‘A guide to Lauren’: How my personal autism handbook transformed my experience at work
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After being diagnosed autistic at 27, figuring out how to approach this at work has been one of the most difficult things for me.
Who do I tell? How much do I tell them? How weird is too weird? How open is too open? What if I seem quite different? Will people still like me?
I wanted to share one thing I did, in the hope that it can be useful for other people “coming out” as autistic at work.
I wrote a document called “A guide to Lauren.” In it, I have explained what autism means for my day-to-day and at work. It also explains how people can help, based on everything I’ve trialled-and-errored my way through so far. I shared it with people I work closely with, and my experience has been overwhelmingly positive.
It feels much easier to ask for the things that I need, which is a relief. My relationships at work have also benefitted. It’s prompted some honest conversations that might never have happened otherwise.
Here is the guide that I shared with my colleagues – plus, a few tips if you’d like to create your own.
A guide to Lauren
I am autistic. This means I have difficulties with:
- Routine and structure – I need a lot of this
- Social stuff – this is all very manual for me and therefore draining
- Sensory processing – a mix of hyper- and hypo- sensitivities
Below, I’ve explained how these things impact me and what that means at work. I am sharing this with you because that includes things that I may ask for or do that I would like you to understand. If you have questions, please ask.
Read more from our article series on Neurodiversity and the Workplace:
- Supporting employees with ADHD: A counselling psychologist’s perspective
- Resources for jobseekers with learning disorders
- The human-centred workplace: Fostering belonging for neurodivergent professionals
Routine and structure
My life is extremely structured. If my routine is disrupted, or plans are ambiguous or change a lot, I will end up in a meltdown before long. I need to know exactly what to expect (e.g. where to cross a road while walking, exactly how everything in my cupboards is laid out). The period between not knowing these things and figuring them out feels horrible and chaotic, and I can’t think straight until it’s done.
What this means at work:
- Last-minute changes of plan can really throw me. The more notice you can give me for meetings, new pieces of work or any other change, the better.
- If something does need to be last minute, you can help me by providing as much info as possible on why the change is happening and by telling me specifically what you need.
- I sometimes need more time to process information. If you need my input on something that I don’t already know a lot about, send it in advance. You’ll get a much more insightful response!
- Knowing what’s coming is important for me. If you need to meet with me, send me an agenda, a question, a document – anything that will help me understand what is going to happen.
- I stick quite rigidly to my hours. In part, because work-life balance is important, but also because starting or finishing at an unusual time can throw me into limbo for the rest of the day.
- Transitioning between weekday and weekend routines is quite disorientating. I am therefore a bit protective of my Monday and Friday schedules and need to stick to concrete tasks on those days.
- All of this also has positive impacts. I’m good at making plans, thinking about processes, reviewing papers and finding details that aren’t right. It also means I quite enjoy things that others find tedious.
Social stuff
A key difference in autism for women is the prevalence of masking. Masking means covering up autistic traits, constantly rehearsing conversations and manually performing learned/mimicked social actions such as facial expressions, body language, tone of voice, dialects, eye contact. It also means manually interpreting these things in others.
For me, like many autistic women, that means I am consciously referring back to books and TV shows about body language or facial expressions, to determine what the thing you just did with your body or your face means about how you are feeling. Left unsupervised, my face actually doesn’t do that much at all, so I do that consciously too. And you can bet your left arm that I won’t look you in the eye unless I’ve consciously decided that now is the appropriate moment to do so.
All those things happen automatically in a “neurotypical” brain, but they do not for me. This is why social situations are extremely draining, and why I need to moderate how much effort I put into them, to avoid burning out.
What this means at work:
- I value people who communicate and give feedback in an open and honest way. I naturally tend to take people at their word. If I can be confident you are saying what you mean, then I don’t have to try so hard to decipher what’s really going on.
- Sometimes, I turn my camera off during meetings or take them as phone calls to save having to make my face work. I try to save my energy for calls where it matters more that I can be seen.
- I sometimes need time away from Slack or emails to decompress, so I do not always see things straight away.
- Meetings are extremely draining for me. If you need something straightforward from me, we could agree on a deadline for getting to the same outcome via a Google Doc or via Slack.
- Sometimes I forget to do small talk. It doesn’t mean I’m not interested or don’t want to talk to you, I just forget. If you’re someone who doesn’t like that anyway, please tell me and I will stop bothering.
- I will interpret things very literally, so I may get confused or need to clarify things with you later if the language used in a meeting is ambiguous.
- The unhelpful thing about masking is that it makes it very hard for you to know that something is wrong, or how difficult something is, just by looking. A lot of the things that I find really hard, I know from feedback that I appear to find really easy. All I can ask is that you listen, rather than look. If I’m telling you that something is difficult or that I am struggling, please listen to my words, and not to the smiley confident face you just saw in the meeting.
Sensory processing
What this looks like day-to-day: I have hyper-sensitivities (things that I’m overly sensitive to), and hypo-sensitivities (things that I’m under-ly sensitive to), so I have to deliberately balance things out.
Hyper-sensitivities: Most people’s brains filter out bits of sensory input as “not important” (like background sounds or the feeling of a label in your clothes). That doesn’t really happen for me.
Hypo-sensitivities: Like a lot of autistic people, my brain does not get enough proprioceptive input (where your body parts are in relation to each other), vestibular input (interpreting movement) or interoceptive input (internal senses, e.g. hunger, temperature, tired, etc.). That leads to a lot of background anxiety, because your body doesn’t quite understand where it is and it may not be meeting all of its physical needs.
What this means at work:
- I need somewhere quiet (noise, sights, smells) to be able to function.
- If I ask you to stop making a particular sound (e.g. squeaking a pen), please try to accommodate if you can. If I’ve got to the point of saying something out loud, then it is probably almost physically painful for me to be around.
- Sometimes I will fiddle with things or move around during meetings to help balance out sensory issues.
- I need to stick to my normal eating times, because having structure around this means it doesn’t matter so much if I don’t notice getting hungry.
- If I look like I am wearing the wrong clothes for the temperature of the room we’re meeting in, please do ask me if I am too hot or too cold! I often won’t notice until I’ve gone quite far in the wrong direction (e.g. shivering or feeling sick), so that can be helpful.
A few words of advice
Based on my experience, here are some tips if you’d like to create your own guide.
Explaining what autism looks like for you is important. If you are going to speak to people about your diagnosis, try to remember that they may not have a clue about what autism means in practice or may have an overly stereotyped view of what it means.
Tell people why you’re sharing the information, so they know what you’re expecting. If you are just trying to raise awareness, say that. If you specifically want someone to start approaching meetings differently, tell them that too.
What I did is just one approach. I am fortunate to have very supportive and open-minded colleagues. That is not true for everyone. If you’re not sure what to do or how people will react, speak to a manager, a trusted colleague or a friend, and see what they think.
Finally, this is all trial and error. If you’ve got other things that have helped you at work, I’d love to hear.
A longer version of this article was originally published on Lauren Nicholas’s website, Colour Me Autistic. It has been adapted and republished with the author’s permission.
