One of the hardest things for autistic people to get their heads around is injustice.

I noticed it first when my son was at school and he came home angry that his sports team lost a game because others were ‘cheating’. My own outrage matched his, and it took a while to realise that the cheating was in fact what I guess is called gamesmanship.

Gamesmanship is the use of dubious (although not technically illegal) methods to win or gain a serious advantage in a game or sport.

Wikipedia

The problem for autistic people is that there are so many shades of grey in this kind of behaviour, and our brains are more black and white. 

In the classroom, my son would end up in trouble for insisting loudly that a classmate adhere to the rules. My son would be seen as the disrupter and get told off. The injustice of such an accusation would be awful, combined then with a feeling that he had somehow broken a rule. It was my first real indication that he might be autistic.

My daughter struggles with the unfairness of teachers breaking a uniform code that is inflicted on children because they need to be ‘ready for the workplace’. So much wrong with that! Autistic people tend not to recognise hierarchy, so one rule for teachers and one for teenagers isn’t fair. And then there’s the illogical idea of an imaginary workplace that isn’t in fact where teachers work. Or her parents. In fact, noone she knows still wears a tie to work and can’t have jewellery.

I used to think my need for fairness was a Libra trait. I am learning that it’s probably a bit more than that.

Discovering I am (probably) autistic – and how glad will I be, like my daughter this week, when I finally get my diagnosis – makes so much sense of why I have struggled to find and keep an office job.

Firstly there’s not understanding hierarchy: turns out thinking ‘if you’re wrong, you’re wrong, whether you’re an admin assistant or a chief exec’ isn’t a popular view point. 😂

Then there’s following the rules. What rules? Who made them up? Where is it written that I wear heels and don’t swear and don’t tie my hair in a messy bun? It doesn’t affect my ability to do my job. Same with laughing too much, complaining about noise, or not wanting to eat lunch with the team. 

And fairness or things making sense? That’s just a minefield. Challenging that something shouldn’t be done just because it’s always been done that way is hugely unpopular. But if you do what you always did you get what you always got.

Needing to know WHY is another no-no apparently. But if I understand why a project is urgent, where it fits in, I might be able to deliver it quicker and change a process so it’s not urgent next time.

Right now, all these things are very much in my mind, for reasons I can’t discuss. It’s making me very sad, and I need to move on. But a combination of injustice and something just not making sense has caught my brain in a loop, trying to comprehend the incomprehensible.

It’ll pass.

In the meantime, if you have an autistic person in your life, and I hope you do as we’re pretty goddam awesome, try and appreciate their strengths even if it makes you uncomfortable. They might just fight for you with everything they have to make your world a better, fairer, place