It's a common misconception that autistic people like me can't cope with change or uncertainty. I don't think that's the case, or it needn't be. Change can be terrifying for many people, and for autistics in particular, but that might be because of poor communication or failure to understand that what matters to most people isn't automatically what matters to us. We depend on "scaffolding" to cope with the world, and change can make that scaffolding fall away until it can be rebuilt. But that problem can be mitigated with some fairly simple steps.

Change is terrifying for many people, and for autistics in particular. We depend on "scaffolding" to cope with the world, and change makes that scaffolding fall away until it can be rebuilt. It can also be particularly difficult to cope when the scaffolding needed to hold us up is something the rest of the world sees as silly or inconsequential. How CAN having the right mug for your coffee make all that much difference? So change means fear of loss of the things you need to cope and likely inability to get them back. And that's even before we've looked at the new "scripts" for dealing with the world that will have to be re-written for the new circumstances (imagine having to write yourself a new phrase book for every job change), and the ever present anxiety and fear of rejection. So broadly speaking autistics fear change. But it OUGHT to be possible to do change in a way that works for autistics oughtn't it? I'm trying to work out how.

The professional world we live in is full of change - evolution, development, occasional revolution. I was talking about this with a wise senior colleague and I pointed out that autistic people find change disconcerting at best and terrifying at worst. This colleague asked a very simple but profound question: why? I realised I had no idea so I thought I'd try and think it out. Please do tell me if you agree or disagree with what I've come up with. My experience of being an autistic professional is that I've built up some very careful "scaffolding" around how I operate that makes things possible. Change means losing that scaffolding and having to rebuild it, and until it's rebuilt I feel very unsteady and liable to fall over. No-one else can see the scaffolding, and I can forget it's there, so it's only when it's unexpectedly taken away that I notice. But having forgotten that I have scaffolding I'm depending on (because I'm so used to it), I don't necessarily see the effect of change coming until it comes. So it's a nasty shock.

Stress makes it worse. Makes what worse? Well most things really, but what I'm talking about is autistic experience. BUT ALSO it makes autism more visible, so the people around you may find you seem more autistic when you're stressed. So if what they're doing is putting pressure on you to pretend not to be autistic, which is resulting in you being stressed, then probably they are doing exactly the opposite of what is likely to achieve what they want. As well as making you miserable. It's a potentially vicious cycle.

If there are any people aged about 4 to about 18 in your family, you might have been confronting "back to school" for a few weeks now. For many children school is something to be looked forward to (I'm told!) but for this autistic it was a total nightmare. And sadly there are still plenty of autistic children having to confront that nightmare every September. Why is it so bad? Well for me at least it wasn't about the teaching and learning so much as the other children.

24 August is the Independence Day of Ukraine so it seems a good moment to think about autistics world wide, particularly those in war zones. We autistics living in our home countries while wars are not going on don't have an easy life, but imagine how much worse it could be. Early in the morning of 24 February 2022 Vladimir Putin announced a "special military operation in Ukraine" which actually meant an invasion. Following that, many Ukrainians had to leave their country and move abroad. Statistically, some of those Ukrainians fleeing the war must be autistic (assuming 1%+ of the population are autistic). Imagine what that would be like - if you needed certainty to function and feared change - suddenly to lose everything you relied on.

Supposing something has gone wrong at work - and things go wrong from time to time in the best regulated workplaces. Suppose one or more of your colleagues are a bit biased against you because you're autistic. And let's be frank, it happens. Possibly they regard your autistic traits as annoyances or fundamentally believe (even if they don't say it) that you should "pull yourself together" and be "normal". Perhaps your reasonable adjustments are all very well in theory but in practice they get forgotten or not done or somehow just don't feel very important. The things I've said might happen certainly do happen - everywhere in society. No one workplace or culture or place or group is particularly culpable for doing it. It's just a fact that our society is still getting used to autism, doesn't understand it very well, doesn't deal well with things it can't actually see (such as invisible disabilities); autism is not yet "meh". You, the autistic person, want to change things for yourself and those that come after, but that means standing up for yourself. And the ways of doing that can be really really difficult.

Black or white, rich or poor: binary thinking more and more... It's so much easier when things are just one of two options isn't it? Autistic people are famously poor at nuance and shades of meaning and I've been thinking about what the mechanism behind that might be.

If you get into a row with an autistic person, you're generally in for the long haul. (Gross generalisation, but if you want to argue about it, the comment function is open and the century is yet young... ) If I feel that something is Wrong with a capital W (and that could be either wrong = incorrect or wrong = immoral) then I am unable to compromise with it. I will worry away at it like a dog at a bone and be unable to let it go. The danger is that a discussion can get into a loop and become a damaging row because the actual point on which I can't compromise can get packaged up in a million added on issues until it feels like a fight for good against evil. Which is seldom what is actually happening. And then once things HAVE gone wrong, putting them back together can result in some really stressful Difficult Conversations. It's all deeply uncomfortable.

We autistics may well try to rationalise bullying as something that we "deserve". My autistic absolutist brain looks for logic in everything. If I’ve failed or been rejected it was my fault. It’s very difficult for me to really believe that I might just have been unlucky, or the fault have been someone else’s. If I were a good person, then these things would not happen. Not true of course – we all know that bad things happen to good people – you only have to turn on the news to see examples – but it’s still a pattern of thinking that it’s difficult to get away from if your brain is desperately looking for logic and patterns in the world. So what to do about it? I wish I knew, because there's no guaranteed answer. Trying to manage my autistic brain is a life's work. And trying to get another person to change their behaviour is almost as difficult. Often the person who's behaviour is causing problems has no idea what they're doing, and when you don't realise you're doing anything wrong, you don't realise you need to stop. Or when the person does know that they're being a bit harsh to an autistic colleague, they may be under the impression that they're doing the right thing. If you feel deep down that autistic people are basically children, then you may well feel entitled to act like a parent and punish behaviour you don't like.

I use the word "joy" a lot - generally in a sarcastic sense, as for example: "eight meetings today? Joy!" True joy is harder to come by but for an autistic person it can be no less intense than for the neurotypical - possibly even more so. That might be the joy of engaging the mind fully in a special interest: a subject or activity you're so passionate about it can be likened to being in love. Or there are other fleeting joys - a colour or pattern that just hits the mental spot, or a sound or a period of glorious silence when no communication needs to be happening. Today is Palm Sunday and marks the beginning of Holy Week leading up to Easter when Christians recall Jesus' Crucifixion and Resurrection. The reference to palms is because when Jesus entered Jerusalem in triumph, riding on a donkey, the people shouted for joy and threw palm branches in his path. We see something similar nowadays when crowds clap or throw flowers into the path of a hearse of a famous person; the thrown greenery is a mark of honour and respect. Jesus rode in triumph (another tradition that continues today) but on a donkey, rather than a horse or other grander animal, to demonstrate his humility. The story illustrates the sad truth of human nature that you can be massively popular one day but have the crowds wanting you dead a few days later. But on Palm Sunday itself we remember Jesus being welcomed with joy by people who were immensely glad to see him.

Having a diagnosis of autism shouldn't be a bad thing - if you have an autistic brain then having a diagnosis helps you manage that brain. Society shouldn't need us to hide or minimise our disability to be valid as people, nor pressure us to "act normal" if we can. Society definitely shouldn't be dividing autistic people into two categories, one of which should just stop complaining and fake normal like everyone else while the other is consigned to institutional care. So yes, there do seem to be a lot more autistic people around than there were 30 years ago, but that's not because people are "catching" autism or deciding to be autistic because it's "fashionable". A lot of those people are becoming able to be their real selves for the first time, and that should be something everyone can celebrate.

Objectivity is something that scientists, academics and civil servants aspire to, but it's quite hard to achieve. It's taking decisions on the basis of the evidence rather than your own personal feelings or opinions. We all like think we do that but - frankly - if you were listening to a politician, you'd probably pre-judge them a bit according to whether they belonged to a party you supported wouldn't you? Being truly objective would mean setting aside all your own preconceptions and judging them just on the merits of what they said at the moment. Happily, focusing on the evidence and screening out bias and assumptions is something that autistic people can learn to do very well.

It's becoming better known that autistic professionals generally "mask" a lot, meaning that we hide our autism in order to fit in with those around us, to avoid being judged, and to maximise the impact we have at work. Masking takes up a lot of energy and concentration - equivalent to speaking a foreign language the whole time. So kindly friends who know we're autistic sometimes suggest we don't need to mask around them. It's very difficult to drop a habit that's been trained into you your whole life - but if you do, what would it actually look like?

In government autistic honesty can be a really solid basis for work. It has its pitfalls because there are certainly times when autistic honesty can go too far - sometimes you need to tell a white lie or a gentle half truth in order to help someone come round to your point of view. We all know that the right answer to "does my bum look big in this?" is unlikely to be "yes - enormous - what were you thinking?" and there is always a risk that an autistic colleague will come out with the work equivalent of that. But on the whole, autistic honesty is a really good thing in a civil servant. If there is a painful truth that needs to be faced, an autistic person may be better able to do it than someone neurotypical. If there is a difficult truth that needs to be communicated, an autistic person will be able to do it - not because they're brave so much as because they find it impossible to not to tell the truth. There's skill in telling truth to power in a way that makes it most likely to be heard, but as regards the instinct to tell the truth, rather than dodge the issue and hope someone else takes responsibility for doing it, an autistic colleague can be a great ally.

The overarching project of The Neurocrats is a series of episodes starting here. Iain writes: "How do you get to be a Director General if you are dyslexic? Can being autistic help you lead teams through a crisis? What is it like to discover you are neurodivergent a long way into your Civil Service career? "Over the past few months I have been working with some amazing colleagues from the neurodiversity networks of the Department for Transport and the Department for Energy, Security and Net Zero to explore these sorts of questions. I am very happy to be able to share the results with you from today. "The Neurocrats is a podcast that explore stories and experiences that help us understand how neurodivergent people in the Civil Service work, live, and thrive. In the first episode I talk to Conrad Bailey about how his experience of dyslexia has shaped his journey through education, work, and leadership. "Each episode is 20 minutes long, so perfect for a listen on your commute or over lunch. The first season is seven episodes long, with new episodes released weekly on Mondays. "If you like what you hear please do click “Subscribe” in YouTube to be notified of future episodes. And please do pass the link on to others who you think may be interested."

YouTube video by The Neurocrats: Civil Service Lives

YouTube video by The Neurocrats: Civil Service Lives

I write a lot about the positives of autism, about the fact that autistics are everywhere, that we're not something (all that) weird, and that we can be successful professionals and leaders. But I'd like to counterbalance that a bit by drawing attention to the challenges for the parents of autistic children and the families of autistic adults. Having a disabled person in your family is often going to be a blessing, but it may not be what you expected, and it may ask more of you than you thought you could give. Some autistic kids don't get diagnosed until teenage or later because they mostly mask and fit in - others are picked up very early on because they have high support needs or because their behaviours present a lot of challenges. In either case the parents are going to have a lot to deal with - perhaps the child having meltdowns after school from masking all day, or struggles through local education systems to access the right support package. Being told that adult autistics sometimes succeed and want to celebrate autistic identity may offer hope for the future, but I imagine it doesn't make the parents' lives much easier in the short term.

OK so Christmas Jumpers are probably not the worst of the world's problems right now but bear with. This blog focusses on the particularly autistic issues of the world and right now, Christmas jumpers are potentially a biggy. You have to wear them - the introduction of the "compulsory Christmas jumper" dress code is a major blow this year in some workplaces - and the dratted things are too hot, too scratchy, made of nasty cheap plasticky material and generally deeply unpleasant for those of us with hyper-sensitive senses.

The autistic stereotype is that we're unemotional. We have blank facial expressions (well I do when you try to explain IT to me), flat modes of speaking and are thought of as lacking in empathy. But actually many of us have the opposite problem, particularly in the workplace. I've noticed from myself, and from lots of autistic colleagues I talk to, that we can get passionately involved in things and then emotionally overwhelmed.

Christmas is a wonderful time of year with friends, family, food, presents, lights, music and togetherness. It's a chance to step outside the normal day to day routine and do something different - from bank holidays when you don't have to go to work, to special events, to small things like changes to the TV schedules. Sounds great? Yes - obviously. But also it's worth remembering that a lot of the good things about Christmas can also be autistic nightmares.

Lots of people are getting autism diagnoses in adulthood, and while some friends and family see it coming, for others it can be quite a surprise. They may have thought You don’t look autistic, for example. So here's my reflections on how to respond when your friend, colleague or family member comes out as autistic to you. As always, please note the caveat that what I think has no particular authority, I may be wrong, your mileage may vary, and if in doubt ignore me and do what the person you're talking to would like you to do.

If you're autistic it's likely one of your struggles in life is small talk. You go up to someone and you need a piece of information from them - but can you just ask for it? No - you have to go through a sort of vocal dance first. There's a code you have to follow - words have to be exchanged - like spies in a movie uttering meaningless content to establish that they're talking to the right person - before anything substantive can happen.

Talking to other autistic people in the workplace, I've tended to find that they prefer to look facts in the face like I do, but others may differ. Sometimes just knowing that actually the world is hard, that life isn't fair can be very empowering to me because it means that I can acknowledge that those things aren't my fault. If I believe that autism is a superpower, then all the things that make life difficult are my failure to deploy my superpower effectively. If I recognise though that autism puts a lot of hurdles in my path, then I'm less surprised and angry with myself when I fall over them. So that's why I pig headedly look the worst facts in the face - to know the worst and be able to deal with it. But I'm aware that it's a potentially high-risk strategy that might not work for everyone.

You say something. The person you're talking to's face changes. They go very silent and walk away. Much MUCH later, you find out what they took your words to mean, which wasn't what you meant at all. In the mean time you've been at cross purposes with them, and probably everything you've said has made the situation worse. Sound bad? Well that is the reality of life for autistic people when we get over-interpreted. I've had it happen at work a number of times and it can cause so much harm. Once someone reads a message into your tone, words or body language that you didn't mean to be there, it's almost impossible to unpick the misunderstanding even if you're neurotypical, and if you're autistic it's harder still. Everything you say makes the situation worse, and ultimately if it happens with your manager they can conclude you're a poor performer and it can even end your career.

There's plenty of things in a world not designed for autistics that can make our lives difficult. But we autistics can also work against ourselves with over-conscientiousness - going not just the extra mile but the extra million miles and then wondering why our shoes are worn out. Figuratively.

Picture the stereotype you have in your head of an autistic person. It's probably a geek or a nerd - maybe wearing loose, scruffy clothes and trainers, possibly with thick glasses, hair probably a bit messy or very short. Probably not much makeup. Now picture the stereotype you have of a "professional" person. Suit and tie/heels, well turned out, smart clothes, impeccably groomed, not a hair out of place. There's not a lot in common between the two is there? Appearance isn't everything but it sets the tone of a business relationship, and your clients, stakeholders and politicians want to see you've made an effort. So if autistic people are to succeed in the workplace they should probably stop looking such a mess and start looking professional. Everyone else makes an effort - why shouldn't they?

For me, like many autistic people, precise language is important. But unfortunately not all autistic people agree on the language that’s best to use about autism. This is an attempt to summar…

One of my most important reasonable adjustments for autism is having a fixed desk. Like most workplaces, mine operates a hot-desking policy and colleagues have to book in advance where they will sit on a given day. I realised several years ago that that system really didn't work for my autistic brain - the sheer level of stress at having to sit in different places every day - or worse still being uncertain about where I could sit - took up all my processing power. My brain is quite capable of spending a whole day going over and over "this is the wrong place, this doesn't feel right, I'm in the wrong place" and failing to get anything useful done at all. So, I know I need a fixed desk, so much is clear. And yet...

If we call someone "mad" or "crazy" or any number of other words meaning "mentally ill" then we often mean we can discount what they're saying. That's really bad for people who are mentally ill, and who deserve to be listened to as much as anyone else, but pretending the unfair stigma isn't there in those words won't make it go away. When an autistic person is called "mentally ill" it's a coded way of saying that they're wrong, they don't know what they're talking about, that their differences are unacceptable.

It's asking a lot of parents, but I really think it would be better for an autistic person if they were allowed to be who and what they are, rather than trained to fit in. Or, I should say, it probably helps to be trained to fit in if that's what you want to do - to have that option - but not to pretend that the autism can go away. Accepting that your family member is autistic not neurotypical can mean great sacrifices - giving up the life you thought you'd have, taking on caring responsibilities that you hoped you wouldn't have, dealing with someone you maybe don't understand very well or who hurts and frustrates you. It's asking the family and friends to adapt and change and they may not like that. But hopefully as more do, as autism is better understood, and with more successful autistic people in work and the public eye it will come to seem less imperative to "cure" rather than accept autistics.

Most autistics are men or boys, right? It makes sense that women and girls who are more naturally people-focussed and communicative wouldn't be autistic doesn't it? Well no. That's a whacking great stereotype about females but also there is no particular reason to think most autistics are male. What IS the case though is that autism is much more likely to have been diagnosed in boys in the past. As Caroline Criado Perez has pointed out, the world (regarding diagnostic criteria and many other things) has tended to treat males as the "default" or the "norm" and females as the exception. So if the way we think about autism is based on the male experience of autism, what does that mean for people like me?

If there are any people aged about 4 to about 18 in your family, you might have been confronting "back to school" for a few weeks now. For many children school is something to be looked forward to (I'm told!) but for this autistic it was a total nightmare. And sadly there are still plenty of autistic children having to confront that nightmare every September. Why is it so bad? Well for me at least it wasn't about the teaching and learning so much as the other children.

Everyone's on the spectrum, right? We all have some of the traits of autism ranging from being a little bit quirky occasionally to being non verbal and unable to function? Well no. The "spectrum" doesn't work like that and saying everyone's "on the spectrum" isn't helpful. You don't have to minimise someone's disability for them to be valid as a person. You don't have to tell them they're (nearly) normal for them to be valid as a person. And you definitely shouldn't be dividing autistic people into two categories, one of which should just stop complaining and fake normal like everyone else while the other is consigned to institutional care. We can do better than that.

If about 1 in 100 people is autistic, and if the UK civil service reflects the population it serves, then there may be enough autistic civil servants to make up a medium-sized department. But what jobs are they doing? They're probably all doing the filing and/or data entry, right? Well no, some of us are doing leadership roles, but autistic leaders may tend to keep quiet about their autism because of the fear of stigma. Part of the role of a senior civil servant is to be able to advise Ministers and speak authoritatively about government policy with people outside government. To do that we need to be able to have credibility, and many of us fear that if our stakeholders knew about our autism, they might not trust us.

I got my autism diagnosis when I was half way to my goal and working as a middle manager, and already things were a struggle. So while the diagnosis was brilliant in explaining a lot of things about me that I'd blamed myself for, it also made me feel that leadership was now out of reach. I still struggle with whether that's the case because of my attacks of self doubt, but I'm hoping that by being open I'll encourage more autistic leaders to come forward and go for the top.

I've been doing an occasional series of observations about how neurotypical attempts to support autistic people can fail because of lack of understanding about how are brains are different. Here's a few extra pitfalls and aggravations for autistic and neurotypical colleagues. I mentor a lot of autistic civil servants so these reflections are derived from their (and my) experiences but each is composed of multiple people and not supposed to represent anyone in particular.

I've been writing this blog for a while now and some days it really feels like things are changing for the better. There are more openly autistic people in the public eye, more TV documentaries (such as Chris Packham's and Christine McGuinness's) more fiction about and by autistic people and better understanding in the workplace. On other days it feels like there's no progress at all.

Proms season has just begun so heat, light and cameras are very much in my mind (I sing in the BBC Symphony Chorus). But more generally in our culture light is generally better than dark - dark is something to be feared, but light is safety and positivity. With the spring, the days get longer and everything seems brighter and more cheerful - and that has to be good thing. But as with so many things that are good for neurotypical people, too much light can be an autistic nightmare. Many of us have hypersensitive eyes which means strong sunlight can be actively painful, as can some kinds of artificial light. You may long for those bright summer days, but for some of us it's not always a blessing.

People putting emotional demands on me on purpose is something I struggle with. I think that's why the colleague who sits opposite me and simpers all day in order to make other people respond positively to him/her is so maddening (to me - not to other people!) It's not that I'm not empathic - I certainly am - and if someone just expresses their emotion, I am very likely to respond to it. What makes me autistic skin crawl is when someone demands a particular emotional response from me and won't stop figuratively poking at me until I've provided that response.

I've started collecting an occasional series of observations about how neurotypical people can attempt to support autistic people can fail because of lack of understanding about how are brains are different. Here's a few more pitfalls for autistic and neurotypical colleagues. I mentor a lot of autistic civil servants so these reflections are derived from their (and my) experiences but each is composed of multiple people and not supposed to represent anyone in particular.

I've written about how attempts by neurotypical people to support autistic people can fail because of lack of understanding about how are brains are different. There are some specific ways that happens in the work place that I'd like to say a bit more about, in the hope of building better common understanding, and avoiding a great deal of unhappiness and frustration all round.

For an autistic person meltdown happens when the sensory overload because too great and we're unable to function. That inability to function might mean withdrawing from all communication, staying still, needing to be silent and as far away as possible from other people. If I begin to feel a meltdown starting at work I lock myself in a loo cubicle to be assured that no-one will approach me and I'll be alone.

For an autistic person meltdown happens when the sensory overload because too great and we're unable to function. That inability to function might mean withdrawing from all communication, staying still, needing to be silent and as far away as possible from other people. If I begin to feel a meltdown starting at work I lock myself in a loo cubicle to be assured that no-one will approach me and I'll be alone.

The most popular post I've ever done on this blog is one called I think my member of staff is autistic - what should I do? Autism's common - in fact the estimate has gone up from 1 in 100 to 1 in 50 even since I wrote that post. So most people have an autistic colleague and plenty of the adult autistics are in work and either not diagnosed or not open about their diagnosis.