Autistic Lawyer

Chapter 1
A Smörgåsbord of Diagnoses

On 15 March 2017, I was diagnosed with autism, ADHD, dyslexia, dyscalculia and right-hemispheric deficit syndrome.

I was thirty-three, and it was a Wednesday.

For me, autistic thinking and neurotypical thinking are like two different operating systems used by different smartphone brands. Each functions very effectively, however, they are ostensibly quite different. More importantly, they aren’t naturally compatible with one another without at least some kind of adaptation.

For years, autistic people just haven’t had that adaptation. Society has not understood their format or been able to convert behaviours and char- acteristics into reasons and explanations for neurotypicals, the so-called ‘normals’, who are the majority and ruling class.

In my experience, having autism and ADHD is like having a wife and a mistress, although I’m not always sure which is which as they can be subject to change, rivalry and the odd spat.

At times, these developmental disabilities mitigate one another, and sometimes, they battle for primacy. ADHD gives me a relentless supply of energy, quick thinking and a flurry of ideas. However, this is soon tempered by the autism returning the much-needed order, logic, caution and structure to my thinking and behaviour. They are a bit of an odd couple, really, but they’ve been together for decades and have learned to rub along.

When my ADHD is in full flow and in need of a harness, I feel like a charioteer, battling the reins against the pull of my horses. Sometimes, I don’t present as being particularly well-house-trained either, and it’s a wonder anything comes out of my mouth with any semblance of order. My brain feels like an internet browser with thirty pages open all at once. I occasionally have little or no ‘thought filter’, and whatever is in my head tends to get propelled from my mouth with the rapidity of a bullet, although I’m getting better at auditing the content as I get older (assuming I can catch it)!

I always thought honesty was the best policy, but surprisingly, that’s not true. ‘Autistic honesty’ and ‘regular honesty’ aren’t necessarily the same thing because when somebody asks a question in search of an answer, it’s not always honesty they’re seeking. They might be looking for reassurance or support. Now, I’m not saying that I’m incapable of offering the latter; however, it’s not my signature dish, so to speak.

When my autism is in the driving seat, I’m tense, intense, detail- obsessed, socially awkward and fraught with anxiety. In short, my ADHD is the accelerator, my autism is the brake and I’m a better motorist for hosting the two.

Increasing numbers of adults (especially women) and children are diagnosed as autistic. Whether this is because there is a genuine increase in numbers or whether it’s because awareness has improved and profes- sionals are just getting better at diagnosing, it’s difficult to say.

In my opinion, it’s the latter.

Those of us who are autistic haven’t just materialised; we’ve been around for years. While diagnostic improvements are being made, girls, in particular, have often been overlooked. This is not because autism is a male condition or because girls aren’t affected. I think it is because girls are more proficient at hiding their autism as well as presenting differently to boys. Professionals have largely worked from a male template, which I think accounts for many girls being missed.

I suspect this is why I wasn’t picked up until I re-entered higher education years after leaving university. Initially, I thought I was just a little rusty as I’d been out of a learning environment for some time, coupled with knowing that numeracy had never been my strong suit. However, I became increasingly aware that I was struggling with some relatively straightforward tasks while managing others along with the rest of my contemporaries.

When I decided to study law, I completed a law conversion course designed for people who already held a degree, although not in law, but wanted to become a solicitor or barrister. It’s a type of fast-track programme. The essential components of the law are condensed into this conversion course. Following the successful completion of this aspect of learning, one could then complete the Legal Practice Course (LPC) along with those who had studied law as an undergraduate to become a solici- tor. This is where legal skills such as drafting documents, interviewing clients, working with accounts and undertaking tax calculations are taught.

During my LPC, I was advised that I might benefit from an assess- ment. So, I saw an educational psychologist. I’d never previously under- gone any similar assessment. I was tested all day on many aspects of my intelligence, thinking and processing. When my results were shared with me, I had very mixed feelings.

As a child, I always felt very different from my peers. I hated going to parties and I didn’t like group games or events. I didn’t share in the interests of other children, be it in the latest doll or a cool new show on TV. This didn’t bother me, as most of my peers just got on my nerves.

Getting my diagnosis was not like seeing a doctor and being provided with a solution, treatment, referral, prescription, or reassurance that there was nothing wrong. That’s because if you present with a bacterial chest infection, you will be given an antibiotic, and you’ll probably be referred for an investigation if you've found a lump. However, on the face of it, once you receive your neurodivergent diagnosis (whatever aspect of neurodiversity that may be), nothing happens, and nothing changes for the most part.

A diagnosis is just that. It’s not a roadmap to explain how to manage your condition(s), and while you may now know that you’re autistic or dyslexic, especially as an adult, what’s changed? Several people asked me, “What will you do about it then?” Or they’d say, “What’s next?” At first, I just shrugged my shoulders because I was just pleased and some- what relieved to have some answers.

A diagnosis doesn’t facilitate any ‘solution’, but a diagnosis did provide me with an opportunity to get to grips with coping strategies. Although, I think I was naïve when I thought everybody would be helpful and supportive. Some people were, but some certainly were not.

Once diagnosed, part of me felt relieved that I finally had an explana- tion as to why I was how I was, and the many things I didn’t understand or I’d never heard of, I could go and read up on. But part of me felt saddened. I wondered what I might have achieved if I’d known earlier and coping strategies had been implemented. I’d never had extra time in exams or had people take time to explain things to me in an accessible or bespoke way, and that could have made things so much easier and less stressful for me. Instead, I’d just have to get on with it and rely upon my own coping strategies and determination to get where I wanted to be.

Having thought about this for some years, I believe I found out at the right time. I think having been diagnosed earlier with my ‘smörgåsbord’ in an era when even less was understood than it is now could have held me back. I think educational settings might have underestimated me or assumed that I couldn’t do things I could. That’s because, from what I discovered, my assessment results were quite unusual and extreme.

It took me a while to get to grips with my hefty report and one thing I learned through reading it was that autistic people often have what is called a ‘spiky profile’. This means that we can have things we’re really skilled at and also things we struggle with. So, when the results of assessments are plotted on a piece of paper, a neurotypical person will have a relatively straight horizontal line with perhaps the odd bump, peak or trough here and there. Conversely, I and others like me are likely to have results that go up and down on the page and look like lots of spikes, giving the appearance of a mountain range when the points are joined up. These peaks indicate things that we’re particularly good at, and the dips are a testament to the things we’re less skilled at or struggle with.

Following my assessment, I discovered that such things as my numeracy left me statistically in the bottom echelons of the population. Conversely, my abilities with language and vocabulary placed me at the top end. Seemingly, to have such a huge disparity in a set of results was very unusual.

I am either very good at something or very poor. By way of an exam- ple, I struggle with sequencing. For some people, sequencing could relate to alphabetical order, directions, how numbers relate to one another, or perhaps patterns in numbers. Which disability this relates to in me, I don’t know because when you have a smörgåsbord, or ‘buffet of disabili- ties’ to choose from, it’s difficult to know where one condition starts and another ends. This is also complicated because there are commonalities across conditions such as dyslexia and dyscalculia.

Nonetheless, it was particularly problematic for me in the workplace trying to explain to somebody that while I could write legally compli- cated and detailed representations for a client, or explain an intricate legal matter to somebody with cognitive difficulties, I couldn’t accu- rately put a court bundle of documents and papers together because of the problems I had with working out what went where, despite it being a straightforward task for many. I faced much criticism because some people thought I didn’t want to do it because I saw it as too menial. This certainly wasn’t the case. I found it incredibly difficult.

I suspect either being really good at something or really poor assisted the masking of my conditions and masked my difficulties to those around me. I shall explain more about masking shortly.

I think the starkness of the extremes of my report is also evident in my personality. If I were a food, I’d be a Scotch bonnet chilli, and if I were to be a haircut, I’d be a Mohican.

I feel that I have always been the exception to the rule. If a clinical trial consisting of one million people were to show that a medication worked in 99% of all cases, I would be in the 1% group.

I’m the ‘i’ before ‘e’ except after ‘c’ when that rule doesn’t apply, like with such words as ‘weird’, ‘feisty’ and ‘foreign’. When people say, “What usually happens” or “It should be fine”, you can guarantee it doesn’t apply to me. I am the person who needs two courses of antibi- otics because the ones given to the vast majority of people cannot get to grips with me. I was also born in the era of confectionery laden with sugar, additives and E numbers, and yet have no fillings in my teeth. In fact, I still have two baby teeth in situ!

Like most people in school, I’d gravitated towards subjects I was good at, such as humanities, but now, during my legal training, when I couldn’t pick and choose to play to my strengths, basic balance sheets, accounts and simple formulae for tax calculations were anathemas to me. I’d always loved learning about history and literature, and what bit I didn’t immediately grasp didn’t matter, because I had something else – a visual memory.

Pictorially, I could recall information and images and almost ‘replay’ them in my mind like a video. So, the discussion held in class around a concept or recalling the explanation given by a tutor to a student enabled me to ‘revisit’ things I hadn’t been able to grasp or process at the time.

I’d developed coping strategies without even knowing it. I’d remember where my fellow class members were positioned in which room and could even recall what clothing they wore at the time. I’d say my memory had compensated for many of my shortcomings in the classroom.

From a young age, I’d mastered memorising voluminous quantities of data. That information could be facts, routes, conversations, methods or exactly where my favourite chocolate bars were on the sweetshop shelf. My recall was seldom based on knowledge or understanding; it was based on pure visual memory. As a small child, I struggled as I had yet to hone this skill and make it work for me. I’d always possessed the ability, but mastering it as I got older would be essential if I was to keep up and get on.

As I aged, I passed exams through my ability to arrange everything I knew into a series of images on the revision page. That way, I could ‘read off’ from my mental picture gallery and ‘pull out’ whatever infor- mation I needed for the respective question and ‘plug’ it into my answer. I did this in the first instance by designing the page containing the revi- sion information to be ‘visually recall-friendly’. That way, I could ensure that it was accessible on command in an exam.

So, in some respects, I’d unknowingly devised coping strategies, but I’d also camouflaged a problem. That said, I’ve always preferred to see opportunities before problems, so I’ll say that I ‘upcycled’ the skill and made it work for me.

As a preschool child, I could find a house I’d been to with my mum just once before. Even if she couldn’t recall its location, I could. I remembered where the rows of shops were, the letter box locations, bus shelter positions and even the road signs, which I couldn’t yet read. I didn’t just remember them; I remembered them in respect of their proximity to something else memorable. Each object was a reference point to the next and I felt rewarded each time I was correct about the next refer- ence point. I’d think in pictures and do so to this day.

I can recall my auntie’s flat I entered at age two in graphic detail. I can still remember the exact floor plan and where furniture and orna- ments were located. The 1970s and 1980s saw a lot of multicoloured soft furnishings and carpets, and I remember the colour and texture of these, too. I would take the time to look at the individual swirls of different shades, tones and colours within the carpet pile and note how each fitted into the larger pattern. I can remember the red leather-topped drum stool in the kitchen corner and how I marvelled at its cylindrical shape. I can remember the heavily raised patterned sofa upholstery and the exact location of the cigarette burns. I didn’t know that they were fag burns, but I did wonder why there were dry, frilly circles at random intervals on the sofa, which didn’t appear to have a function or purpose.

I liked the orange with green ceramic tiles making up the surface of the coffee table and the half-full red glass Murano ashtray occupying the centre. As I recall the images, the smells return, too.

Curry powder.
Ammonia aromas began exactly two steps from the toilet door. Cigarette smoke, old and new.
Remembering minutiae was only the beginning. I could and still do

take enormous pleasure from things, particularly very small things, things which others may overlook. I can be mesmerised by a very partic- ular shade of colour, gripped by a single component of a smell or a taste of a wine or perfume and transfixed by a tiny section of a piece of music. In fact, when I first fall in love with a fragment of music, I can play that few seconds maybe fifty-plus times, until I know every element and nuance.

We’re still at the edge of understanding autism and its countless manifestations. What’s more, while some books and films have done much to raise the profile of autism on the whole, there are some people who assume we’re all savants. The vast majority of us are not and spend a lot of time saying, “How the hell am I supposed to know what day of the week it was on this day in 1863?”, or impolitely declining duplicitous offers to go to a casino and play Blackjack.

I don’t want the understanding of autism to be just limited to those with a special interest in those of us with a ‘special interest’. I’d like to enable a few more people to understand more about autism’s all-too- esoteric complexities.

Furthermore, everybody’s neurodivergence (be that autism, ADHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia, dyscalculia, etc.) is the same until it’s different, and it's always different.

That said, you don’t need to understand everything about every- body’s particular condition(s). You just need to work out what you need to know to work, live, get along with, help and support that individual, because every person is an individual. Don’t just see the conditions because there’s a person there, too.

Neurodivergent people need to fathom out their own coping strate- gies to get through the day, but this can take time. However, I think the same applies to the neurotypical person insofar as they need to develop almost secondary coping strategies because they need to understand how best to understand and, where necessary, help the neurodivergent person. So, I think we have to ‘help the helpers’ and equip them with a clear window of insight because, for too long, the glass has been opaque, and while some have been doing their best to clear the fog and drive away the mist, the ignorance of others has hindered us for long enough.

Increasing numbers of people are receiving diagnoses, and even more are in the wings. If I can improve understanding, challenge a few misconceptions and lay a bit of paving on an otherwise hazardous potholed path, then I shall be quietly pleased with myself.

Adjustments: Who’s making them for whom?

Regardless of the law, we help people with disabilities. We hope as human beings that society will make ‘adjustments’ for us because it’s the right thing to do. However, I’ve always thought that it was the other way around and that we, those of us who are neurodivergent, actually have to adjust for neurotypicals. This is because they are the mainstream, and we live in their world, which is governed by their terms of reference and what they think is ‘normal’.

Neurotypicals dictate and determine societal norms and how we should and should not behave or live our lives. They dictate what is expected and what is and is not acceptable. So, if I want to live in their multicoloured world with my black-and-white thinking, and fit in, and get through life, I need to change and become more ‘normal’, more like them.

So, who is making the adjustments for whom?

Many people will (and I think autistic girls are better than autistic boys in my experience) ‘mirror’ the behaviours of others who they think appear to know how it all works, which will enable them to integrate. Therefore, by ‘masking’ the more obvious features of their neurodiver- gence, they can spend less time with their head below the parapet, fit in and appear less odd. But masking comes at a price and is not without consequences.

Masking is when we feel the need, consciously or unconsciously, to go to considerable lengths to camouflage and suppress aspects of our personality and the manifestations of our neurodivergence. If you have met an autistic person in a social setting, they may well have been mask- ing, presenting a veneer of what they felt was the most appropriate way to behave in the current circumstances.

They could seek to mask these facets which could be stimming, (a repetitive movement used for self-regulation or self-soothing), talking about a special interest or avoiding social interactions. Examples of stim- ming can include hand and finger movements, rocking or jumping around. Stimming can also be less obvious, such as hair twirling or foot tapping. A special interest may change or may never change. It may be joined by other special interests, too. A special interest isn’t just a hobby or having a favourite television programme you love. It’s a highly focused interest which not only brings great joy to the autistic person, but can also help manage and regulate their anxiety. In a child, a special interest could be a subject such as the solar system, dinosaurs or an object like a toy car. It’s no different for adults, although the examples may change. The vast majority of autistic people will have a special interest. That said, what this is and how it changes and develops is as unique as the individual themself.

In my case, one of the things I try to mask is my poor eye contact. For so many neurotypicals, eye contact is the most natural thing to do. It’s expected and seen as a sign of sincerity, but for me, it’s excruciating. It feels like I’m having a laser pen shone in my eyes when I meet another set of human eyes. Strangely enough, though, I find animal eyes just fine.

We go to massive lengths to emulate the ‘normals’ in the hope that we can fit into their world and function in their atmosphere.

So, if we can minimise those features that make us stand out and frustrate our ability to comply with society's expectations, our lives may be a little easier. We may then be considered as a candidate for a job or an interesting task at work, or the person we’re attracted to may go on a date with us, or if we’re in school, we might not get picked on as much.

However, not everyone masters these coping strategies or even wants to. Some are tired of adhering to a set of unspoken rules they may not understand. Some feel they are inconsistent with their values, and some of us find them draining. Sometimes the mask slips too, because it’s so difficult to consistently maintain a façade, which is exactly what it is for most of us. Imagine somebody from the twenty-first century spending the rest of their life playing the role of Shakespeare’s Iago, or Othello or Hamlet – every day. But that’s what it can be like for us. We need to put on a ‘social costume’ and play a character who will fit in and not get ridiculed or picked on.

What’s more, as authenticity is so central to us and integral in our decision-making, we can feel like we’re being disingenuous by masking and that creates a real dilemma. We rely so much on the honesty and integrity of others because we naturally take things literally or at face value. Therefore, things need to be what they seem, because if they’re not, we’re liable to become seriously discombobulated.

Coping strategies

When navigating my way through the neurotypical world, I not only have to make adjustments for the ‘normals’, but I have had to develop various means of managing my own difficulties. This is to circumvent the all too numerous perils and pitfalls to avoid additional stress, because a neurodivergent life is a stressful and hazardous one.

I spend my days avoiding bright lights, loud or high-pitched noises, scratchy fabrics, clicking pens, being hot, socialising, small talk, hypocrisy and disingenuous people. I like vertical lists, order, clarity, detail, routine, punctuality, symmetry, honesty and limited contact with people, especially their eyes.

Life is full of all the things I try to avoid and the things I need are too frequently in short supply, so like many autistic people, I have developed coping strategies. These aren’t a magic pill nor do they mitigate the things which are most problematic to me; however, they do help to make my life a little bit easier in terms of crippling anxiety management and accomplishing tasks.

These coping strategies change as one travels on life’s voyage. I can do things now that I couldn’t previously grasp and while practice doesn’t make perfect, it’s made things good enough in my case.

By way of an example, I struggle enormously with my numeracy. I may deploy different means to achieve an end goal compared to the ‘nor- mals’ and I may not like undertaking the task, but I do like repetition and the pursuit of perfection. This at times extreme repetition of practice not only helps me manage my stress levels but also usually gets me where I need to be in terms of passing an exam or completing a task.

I particularly struggled with the accounting component of my legal training in the classroom, to the extent that I’d go through the examples handed out in class seventy-plus times at home, whereas my fellow class- mates had it mastered in a couple of practice runs. Nonetheless, I passed and looking at my results on paper, you wouldn’t think that I was any different from the other students, but if you knew what it had taken to get there, it was quite staggering.

While some people have been brilliant and have helped me more than I could ever have asked for, sadly I’ve had to deal with varying degrees of sneering, usually from people who should know better. That said, I always get there in the end, and the disappointing responses of others have unfortunately been a reflection of their shortcomings and not mine.