Sometimes the hardest advice is actually the easiest.

One class loomed large in my college course sequence: EN 360 – Advanced English Grammar & Composition. People spoke of it in somber tones, shuddering, recoiling at the mention. Even English majors failed it or barely passed it.

The survivors painted graphic pictures of the coursework: labyrinthine diagramming extremes, freewriting exercises that would cripple your hand, and a gargantuan “annotated bibliography” littered with technical traps and bedeviled details that would papercut the work into failing.

After enough conversations, brave attempts at small talk, researching ahead of time, a colleague gave me the absolute best advice on how to pass and ace the course:

“Just do it exactly how Dr. Chapman shows you to do it.”

This guy had to be kidding. It couldn’t be that easy. It just couldn’t. 

Next semester, for the course, I took Dr. Chapman (as recommended), the school’s resident grammatical and compositional authority, a genteel Southern gentleman, rigid-but-kind, proper-yet-warm.

My first assignment drafts? Trash. He wasn’t pleased. Then again, that seemed to be the consensus for all of us.

But as he started to walk us through how we could revise our drafts, I heard that advice clicking into place. Dr. Chapman walked through the assignment, and wrote out the very words, sentences he was hoping to see in our next drafts.

This. This was it. 

He wasn’t making a recommendation. 

He was showing exactly how to do it. How to rewrite the assignment. The words, the sentences, the sequences.

I wrote them down, word for word. It clicked.

And where the next drafts also suffered for many, they did not suffer for everyone. Because some of us were in on the secret. “He’s telling you exactly how to do it.”

So what does this have to do with The Life Autistic?

We’re telling you exactly what autism is all about.

We’re explaining the why, explaining how we feel, explaining our triggers, elaborating on the challenges of our autistic experience.

If “Understanding and Supporting Autistic People” were a course, you could ace it just by literally listening to autistic people telling you about autism. The more people try to overcomplicate it, to render judgment, to debate the experience, the harder it gets.

But better understanding autism through autistic voice is that easy. It would make your life easy! It would do wonders for us!

Not everyone listens. Not everyone seems convinced that our first-hand narratives are enough to overcome bias or pre-entrenched suppositions or other personal obstacles.

Sometimes it’s easier to believe less than the best, or that something you don’t understand is just “bad,” or that we’re just trying to excuse our faults away. Or that experts about us know more about us and don’t care or see the need to value our voice.

Those are the people who failed courses like Advanced Grammar.

Because it can’t be “that easy” or “that obvious.”

But it is.

 

 

 

Last weekend, I survived a birthday party. It’s nothing new, but it is.

If you know autistic people, then you know there are some easy, basic, common triggers to where it all “goes sideways” for us. Changes to routine, unpredictability in events, people, ambiguous plans, whatever.

After the party ended, Mo insisted we go to the afterparty — essentially just a free-for-all at the Denver Children’s Museum.

On the face of it, that wasn’t a bad idea. We’d been given admission thanks to the party hosts. But apparently, everyone and their tots also had the same idea that gray, chilly Sunday afternoon as well. Once more into the breach, I guess.

If you want a perfect storm of cacophonous, noisesome, exuberantly buzzing sonic pestilence, then I highly recommend a busy kids museum. It’s perfect, but:

Cramped spaces, scattered chaos, and constant loudness are major stressors for us autistic folks.

I leaned over, almost yelling in my wife’s ear: “This would have ruined me as a kid.”

But now, not so much.

*record scratch*

You read that right: I’ve found ways to cope with what used to be an impossible combo of stressors for me.

I’m not saying there’s a prescription, nor some strategy – just some benefit of circumstance, experience, and focus.

Here’s what helped:

Growing up loud. When I was younger, I’d start getting disconcerted and comment on how quiet it would get. As the oldest of five, there was always just noise. Siblings, activity, TV, something. Having the options to duck out and tune out was essential, but throughout life, bustle was my normal. It still wears me out, even if it doesn’t freak me out.

Have the getaway planned. We were only going to spend about 45 minutes at the museum, so having that set in stone was key. It’s not so much about the details of the plan – but that there’s a plan at all. That helps.

Being active, not passive. It’s like getting wet while swimming vs. standing near the pool: the difference is the intentional experience. My daughters were having a blast, but my youngest still needs supervising — it’s easier for me to “lean in” and keep watch and engage her (and Mo) and do my part to be a part of the noise, rather than let it splash me.

Find focused downtime. I can’t stay fully engaged forever, but I’ve found helpful “focused disengagement.” Near the end, we let Mo and Zo loose on the play kitchen. While most parents took that as a chance to bury their nose in their phones (hey, I’m guilty too), I knew I’d get distracted from that. So I watched the girls, interacting, cooking with their ingredients, following their paths around the kitchen, etching observations and just, I dunno, enjoying my kids playing? It gave me both enough to do without having anything to do.

We got home, and I got straight into cooking dinner.

“You did pretty well with all that, being you and all,” said my wife.

“Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah”, I nodded, shaking out excess party from my eardrums.

That’s good, because we’re doing this again next weekend. And the next. And the next.

I am now in the “children’s birthday party gauntlet.”

You may know the deal: where weekend afternoons are a carousel of venue and child and celebration of birthdays that sequence from party to party to party, with classmates you hear about and parents you’ve never really met.

It’s how it happens. It’s what you do.

This was my first of those.

Even for normal adults, it’s not the most ideal scenario.

But I’m not a normal adult.

Despite my cheeky snapshot above, I managed to survive and even smile through full-on kid birthday gauntlet fever in The Life Autistic.

Thankfully, I’ve got social survival skills:

Doing things. One of the other moms asked if she could help setup. Great idea, thought I, until I realized she took the one box of things that made for an easy task and left me, uh, nothing.

Finding a corner. That didn’t work. We were just late enough to where the corner/side seats were taken. Drat. Find a wall, find a wall. 

Chase my younger child. Mo, my oldest daughter, is as learned and practiced socially at 4 as I am at “older than 4,” but Zo is kind of a wily, todding, ornery, troublemaking baby. Of course, today, she was perfect and didn’t need corralling or chasing.

Well, those options disappeared quick.

Help.

Things eased up as “the process” began. When there is process, there is peace. Chaos, too, but at least it moves in a sequence: crafts, snacks, cake, cleaning, and more cleaning.

Thank goodness my wife was there, else I’d have been unmoored and adrift in having to solo it out with other adults. I can make the moments count, but I need a safe harbor.

So I did venture out once or twice.

When the kids’ dad himself got a plate of snacks, I overheard him getting chided for not announcing that “everyone was welcome to get food.” I can relate to that! So I ended up joking with him a bit later, remarking how “It’s like a pool party — someone’s just gotta jump in to let everyone know it’s open.” To my credit, I did not reference the arcane source: a pool party episode on Nickelodeon’s Doug.

Then when I noticed their grandmother laying out cupcakes on plates with sprinkles, I leaned in to ask:

“Oh, is this a decorate-your-own-cupcake thing?”

“It sure is,” she beamed.

“Ok, we’re leaving – it’s been great!”

For not getting sarcasm, I can sure dish it hot — we all laughed.

After cupcakes and controlled chaos, they announced that the Children’s Museum would be ours to explore for the next hour or so.

“Dad, can we go?” asked Mo.

The party quieted down in my head as I could hear the distant roar of hundreds of other kids throughout the museum’s floors, thinking back to the unending trickle of parents, children, escapees from the boredom of a Sunday afternoon, ready to burn off that excess energy here.

“Of course we can go.”

To be continued.