Below is the transcript of the podcast interview I did with Natasha Golding about my book The New Normal: Autistic musings on the threat of a broken society with references to my poetry collection Existence.
The podcast can be found here, and both books are available on Amazon here.
Natasha Golding
Hello, David. I guess we could pretend that we’re just saying hello to each other when actually we’ve been talking for 10 minutes. I’m Natasha. And we’re here today to talk about The New Normal: Autistic Musings on the Threat of the Broken Society, which is a new book by David Gray-Hammond. David’s also released a poetry book at the same time. So we’ll be talking a little bit about the connection between those.
I am somebody who follows David’s work and likes having conversations so I asked him if he wanted to do this. So we worked on the idea together. And I am a pale skinned white woman. Well no, I’m not really a woman. I’m non binary, but I got used to saying it because I can’t deal with explaining non binary to people all the time. So I have kind of so called ‘mousy brown’ hair that’s off my face and in a bit of a quiff. And I’m wearing a cream, like traditional fisherman’s jumper and I’m in an attic room with a chair and some coats hanging behind me. And I’m not used to doing this description. So I might have missed some information out. David, do you want to do your introduction and then let me know there’s anything else I need to say?
David Gray-Hammond
So i’m David Gray-Hammond, I’m a white person of Mediterranean decent I have a shaved head, a beard, thick rimmed glasses, a lip piercing and a ear piercing. I’m sat in a room with blue walls with curtain. Next to a bookcase covered in books. Yeah, that’s about it really.
Natasha Golding
Yeah, so I don’t have glasses. On and I haven’t got any jewellery on particularly. And my room is white with a grey thing. A grey carpet. I am autistic and I’m also neurodivergent, I have attention differences and I have a Dyslexic mind. And I have experienced periods of great mental and emotional distress. And I come from some folks that are survivors of psychiatric abuse, amongst other things, And yeah, that’s kind of like my neurodivergency. I’m also getting to talking about this. I’m a survivor of childhood abuse, our familial abuse as well as general neurodivergent abuse. So that’s my kind of history and what I bring to today. David, do you want to just introduce yourself as the author, and what you come from.
David Gray-Hammond
I’m David Gray-Hammond, I wrote the book The New Normal: Autistic Musings on the Threat of a Broken Society. I’m autistic, attention differences. I have schizophrenia. And I mean, I’ve done a lot of stuff. I sort of started out as an independent consultant in a voluntary capacity working for a branch of the charity Mind, representing the treatment rights of neurodivergent drug users, working with clinical commissioning groups and regulated death routes. Harm Reduction, that sort of thing. I’ve done drug market profiles in my home city of Brighton analysing different markets for Brighton. I have been writing a blog since about the beginning of 2018. And that sort of how I got to this point today. That’s where it all started. Really. I’m a former Chief Operating Officer of Neuroclastic regular educator at Aucademy and I also host their podcast. I am one of the co-authors of the Creating Autistic Suffering Neuroqueer series with Katie Monday. That probably gives you a good idea of who I am. I also run my own business DGH Neurodivergent Consultancy.
Natasha Golding
Great. I picked up on ‘having schizophrenia’ because I wanted to ask you what that means to you? And then relate that to essays in the book that talk about mental health as part of neurodivergency? So could you tell us what having schizophrenia means to you?
David Gray-Hammond
For me, it’s complicated, actually. Because when I’ve had psychotic episodes, I have often described myself as being unwell. And I’m not convinced that inaccurate because psychotic episodes are terrifying. They’re not good for your wellbeing. That said, being schizophrenic in itself I view as a form of acquired neurodivergence. You know I experienced excessive trauma throughout my life and it seems almost logical inevitability, that something like this would arise within me. You know, I accept that. I have a brain, I already had a brain that functioned differently to everyone else’s. And this is just another way that it functions differently. For me, it largely looks like you know, I hear voices. You know, I might have the occasional visual hallucination I do take medication for it. I have a back and forth relationship with with my medication. Because medication for schizophrenia is not pleasant. But it does seem to reduce the frequency with which I have episodes. And I guess mainly, I’ve come to peace with the fact that it’s there. I don’t necessarily like the fact that I can slip into these alternate realities that my brain comes up with. But I strongly feel that it needs to be recognised as a form of neurodivergence. Because so often we tell people with mental health issues that they are ill they are broken, that they need fixing, and I don’t think that actually helps their wellbeing. I think what we’re doing when we say those things is we’re putting the responsibility on to the person and we’re not calling out the structures in society around them that led to those mental health and wellbeing issues.
Natasha Golding
So I think that kind of nicely takes us to the topic of the book, which is exactly about this. It’s not broken individuals but the thing that we live in is broken – that the systems and structures that we live in are broken. In a sense my route into neurodivergence is through mental health. I used to work in the voluntary sector many years ago, and when the hearing voices network was beginning about 20-25 years ago. Not beginning but when it was in its, you know, it’s in different sort of stage of history. And that’s when I was sort of first introduced to these ideas about social models of disability and the idea of mental illness as trauma responses.
So it’s been really good to sort of see how that has grown. And then kind of see how, yeah, see how it crosses over because my understanding was that neurodivergence has always included that understanding. But it tends, maybe whilst we’re trying to sort of promote the idea that we have a sort of strengths based approach to neuro differences, that we’re kind of leaving out the acquired neurodivergence. Or I don’t know that it sometimes feels like, trying to keep ourselves away from it or I don’t know. So that yeah, that’s a thing that I think goes on and you talk a bit about in the essays in the book. I need to talk about …I’m a bit, I’m way more nervous than I thought I was gonna be. So this is fun. I am going to use my script.
My experiences of the book, like, I sometimes feel like some stuff is like fresh air. It kind of like makes me feel nourished. And it’s sort of, it’s almost like, because I don’t read with eye words, I would like …my friend recorded it for me. And so it’s almost like, whenever I need some, some scaffolding for my own advocacy, I can listen to this. It’s like this amazing like source of of like neurodivergent pride. And I personally find it really liberating. It’s also theoretical, which I love, like because it helps me understand how things work. But I like the self-reflective parts as well the way that you then also talk about the essay and where it came from and how you feel about it. So I’m interested in how did you come to make the book – so you said there was blogging happening? So it’s been a sort of extension of that. But why did you get to the moment of like, “Oh, I think I’ll make a book”?
David Gray-Hammond
I started blogging, sort of, in the 2017 beginning of 2018. And since then, I mean, I’ve I’ve probably written a couple of 100 different blog pieces on my website. And when I first started, I wasn’t really doing it with essentially anyone reading it. It was more just like a cathartic exercise for myself. But then people started finding my writing and in particular, a very helpful person called <missing word> came across my writing and invited me to their Facebook group. And at this point, I was just like walking in and I was like, there is an entire community of us and I did not know that this was here. It was a really important moment because suddenly then the Autistic community were aware of my writing, and I was like. You know well I have bit of responsibility now to make sure that I am <missing word>.
So I started just absorbing information. I was spending time in the group in like various Facebook groups that reading blogs reading research, just absorbing all the information I could. And I was just, I was using my blog, the emergent divergence blog to sort of…it was how I was processing that information. So as I learned something, I would write about it. And I often say I don’t know my opinion on something until I’ve written it. So it was helping me sort of put everything into context of my own life, other people’s lives, and gain a better understanding. And over the years, as I said, I was accumulating a lot of these posts and shortly before I put the book together, I hit 50,000 views on my blog. So I was like, ‘Okay, so a lot of people who’ve been reading this now’. So I always wanted to write a book, but I didn’t think I was able to do it. I didn’t think I’d have the patience to sit and write a whole book. But as it was, I had this idea. And I looked at some of these posts. I’m really proud of them, but they’ve not necessarily been the most popular posts and I suspect it was because, you know, in the blog format, people don’t often go out there and to expereince theoretical approaches. So what I did was I took I sort of thought of this theme of looking at society and how society as a structure was sort of broken by design and I took them off of my website and I started rewriting them. And as I was rewriting them, I was collating them all into one document before I realised “What! I’ve written a whole book”.
So as you’ll see, you’ve probably seen the self reflection I talked about the fact that some of the essays you know, I had previously written and rewritten.The book itself is actually based on the original essays, off of my emergent divergence blog. But, but what I did was just rework and rewrite them because some of them are years old. I’ve learned a lot more since then. So I’m going to go back and sort of be bringing new life into them. Incorporate my new knowledge I’ve learned a year since writing some of them. I chose the topic of looking at a broken society because when I look around the autistic people in my life the one thing that we all have in common, despite being individuals, one thing we really have in common, and I think it’s one of the we can talk about in a second, but really one of the main shared experiences of being autistic I think is the fact that society is not nice to us. We talked about ‘you know aAutistics living in a neurotypical society’. What we don’t talk about is the fact that that society was designed to keep us out on purpose, because we don’t fit these neuronormative ideas. When you look at the history of, especially European culture and separate culture, as developed, people who are different from what was considered “normal”, in inverted commas. We are boxed out on purpose, and I wanted to highlight that. You’re probably thinking, you know, not just how does this affect our well being? How does this affect our sense of self, our sense of identity? How does this affect Autistic culture? Because whether people like to admit it or not, there is such a thing as Autistic culture.
Natasha Golding
In my experience because I get to Autistic identity at the age of I think 43. So, the issues around me up until that point had been issues of self identity, because basically, you know, for my understanding, you construct yourself through your interactions with the world. So essentially, if your interactions are never quite being perceived or understood, how do you construct yourself? So the whole thing is a sort of, you know, like a terrible instability. And my understanding of it had been that, like, it’s not a broken like, it’s not as if the system gets together and thinks to itself, let’s fuck those people over. It’s more that you know, like in terms of system theory that the purpose of the relationships and the purpose of the system necessarily create the problem. Because I think when we talk about “you know it’s a system problem”, people think of like, people in a room planning to make life difficult for autistic people, but it’s like a negligence rather than a conspiracy. Do you know what I mean? And that that’s helped me to sort of make more sense to other people when I talk about in those terms, and I think that’s the the thing that’s useful about your book that I almost feel like I’m getting language that I can then use to tell other people. So it helps me build understanding in my community. Because I think one of the difficult things about autistic experience is not having a language to access your culture. So there is an autistic culture but you don’t, you can’t be in it. Because you’re you’re used to having to be in somebody else’s. You know, this kind of thing. So…
David Gray-Hammond
You’re absolutely right. It’s not a question of people sat down in like a little war room. Right. How do we screw over the Autistics? I talked about this in the book, you know – that we live in a capitalist society which is profit driven. So of course they’re going to want people who create a profit thereafter. Autistic people need accommodations to fulfil a role. And if that’s perceived to reduce profits, then, of course, the system that we exist in is going to be discriminatory against us because if the goal of the system is creating profit, we’re actually costing money, then, you know, we’re going to be perceived differently by that system and treated differently by that system. But fundamentally, I just …I wanted the book to be somewhat of a call to arms that you know, we can be aware of our place in the current system, and we have a choice already. We can either accept it and carry on living in that system. Or we can, as Nick Walker puts it, throw away the Masters tools, dismantle the system, to the best of our ability and rebuild it into something that works for everyone.
Natasha Golding
Well, this was another thing that interests me about getting more involved in a sort of Autistic pride. Because that, I’m pretty sure that quote is from Audre Lorde. I think, I think it’s Audrey Lorde. So making the connection between other movements of liberation. It’s been an important thing for me, and I guess I wanted to ask about that. Sometimes when I kind of go,’ it’s not us, the system’s broken’, that there’s a sense of like, ‘how’s that helpful?’ So how do you …because I personally find it very stimulating and, like, just describe a call to arms to go to ask the system. So have you come across that problem that people kind of go ‘I don’t want to know that’. That you know, in a sense, it’s easier for them to go ‘no, I’m the broken one’. This happens a lot. I think in mental illness people are more comfortable with ‘no I’ve got the disease’ theb they are with ‘no I was driven mad by what happened to me’. Do you have anything to say on that like how does a broken society liberate us?
David Gray-Hammond
I think the main liberating factor in understanding that society is the thing that is broken and not the individual. Is that it takes that sense of responsibility off of us to do something about it, let me let me try to explore a different angle. We are neurodivergent. Nothing we can do is going to make us not neurodivergent. That’s, that’s what being neurodivergent is we are neurodivergent and we will be neurodivergent until we’re gone. Society doesn’t have to stay the same. So we can either think that our neurodivergent is this big problem in us that we can’t do anything about, or we can understand that society is the problem. And realise that if we want to, if we have the capacity to – and whatever that capacity looks like is valid – , but if we want to and have the capacity to, we can do something about society. That really liberates me.
Natasha Golding
Yeah, me too. And I’ve during times of Autistic burnout, I’ve had times of great hopelessness and despair, which I’m deliberately avoiding calling depression because I think depression is a political problem. Because it’s an individualised illness. It’s not a description of the experience anymore because the language has changed. And I remember having like this idea of like, me being frontline, like if we’re here to sort of help change the world. It’s like, well, at the minute, the only world is me. So my responsibility today is to get this human body through the day without it, getting to the point where it thinks it needs to be removed from the earth. Or you know, like so that the world sort of shrinks. But I think the culture we live in tends to view us as not included in the world that needs changing is what I mean, we tend to see it as like, I’m gonna change the world that happens outside of me, it’s not to do with me. Does that make sense? Have you had experience of your workd being just you?
David Gray-Hammond
This idea of otherness. So society, whether it’s done intentionally or not, has created this sense of otherness around neurodivergence we are othered to the mainstream. And see, one of the things that can really make us feel a great deal of despair is ‘okay. I feel very liberated that society is broken, but how do I fix it from the outside?’ But you’re not actually on the outside of the system. If we where, the system probably wouldn’t be doing the harm it’s doing to us. The reason the system is doing the harm it’s doing to us is because we are very much in the system. We exist among the structures of society, no matter how much we try to distance ourselves from it. We live in civilizations, we live in various cultures around the world. We are all part of that culture’s!structures and systems. And so we have been othered and we can feel a great deal of despair about that. But it’s important to recognise that we are actually still part of culture, we can work from the inside to change those structures.
Natasha Golding
Makes me think about you, you talk in your explanations of ableism and how ableism functions and the connection between racism ableism sexism. I wondered, like, what was your route to…Was there a time where you had more internalised ableism and what’s your route to sort of learning what you’ve learned and that you share in the book on that?
David Gray-Hammond
I am going to be complelty honest. I used to have a great deal of internalised ableism, there was a time… if people search hard enough on the internet, they will find an article I wrote for a particular [word misding] that I refuse to write for anymore, where I talked about the fact that I would take a cure if it was offered to me. I you know, I’ve been writing longer than I’ve been in the Autistic community, and as such, it’s taken me it’s only been in recent years, I’ve really done the work to start dismantling that internalised ableism and like anyone else, I still have a great deal of internalised ableism inside me.
Just like you know, I’m a white person I benefit from white supremacy, you know, we all have sort of these bigoted views conditioned into us to an extent whether we had to admit it or not. And it’s been really tricky trying to search out especially the ableism and try and catch it so I can go right. Why do I think this because I can extend compassion to literally everyone else. But I’m still using this very abelist view of myself. And it’s interesting trying to work out where it comes from.
Natasha Golding
And that’s a process that you seem to do in your writing, right? That’s what you sort of testify but its purpose is really,
David Gray-Hammond
Yeah, that book really, really had a good purpose for me, in helping me further dismantle some ideas that I had about myself. It really helped me come to terms – especially with my aquired neurodivergence, the schizophrenia and that. It really helped me through that because I was actually I mean, I started hearing voices when I was 18. I’m 32 now and I only got my diagnosis this year. So it’s been 14 years of psychosis without a diagnosis. So I’ve been coming to terms with various forms of ableism that I have in my life and writing that books helps me pick it apart. And then once I picked it apart, I was able to take all the different parts and kind of lay it out for everyone to see. If this is a problem we all have. I was able to take my experience and perhaps try and create a map that others can use that
Natasha Golding
Yeah, I feel like that happened in the book for me, so thank you. I wanted to make the connection. We’re talking about sort of theoretical and reflective writing because obviously different sorts of writing and I think… yeah, I was interested in… because I really like theoretical, but because I pass as a woman. I’m not allowed to be theoretical, don’t if you knew that David [sarcasm], but it’s a gendered activity. So I …poetry, I’m allowed to be poetic. That’s the rules of the genders as I’ve experienced them. So you wrote a poetry book as well. So I wondered how …Yeah, what your experiences with those dichotomies of theoretical poetic and how you’ve used that?
David Gray-Hammond
I’m very much of the opinion thay. And this might sound quite extreme to some people – theory is an art form. it requires creativity. People don’t just like, it’s not like you’ve just got a machine putting together theories like you need to have that creative mind in order to understand theory and build on theory and create new theory. For me releasing the poetry book around the same time as the essay anthology was I wanted to prove I’m not a ‘one trick pony’ as they would say. You know, I love writing poetry. I will say when I write poetry, and this is probably one of my more annoying habits if you’re a diehard poetry snob, I refuse to follow any particular poetic rules.
Natasha Golding
halkelujah
David Gray-Hammond
I don’t rhyme. I don’t use things like iambic pentameter, not on purpose anyway, you know, I mean, I’ve got A levels in English literature and all sorts but I refuse to write to poetic, because it’s art, such an expression of me and me is kind of chaotic, honestly. So I wanted to show that I’m releasing sort of together because both sort of talking about the same thing. One is theoreticsl, the other one is typically artistic. I wanted people to look at them together and go ‘these things are just as valid as each other’. But so often, especially when it comes to art, people are like, ‘oh, we need to throw all the funding into the sciences into research and development’, but actually we can learn just as much from creative endeavours, as we do from a very strict academic research development theory. Not everyone is gonna want to access academia. Academia is famously inaccessible to just about everyone including the people who work in it. But art is for everyone. Everyone. I just wanted to kind of prove a point. So I released the two together. Yeah, yeah, that’s…
Natasha Golding
Me too I dont rhyme. What’s the name of the poetry book.
David Gray-Hammond
The poetry book is called Existence. And it’s a lot more personal than the essay anthology because a lot of it is based on my experience of society. And my experience of being neurodivergent
Natasha Golding
Thats an interesting clarification, though, because, like, how is theory…because to me, theory is personal like, I listened to your theoretical model, or I listened to a theoretical description of how something works in the world. I check whether it matches my experience of the world. And then I adopt it – it is very personal to me theory. It’s not.. but it is…it’s communal, because essentially, you read other people’s ideas and then you integrate them into your own. So how is it less personal to you?
David Gray-Hammond
This is a tricky question. Because neither of them are less personal to me. But the poetry collection itself is much more overtly personal to me. Like, if you imagine that the essay anthology is like I took the part of my mind that processes theory and sees whether it matches my experience and put that out there. Then the poetry collection is like I took a piece of my soul, or whatever you want to call it. So they’re both personal to me, but from different parts of myself.
Natasha Golding
That’s really interesting to make that destinction because I often get people tell me…my work website, somebody read it and told me ‘Well, it’s very personal’. And I was like, what’s that mean? That’s one of those moments where I need like a neurotypical translator.
David Gray-Hammond
I think its imporant to note. This is part of neurodivergent culture, we do things personaly. We can’t just be like, arbitrary and detach. Like, this idea that we will lack empathy and have no emotions. You’ve only got to read the stuff that we write, the things we say, anything that we do to realise that actually we are some of the most emotional and in touch with other people and ourselves, humans on the planet. Because I don’t know. I mean, I’ve seen sort of business things now that are very impersonal. They have no appeal to me.
Natasha Golding
No, and I think impersonal is somehow the wrong… to me it’s more …I was listening to Harry Harry, Harry Harry, Harry Thompson? Talk about the pervasive demand for autonomy, or PDA. And he was talking about the sacricity of living like how PDAers seem to live with a sort of like, seriousness or like, the significance of what they do is really high. And I totally relate to this. So I think pervasive, I’m like, yeah, really into autonomy. So it well, it has that sense of like, if I’m going to do this, I’m going to do it. With all meaning. Like I can’t do it with like, surface commitment, or do you know what I mean?
David Gray-Hammond
Yeah and i think…it brings to mind for me, and for want of a better word because I don’t really want to tie in with religion, but I think for neurodivergent people on the whole we’re very aware of like the sanctity of life. My mother’s a priest, she’s a priest in the Church of England, they have what they call the sacraments, which is like the bread, the wine and baptism, things like that. So there’s only quite I mean, I don’t really subscribe to any particular religion. I’m not particularly sure if I believe in anything or if I don’t want it. But I do see the way that we express ourselves is a form of sacrament because we are sharing literally the most personal thing we can with the world. If anything in this world is even close to be holy. I think it’s sharing yourself. And that’s why I believe and that is why I wanted to the essay anthology and the poetry collection come out together because I couldn’t share my wholel self without both of those parts.
Natasha Golding
Yeah, this makes a lot of sense. I wanted to ask about your experiences of so called impostor syndrome, which I’m working on the idea that people who don’t experience imposter syndrome are the ones that are actually sort of disordered, because essentially, imposter syndrome is the ability to perceive the way that space is modulated by power. So it’s the sensitivity to the fact that that people are going to restrict your power or your access to something. So thinking about like, your …when you sort of entered the institution of being a writer, or an author, or a poet, did you find that easy to get into those places, or did you find it? I’m curious about yeah, how your identity as a man affected it and you know whether you felt you had the legitimacy to say something?
David Gray-Hammond
ive long suspected II have some privilege I’ve been sort of unaware of, because I am a white cisgendered male Yes, I’m autistic and yes, I’m queer. But being a white cisgendered male does give you a fair bit of privilege in life, and I have not had many serious issues with people coming up saying like ‘Why have you said this, like this is harmful or this is wrong?’ Not many people have argued with me. That’s not to say no one has. I’ve had issues in the past with people intentionally misunderstanding my words. But I was lucky that it felt quite easy to start with the blogging because forst nonone was reading it and then the people that were reading it just seemed to love what I was saying.
I suspect perhaps it could be more difficult if I hadn’t been a white cisgendered male, you know, I would extend if you take my queerness out of the equation, which we commonly do hypothetical reasons. For all intents and purposes, I am the stereotype of an autistic person. I’m relativly clever. I’m white, I’m socially awkward. I’m male. They used to call me Sheldon as in Sheldon. Cooper from the Big Bang Theory. Back then, I thought it was really funny. It was only as I came to understand more about my Autistic Self, I was like, actually that really was not very funny. But it’s, I certainly have had privilege in where I am, I’ve had privileges throughout my life, and it’s really the only reason that I’m able to be here and be a published author.
Natasha Golding
And that’s really important to talk about because I sometimes talk with friends about like, our – I don’t know… noI think I can say this – to understand that the fact that we’re alive and neither heavily medicated in the mental health system and not physically harmed is very much to do with our class privilege, because our experience of interpersonal abuse, and that we’re protected from a certain level of violence because of our class. And to understand that you are not where somebody else is only because of the money and the education seems an important thing to acknowledge. You know, to sort of really feel how close you came. Do you know what I mean? Like how precarious… I think…
David Gray-Hammond
I didn’t have the privilege of money, unfortunately. I grew up like poverty line. I struggled for the best part of a decade in active addiction. We don’t tend to have plenty of money. We’re in active addiction. I have been in a psych ward twice. And that was not a pleasant experience. I’ve had things that have not been great in life, but it doesn’t detract from the fact that my experiences with those knob ratings could have been a lot worse if I didn’t have the privileges that I do.
Natasha Golding
And it’s …I think that understanding that I don’t know brings a certain complexity. It helps me take seriously precariousness. Which seems important. Yeah, it’s really …I’m looking at notes here to relate this to …
So we’re going to come to the end of the interview, and I just wanted to pick up one of the topics that comes up at various points in the essays. Which I struggle to pronounce…rhetoricity, and somehow the idea is around Autistic, the Autistics lacking rhetoricity? could you explain a bit about that?
David Gray-Hammond
So I mean, I was very much inspired by M. Remi Yergeau’s book Authoring Autism which is a book thats subtitle is liiterally ‘on rhetoric and neurological queerness’. And there’s this idea in the book that autistic people are either too autistic to be part of the conversation or not autistic enough and it creates this what what Yergeau refers to as ‘demi-rhetoricity’. We are both autistic and not the right sort of autistic. And therefore, doesnt matter what we do. We can’t inform our narratives. And I really wanting to highlight that in this book because I think it’s almost wielded as a weapon in society, for when, when minority groups try to speak out against a system that is oppressing them, that system will then come back with ‘well, your voice doesn’t count because of this reason’. That your voice doesn’t count because of that reason but in the case of autistic people, we will use the example of something that people in the autistic community talk about a lot is “martyr parents”, in inverted commas. Now, if you approach someone who falls into this particular stereotype, and say, “well, actually, I don’t think what you’re saying about your Autistic child is okay”. You know, they’ll come back well, “you’re not you’re not really Autistic. You’re not the same sort of autistic person as my child”. It’s, it’s very invalidating because, okay, we all have different experiences of divergence.
Because humans, we are all individual and we can’t even prove that we will have the same experience of being Autistic. The only the only way we kind of know we do is through observable behaviours and what we say out loud. We can’t go into someone else’s head and be like ‘Oh, yeah, this is very me’. But the same sense. Take for example, the non speaking community and because they can’t verbally communicate, what they want to say, people than invalidate them and basically say they are too Autistic for their opinions to count or their you know, they’ve got the wrong views on …in fact this is one of my pet peeves actually, is that a lot of non speaking people get excluded from the Autistic community for using the ‘wrong language,’. Language which they don’t get the opportunity to access. And I think it all comes down to this idea of demi-rhetoricity, you know, you’re either too autistic or not autistic enough. Even happens within the Autistic community and we need to just accept that being Autistic is being Auutistic. It’s not good. It’s not bad. It just is. There isn’t more Autistic or less Autistic, yet we can have various things going on around being Autistic, we can make it a more complex situation. Autistic people themselves are just Autistic. All of our voices are valid, and not everyone’s going to have a really helpful voice like any group there will be autistic people who have very harmful views. Because once again, we’re human beings. There are human beings out there who have some really harmful opinions and views. We should at least start from a place of assuming that everyone has somethin to contribute to accomplish it.
Natasha Golding
Sounds like a good place to close.
David
It does, doesnt it.
Natasha Golding
So yeah, I’m happy. It’s really good to experience autistic culture and those autistic voices. Getting to the moment in history where there’s books and there’s films and do you know what I mean? Like, yeah, it’s a good time for that. Thank you. Thank you for the conversation today. And thank you for the book. And is there anything else you want to finish up with?
David
No, no, I think we’ve had a pretty good conversation. Obviously, people can check out my blog where a lot of stuff started from emergentdivergence.com It’s also on Facebook. And if they really want to, they can check out my business page as well which is DGH Neurodivergent Consultancy. That yeah, thanks for having me come and talk your ear off.
Natasha Golding
But yeah, I am into getting my ears talked off. I think clearly your your consultancy and stuff is based around this deep understanding of how things are happening and not happening. So I’m glad that is there to sort of integrate the knowledge into other parts of the culture and the community its really cool. Thank you, David,
David
Thank you Bye.
Natasha Golding
Bye.
You must be logged in to post a comment.