in which society has decided that children should be able to function. It’s loud, crowded, and unpredictable, and students with a neuropsychiatric diagnosis are often bullied. Refusing to go doesn’t appear all that strange. Why would anyone want to be part of such a setting?

Some doubt the power of fiction to touch us to the core and influence our feelings and behaviours. They have never seen an autistic girl watch the same episode of a tween show on repeat, memorising each line so she can speak to her friends in the schoolyard.

One can be separate from the collective yet a part of the world. For some people, standing on the sidelines is enough. Some of us are happier watching.

Among these traits: not enjoying talk about feelings and relationships, preferring to sit alone in one’s room and immerse oneself in one’s own interests, having a hard time grasping subtext, and not being able to sugar-coat one’s words.

Yet the autistic woman is not masking with the intention of being deceitful. Her true self is invisible even to her own person. She is masking to fit in, and doing so unconsciously. Often, she doesn’t even understand that she has been camouflaging herself until she gets her diagnosis. Before that, she thinks her struggle is everyone else’s, too. At

The rigid criteria that are used in the name of rational organisation assume that all employees are the same. And the more you assume that all people are the same — and thus interchangeable — the worse the conditions become for the autists, who are different from the majority.

I remember the doctor who said that on a suicidal-ideation scale from one to ten, I was a two — and I remember that a brief disappointment ran through me. He was right, but I wished he had assessed me as just a little more suicidal.

A computer might be amazing at doing calculations, says Jonna Bornemark, but it has no judgement. Yet the capacity for judgement exists in every human being. It’s a hidden bank of knowledge that we have forgotten how to tap into. We have instead come to equate judgement with subjective opinion, which may vary from individual to individual.

In her books, Weil describes the autist’s paradox: at the same time both longing for and shunning social life.

As a woman, I have come to understand that I’m expected to speak in code. That is what most people do. For this reason, I’m often interpreted as speaking with a subtext, even when there is none.