Autism Advocacy

It's World Autism Awareness Week so I thought it would be an ideal time to discuss what autism advocacy means to me and why I do it.

I started this blog just over a year ago in the run up to last year's World Autism Awareness Week partly because I wanted to raise money by doing a 10 mile walk with the blog being a way to spread the word of what I was doing, and also to raise autism awareness in general. After I did the walk I carried on blogging once a week because with my busy schedule of work and parenting it's all I've got time to do in terms of advocacy. I wanted to make sure I was at least doing something.

So what is autism advocacy? It's a way for people (usually autistics themselves) to actively engage in the conversation around autism as a condition and to ultimately aid society's understanding and acceptance of us as people. I sometimes see debates online where people argue that we need to focus on autism acceptance rather than autism awareness, and therefore they disagree with things like World Autism Awareness Week. While I do agree that acceptance is the ultimate goal, I also think they go hand in hand. In my opinion, to achieve autism acceptance people need to understand autism, and the way to understand autism is by advocates such as myself explaining it - i.e. raising autism awareness. Autism awareness is about more than just letting people know that autism exists. I don't believe that you can have one without the other, so for that reason I think World Autism Awareness Week is a great thing despite the fact that in an ideal world we shouldn't need to dedicate a specific day or week to it, it should just be the norm. But obviously not much in this world is ideal.

I do wish I could do more for the cause, but my hours at work will be changing very soon so maybe that'll give me a bit more time to dedicate to advocacy in the future. World Autism Awareness Week is 30th March to 5th April.

For now though, I'll just remind you to please click Subscribe at the top of the page and follow me on social media. I'm @DepictDave on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and you can buy me a coffee at my Ko-Fi account here.

[Image description: The word "Autism" in rainbow colours on a white background. Directly underneath it are the words "Awareness", "Accessibility" and "Acceptance", all in smaller black text. Towards the bottom of the image are the hashtags #ActuallyAutistic and #Asking Autistics. This is the image used on my Instagram to promote this post.]