But You Don’t Look Autistic at All (Bianca Toeps’ Books)

by Bianca Toeps

We close ourselves off to stimuli, and then get blamed for not having any empathy.

The notion that people with autism might experience more stress due to a day that’s been planned down to the hour (because the more that’s been planned, the more that can go wrong) is lost on them.

This is also referred to as the autistic burn-out: someone who was previously able to speak in coherent sentences, suddenly can’t utter a single word or bursts into tears at the slightest change. It’s the result of years of asking too much, of hiding and of “acting normal”. The person in question shuts down and seems to become more autistic. But that’s not the case: The person was always this autistic, they just ran out of energy to hide it.

Usually the person who seems to be functioning just fine, the one who appears to be doing well in society, is fighting to just keep their head above water.

I still keep hitting my own limits – it’s just that they always seem to be a bit closer than I’d hoped.

You need to eat at least three times a day, but you can’t eat the same thing every day. All that planning, decision making, grocery shopping and preparing causes many autistics a lot of stress.

Are women better at camouflaging, or do they face more severe consequences if they don’t?

According to Jasper, there should be a network where autistic people can go to for help at any point in their lives. If they require some extra care for a while, the intensity is increased. If things are going well, care can be scaled back. But care is always within reach.

People who have recently been diagnosed with autism often don’t even know their own boundaries anymore; the uncomfortable feeling is so omnipresent, that listening to it seems like an impossible task.

we can’t even tell anything’s the matter with you!”

“I don’t have plans, I have options.”

She didn’t have to, but she could.

“I have a list in my phone of things I could do one day,

They have a better view of what’s really going on, rather than making assumptions.

I’ve personally never felt quite represented by the label ‘woman’. I wouldn’t want to change myself, but I also won’t be forced into meeting certain expectations.

To be clear: I have no issues with my biological sex, it’s fine with me that my passport says Female and I’m also OK with people addressing me with ‘she’ and ‘her’, but somewhere deep down, I think: whatever. I’m not a part of this. I’m just happy to live in a time and a country where that’s barely an issue. I feel pretty much the same way when it comes to relationships. I’m attracted to both men and women, am intrigued by polyamory and although I’m in a relationship at the moment, we don’t live together.

if you don’t automatically pick up on how I’m doing and don’t actively check either, and if you only act when you see me cry – that’s too late. Way too late.

there’s an app called Emergency Chat, which shows the reader a message explaining that the person in front of them is experiencing a meltdown.

This might also be the reason why we bump into table corners more often than the average person, and regularly drop things.

Is it possible to want things to improve, but to shrug things off at the same time? The answer is yes.

I’m an idealist when it comes to society, I’m a pragmatist on a personal level.