This means that people cannot conserve disabled people as easily as they used to. It does NOT mean that people with disabilities will be barred from getting the supports they need and deserve.
Pro tip: it’s fine to want to understand your autistic friends’ sensory and accommodations issues, etc., but please don’t frame it as a “Gotcha.”
This checklist is for people who aren’t autistic (or whose autistic traits differ from those of their child/charge) to understand what may upset an autistic person, and cause them distress.
For a person with heightened sensory sensitivity, clothing and accessories can make or break an entire day out; here are suggestions for clothes, accessories, and miscellaneous accoutrements that might work.
Jordyn Zimmerman’s story, as told in the new documentary This Is Not About Me, is an example of how non-speaking autistic people can blossom when communication becomes possible.
You know where I didn’t learn how to figure people out like that? Anywhere that was not a game. Not in previous jobs, not in books, not in school. I learned these life skills using a table top role playing game (TTRPG), purely by accident.
Sound dampening a space, especially at home, can be helpful for a lot of reasons: Many autistic people have auditory sensitivity, and sounds can be a reason for sensory overload.
All humans deserve to be able to do energy budgeting in ways that make sense for us, and I hope to see the day when support for autistic people toward this end is considered a matter of basic ethics and decency.
For instance, autistic inertia means that it’s harder for autistic people than it is for other people to stop, start, and change activities.
After your loved one receives a diagnosis of Autism, people may bombard you with (possibly unsolicited) advice for next steps. One such step you may actually want to consider is to seek the services of a Speech-Language Pathologist (SLP).
