Positives Of Autism

I feel like a big part of autism advocacy focuses on the negatives in highlighting our struggles, whether that's imposed by society or by our atypical hard-wiring. I think it can sometimes be a bit much to keep looking at the negatives so this week I wanted to look at some of my positive experiences instead to demonstrate that it's not so much doom and gloom as it can sometimes appear to be.

A few weeks ago I had my end of year one to one with my team leader at work and I was quite surprised about how positive she was about both me and my contributions to the team. There were 2 big things that have contributed to how I've been over the last few months. The first one being my autism diagnosis. I came out to the team not long after that and immediately felt a lot more free to be me as my team leader commented in my one to one how much I've come out of my shell since then. The second thing was that my old team leader left around July/August-time last year leading to our current team leader - who was already a part of the team - stepping up to take his place. She's done a much better job and has done wonders for not only my confidence but my overall happiness in the job.

Every now and then team leaders at our place delegate little tasks to people to help ease their load of team leader stuff. There's never been anything that I would have felt particularly comfortable doing until my current team leader took over. She identified one of my strengths in that I like to keep spreadsheets of things like my monthly performance stats as I find it helps me keep on track and know what I need to do to hit targets and when. So once she spotted that she gave me a kind of performance analysis role where once a week she asks me to find whatever stats and figures she needs about our team so that she can take it to the team leader meetings to report to the managers. It doesn't feel like a particularly big or important thing to do, but that's probably because I've always done it anyway, the only difference being that I've now scaled it up to get stats of the whole team rather than just me. So even though it just feels like a small task to me, it really has made me feel more included in the team and that I can (and do) make a valuable contribution. Inclusion in my job can be important, especially as I work from home.

Some other things that she said in my one to one were that I contribute more in team meetings with things like sharing canned responses to use, I'm more willing to approach team leaders and managers for help when I need it and that I'm one of the strongest members of the team in terms of in-work behaviours. These are all things that either I don't realise because it's me and I struggle to see any non-physical changes in myself, or that I just don't think are big things - again probably because it's me. Our end of year reviews ask us to rate how we think we've performed over the year out of 10, and my team leader was shocked that I only put 5 for myself when she would have put at least 9 based on the time since she took over. I think that's partly because of my autistic tendencies to want to do things right (I kind of feel like that's just standard and nothing particularly special), and also partly because I tend to under rate myself. Clearly one of the things I struggle with most is looking inward and assessing myself for how I really am.

Although autistics do have a whole load of struggles that are unique to them, there are also strengths that come with autism but human nature can make it hard to see the strengths through the struggles. In my case it just took 1 person at work to identify what I'm good at, what I enjoy and that I am different from the rest of the team to massively turn things around. There have been times in this job where I've felt like I was crap at what I do, not valued and really wishing I could get out. The only thing that really changed that for me was a different perspective from a different person. I also think that if I had my current team leader a couple of years ago I wouldn't have had to fight so hard for reasonable adjustments to be put in place. It just goes to show that acceptance is vital, and that goes for both self-acceptance and acceptance of each other.

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