As I prepare to close the door on 2024, which was another blog-lite year for me (I only did three). I wanted to talk about where I am at and about why Autism is still highly topical in 2024.
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Where I am
I'm still married to the same person (just passed 27 years), still working and still living in the same place (24 and 28 years respectively). My kids have grown up and are now trending towards their mid-twenties. I've tried to talk about them less to give them more space to grow up into individuals who can go through life without having people look them up online and learn everything about them.
For all our "advances" and "woke-ism", the world is a much more dangerous and intolerant place than it was in 2007 when I started this blog. Words like "Asperger's" are now considered triggers and instead of providing protection, social media companies have created platforms that encourage and support bullying, spam and misinformation. I spent quite a bit of time in 2024 attempting to get those platforms to stop dangerous behavior towards people on the spectrum. I believe that kind of work is going to increase.
I've often thought about changing the blog name or revisiting my older posts to do a cleanup of outdated ideas or poor language choices but although the words are different, those old thoughts are often the same - and I'd rather go forwards than backwards. I think it's important to contain a degree of coherent history.
Increasingly, over the last five years, one of my colleagues has been using the words "time poor" to describe our situation. I think it's a very good description. Getting older means that you can't put the same levels of concentration into writing. It means that more people rely on you to be their rock, that the previous generation (our parents) are no longer capable of being our rock and instead need our support. Time is in many ways our most precious commodity - and yet we don't use it wisely.
There are so many things that I want to do and there is so much that I want to research and discuss. Unfortunately, there is so much going on that I get distracted by choice that I do nothing instead. Doom-scrolling isn't just on the phone, it's in our writing and our general living activities. It's pervasive and it is particularly dangerous to people on the spectrum.
One of my intentions for 2025 is to use my time more wisely. We'll see how that pans out.
Autism is still Relevant
Regardless of all of this. Autism is still a very relevant part of my life and of society in general. It forms much of our regular table discussions with family and friends. It's still very widely discussed in our news sources and it's still responsible for many of the actions and behaviours that I see everyday.
I've become adept at spotting autistic behaviors "in the wild" and I am noticing more and more autistic people in my life. I don't go around diagnosing people but every now and then I'll mention "the A word" in passing and these people will automatically add a connection. "Oh yes, we're currently seeking a diagnosis for our child..." I don't generally tell adults in this situation that I'm seeing the markers in them, or their partner but as we know, the apple does not fall far from the tree.
I'm not sure if the number of adults on the spectrum is steadily rising, if people are feeling more "free to be themselves" or if diagnosis is simply becoming more effective but the percentage of families with at least one person on the spectrum seems to be extraordinarily high. We are certainly "not alone".
High and Low Functioning Autism
One of the more central discussion trends of 2024 was a movement that was trying to get rid of the labels of high-functioning vs low-functioning. I understand this. People who are high functioning are not high functioning all of the time. When they have a meltdown or a shutdown for instance, they can become very low functioning indeed. Similarly, people who are considered low-functioning, can actually be masking some fairly high-functioning behavior.
For example: until computers made communication easier, it was assumed that non-verbal autistics had nothing to say. It turned out to be not true at all. There are also low functioning autistics who are savants in specialized fields or who actually are just generally a lot smarter than anyone gives them credit for.
I think in the absence of descriptors like "Asperger's" and "Autism", we still need to be able to easily describe the observable capabilities of people - and in that sense, we need the high and low functioning labels more than ever. They help to ensure that the right levels of resources go to the right people.
It doesn't mean that these labels are set in stone though. They're only useful in communicating a level and we need to recognize that our levels change depending on the situations we find ourselves in.
On to 2025
I'm hoping to be more active on the blog in 2025 but we'll just have to wait and see how that goes.
Until then, thanks for reading and congratulations on completing another year.
