Good Intentions

Lydia is a 22-year-old who is somewhere on the autism spectrum.  She loves Jesus, her service cat, her mom, and her best friend.  She writes a blog at www.autisticspeaks.blogspot.com and has recently written and published a book on life with autism (Interview with Autism, available at www.lulu.com).

(Queue music playing in the background.  The tune is the Beach Boys’ Good Vibrations, but you quickly notice that the lyrics are instead, “Good, good, good, good intentions…”).

Frequently, while I intend to be nice to someone, it comes off the wrong way.  For example, there was a new girl at my job, and I would give her what I thought were helpful tips so that she didn’t get in trouble with the higher-ups.  She ended up going to the boss and complaining that I corrected her all the time.

I think this is how it is with people and autism.  They end up coming across as rude or mean simply because they don’t know any better.  Once, I was playing with a fidget toy during church and dropped it into the pew in front of me.  The older gentleman sitting in the pew gave me a nasty look, probably thinking that it’s not appropriate to play during church.  What he didn’t know was that I can only understand the sermon if I have something in my hands to play with.  A few months ago, I took an hour-long class with three other people at work.  My lack of eye contact, social graces, and ability to keep up with the conversation made my coworkers go to my boss and complain that I was being extremely rude.  Had they known that I have autism and that I heard most, if not all of, what the man taught us, I doubt they would have done this.

Even my own parents have made this mistake, many times over, before I was diagnosed.  They took my melt downs for temper tantrums and sometimes punished me for them.  Once I had a melt down at McDonald’s over something seemingly minor, and the punishment was that I couldn’t go out to eat for three months.  In reality, the restaurant was crowded and the lights were too bright, and the minor thing just happened to be the straw that broke the camel’s back.  Had my parents known that I was autistic, they could have helped me work through my melt downs, process what happened, and avoid such situations in the future.

While we are getting better at spotting milder forms of autism at younger ages, I believe that we are still largely failing females.  Girls with autism can be relatively social creatures, compared with their autistic male peers, causing us to overlook their challenges.  We owe it to the many girls on the spectrum out there, both diagnosed and undiagnosed, to improve our knowledge of autism spectrum disorders in females.