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.

In light of this development, it’s easy to see why people who are different need their diagnoses. It’s their only hope of being listened to. In a top-down system, that slip of paper turns into a tool for survival. With a diagnosis in black and white, adaptations might be made to meet your needs. Without it, you don’t stand a chance.

Over the years, I began to see a pattern: I asked too much of my friends morally and was terribly disappointed when I realised that they weren’t willing to sacrifice as much for me as I for them.

For me, cultural consumption was never an escape from reality. It was a way of getting closer to reality, of better understanding it, conquering it.

Parents of autistic girls who keep it together at school speak of difficulties simply getting school representatives to believe in the diagnosis. The teachers don’t see the girls breaking down at home after the end of the school day.

Because I take in every sound, including conversations, I also remember much of what is said. But neurotypical people appear to be insensitive to repetition. They love to talk about the same thing several times and come to the same conclusion over and over again. In contrast, I become impatient; I feel that what is being said has already been dealt

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.

To Weil, the sacred, the basis of human worth, the impersonal, is the human ability to suffer when experiencing bodily or spiritual harm. What remains is the trust of a child, the childlike core deep in every human heart that expects to be treated well, and thus protests when someone hurts it. That trust, that expectation of goodness, that part of

What others do automatically, the autist must do intellectually. This can make it harder to draw conclusions about other people’s intentions. But a person who interprets communication literally and fails to recognise hidden meanings also tends to be honest, with a strong sense of justice.