I’m so happy to once again be speaking at the Yellow Ladbugs conference this year, alongside the incredible autism advocates Gilly (@neurodivergent_researcher) and Autistic lawyer Annie Crow (@_anniecrowe). We’ll be chatting about Autistic burnout and ways to support our girls.
It’s absolutely packed with lived experience educators, teachers, speech pathologists, lawyers, doctors, psychologists, advocates, artists, allied health and so much more.
I learned so much from last year’s conference and it’s tremendous value at just $50! Parents, teachers, grandparents, allied health and #neurodivergent people of all ages and stages will find something wonderful in here.
You may have heard people talk about ‘the spectrum’ or ‘the Autism spectrum’. You may have heard people say that “oh, everyone’s on the spectrum somewhere” or “we’re all a little bit autistic”. The first thing to know is that those last two statements are flat out incorrect. You are either on the autism spectrum or you aren’t.
The spectrum essentially refers to the fact that every Autistic person is different, with different strengths and challenges. As the saying goes, if you’ve met one Autistic person, you’ve met ONE Autistic person. There is as much diversity in the Autistic community as the neurotypical community.
The second thing people tend to believe is that the spectrum is linear and every Autistic person is a dot on the line, either less autistic or more autistic, or “high functioning” or “low functioning”. These are difficult terms and ones a lot of the Autism community rejects. In old school language, I would be called “high functioning Autistic” and until recently I would have been labelled as having “Aspergers Syndrome” (which was another term for high functioning). It’s important to note that the label of Aspergers Syndrome has been removed from official use and those of us previously thought of as “aspies” are now included in the spectrum.
The challenge with the term “high functioning” is that it makes it difficult to get the support you need. High functioning mostly just means we’re really good at masking our distress, or camouflaging ourselves to “pass” as neurotypicals. This costs us a lot in terms of our mental health and energy and high masking individuals are more likely to experience episodes of Autistic burnout, which I can certainly attest to.
The challenge with the term “low functioning” is that it is used to deny agency to the individual, might be confused with an intellectual impairment, is demeaning and locks the individual into a box that might be difficult to get out of.
An Autistic’s person’s ability to “function” (whatever that truly means) can change from day to day, hour to hour, year to year. The truth is, though, that while I may look “high functioning” I can assure you that I can be very “low functioning”. If the perfect storm of stressors strike, I can be confined to bed. In other words, if the spectrum was indeed linear, I could move up and down it depending on whatever else was happening in my life at any given time.
Last year, I went through a prolonged Autistic burnout (though I didn’t know it at the time because I hadn’t yet received my identification) and I cried every day for eight months and I was convinced I need to quit writing. Now, post diagnosis, I know so much more about how to help myself and I am excited as all get out to bring you a new book! That would be ‘movement’ up and down a linear scale but the truth is simply that our abilities are determined by our capacity at any given time.
In reality, the spectrum is like a pie chart. Every Autistic person has a ‘spiky’ profile where we’re really good at some things and struggle a lot with others. Everyone’s pie chart will look different.
Technically, these days Autistic people are given a category based on the likelihood of how much support they need. These are “needs support”, “needs more support”, “needs high levels of support”. These are boxed this way so that the NDIS can decide how much funding they wish to offer that person.
p.s. I’d love to be able to credit the owner of that image but there’s no tag on it and I see it everywhere online so it’s been shared so many times it’s impossible to find.
