When I was a teacher in a school for autistic students, it was well-noted that my biggest strength was my ability to build strong teacher-student relationships. My students engaged well in my classes, opened up| Autistic Not Weird
Ever since adolescence, I’ve wanted to spend my life building people. Whether in terms of confidence, intellect, life skills, or all the other ways a person can be built up, I’ve wanted to be the| Autistic Not Weird
One commonality I’ve found among autistic people is that many of us love creating our own universes. The real world often functions without autistic people in mind. To many of us, it seems that the non-autistic population seems to be entirely in control – often, even in control of our world and our futures. So it can help enormously for us to escape into a universe where we choose the rules, we can influence events, and nobody gets to cast […] The post Twenty tips for aspiring writers, ...| Autistic Not Weird
We see them far too often. Videos of an autistic child (or adult) in extreme distress, shared across the internet in the glorious name of “autism awareness”, perhaps even with a divisive or gatekeeping comment such as “this is what real autism looks like”. The motivation, of course, is to display the problems that all too often kept behind closed doors. And whereas the issues do need discussing and addressing, perhaps there’s a better way to do so than uploading […] The post Ten v...| Autistic Not Weird
There’s something falsely positive about the word “perfectionist”, isn’t there? The first time I remember hearing the word, I was being taught how to answer job interview questions. I was told that when the interviewer asks me what my biggest weakness is, I should say “oh, I’m a perfectionist, I can’t leave things alone until I know they’re right”. Because apparently, it’s like answering a question about weaknesses by continuing to show off my strengths. (I never did this,...| Autistic Not Weird
It doesn’t seem quite right, does it? That a month designated for raising public knowledge of autism would be so widely disliked by the autistic people it claims to support. But just to clarify: the| Autistic Not Weird
On 29th November 2009, my life started to take the opening few steps towards beginning to make some kind of sense. After a lifetime of knowing I was different somehow to the general population (and too many years believing myself to be ‘lesser’ rather than different), a family member finally gave me an explanation for why, and it started a mental revolution for me. My attitude towards my own brain has changed enormously: what started as a secret word to […] The post Ten years ago today,...| Autistic Not Weird
A few years ago, one of my articles received this comment. “F*** YOU F***YOU F***YOU.You don’t even know anything about autism. It’s a f***ing curse that controls parents’ lives until they finally die!F*** YOU”(Obviously, this| Autistic Not Weird
The most depressing period of my life was spent jobsearching, but I picked up a bunch of lessons from it. Here they are. The post Finding employment as an autistic person appeared first on Autistic Not Weird.| Autistic Not Weird
Content Warning: this article discusses the dangers of making children vulnerable to abuse and manipulation, but does not discuss specific instances of abuse. Not long ago there was a debate on a British morning TV| Autistic Not Weird