Why Can’t I Just Enjoy Things?
A Comedian’s Guide to Autism
Pierre Novellie
Having read it
★★★★☆
Clear, considered and commendable.
Oh, it’s also quite funny in places and hopefully, as a whole, helps add to and assist the ongoing conversations, attitudes, approaches and always evolving understandings of ASD.
A good passage
Due to the negative feelings people have for the word ‘disability’ and the ‘high functioning’ and savant or savant-like effects of some people’s autism, you hear a lot of well-intentioned rhetoric about how autism can be a superpower. While that is lovely, it makes all the autistic people who aren’t Albert Einstein feel like donkey-brained losers and it means that the ones who are like Albert Einstein feel obliged to play down the enormous difficulties they face in their personal lives, or to see those difficulties as part of some Faustian pact made on their behalf. As though Mephistopheles took their parents aside and said, ‘Your kid is going to be socially miserable, suffer with panic attacks at parties, no eye contact, a decent amount of bullying, BUT ... they will end up with a Nobel Prize. Deal?’ Whereas in reality, much of the misery of autism is caused by society’s structure, its expectations or people’s attitudes and is, therefore, optional. So, while pleasant for some, the ‘autism is a superpower’ rhetoric can cause more harm than good.
A second good passage
OK, so what is autism?
The simple answer is best expressed by the NHS website: autism is not an illness or a disease [or a disorder, actually], it just means your brain works in a different way from other people.18
A third good passage
When I was a child, I had one teacher tell my parents that I should be checked for deafness and a primary school teacher claimed that, at the age of nine, I had completely failed literacy, as well as several other key progress markers. In truth, I simply ignored or didn’t bother fully filling in any tests that were handed out. Why should I? They were boring and no one ever told me what they were for. My kind and patient mother had to sit me down, aged ten, and explain the entire purpose and concept of tests to me, how to answer them and why I should bother. After her intervention, it was success all the way. In some ways it is too risky to let some outsider define the potential of your child – after all, who died and made them king of functioning?