Growing in to Autism

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You can pick it up and try to put it down, but you will find yourself gripped by the narrative style, and will carry it with you everywhere until you are done. As my children grew, I continued to learn about autism but it was a long time before I really processed the fact that females can be autistic. It was even longer before I began to accept that perhaps the many similarities between my own and my sons’ thoughts, behaviours and challenges were due to a shared neurotype rather than just shared genes. Here I was, a person with an abject fear of failure and a strong need for control, who had gone through school with the absolute conviction that anything less than 100% on an exam was tantamount to failure.

We are not alone in our every day struggle against the complexities and multiple facades of a layered world. like not knowing what the rules are for communication, unable to read facial expressions and prosopagnosia or not remembering faces, avoiding eye contact while conversing (making 2 way zoom very difficult), needing recovery time alone after draining social contacts, meltdowns (overt) and shutdowns (covert) when stimulation becomes too great.

I hope that the book helps autistic readers to understand their unique strengths and support needs as an autistic person (recognising that no two autistic people are the same, so there will be parts that resonate and parts that don’t). As she quite carefully notes this the story of one autistic person and not meant to cover the huge diversity of challenges and successes these folk experience. There are a number of signs that are well known to the general population (inability to engage in social chit-chat, obsessive interest in one particular subject or hobby etc.

Sandra Thom-Jones is one of world's leading academic voices in public health, health promotion, and social marketing.My diagnosis gave me the courage to stand up and advocate both for myself as an individual and more broadly for autistic people around me; and slowly, progressively, that gave me the confidence to begin taking my mask off. I was concerned about doing it this way because I didn’t want to pathologise autism, or support a medical model that reduces autistic people to a series of “symptoms”. I wasn’t worried that I would be diagnosed autistic as I had self-identified that way for some time and was comfortable with it: I was worried that I would be diagnosed non-autistic. There are moments where she makes generalisations and sweeping statements about both neurodivergent people and neurotypical people, but for the most part she acknowledges those generalisations.