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Key points
- The year's Autism Acceptance Month's theme is "Celebrating Differences."
- Parents of autistic children and autistic adults continue to be excluded and derided.
- Hearing other autistic people’s experiences and sharing our voices is important for acceptance.
April is Autism Acceptance Month, and this year’s theme is "Celebrating Differences."
At the time of writing, a news story had just come out in the UK about parents being offered the choice to have school photos that either included all the children in a class or a photo that didn't include children with special educational needs. Rightly, this has produced an outpouring of disgust; as I write, news channels are filled with parents sharing their and their children’s experiences of exclusion. One mother of an autistic daughter shared how they were once forced to leave a bus because of her daughter’s stimming, a humming sound that indicated that her daughter was content.
These shocking recent stories highlight the amount of ignorance, nastiness, and exclusionary behaviour that parents of autistic children, autistic adults, and others with different needs or disabilities can contend with daily—along with just why Autism Acceptance Month is so important.
Celebrating differences is something we all need to do, for each other and for ourselves. The examples above show that being different can mean you’re left out, bullied, and made to feel “less than.” The adult clients I work with have by and large faced a lifetime of being made to feel there is something “wrong” with them. By the time they’ve reached adulthood, there’s a lifetime of negative messaging they need to overcome in order to reach a point of celebrating their differences.
On discovering that she was autistic, my client Cynthia told me that she felt she had permission to be the person she'd always believed she was. "I felt like I'd hidden the real me since childhood, when I was told off for asking too many questions or doing things differently in school. Knowing that I'm autistic, and that there are others like me who value people's different ways of making sense of the world, feels truly liberating. But I still have to fight against that voice that tells me I'm the 'weird one.'"
"I got my diagnosis four years ago," another client, Emma, shared, "and it's taken that long for me to feel comfortable with who I am. I thought things would change overnight, but instead, it's been an ongoing process. I do feel happy now, though, with who I am and ready to embrace my quirks and uniqueness."
From a more personal perspective, celebrating difference has meant acknowledging that my life choices, including my professional choices, are right for me and bring something different to others, even though they haven't always fit into a conventional trajectory. More broadly, without autistic people processing the world differently, our world would be a far duller, less innovative, and less creative place.
Knowing that there are other people out there who are autistic and whose voices are being shared, and hearing their stories of difference, achievement, and acceptance, is so essential for people who are only starting to discover they might be autistic, who are going through the diagnostic process or who are dealing with negative responses from friends and family.
If you’re the parent of an autistic child, or you’re an autistic adult, immerse yourself in some of the wonderful campaigns and story-sharing that will be taking place this April during Autism Acceptance Month. This is a great opportunity for us to celebrate our own and others' differences and recognise the contribution that different thinkers bring to the world.
