I spent half a century failing to understand the people around me, and being failed by them in return. Only my half of it ever got a name - and the name was wrong.
I did not know I was autistic until midlife. What I knew was the evidence: the jobs that ended, the rooms I could describe in detail but never enter, the friendships that turned out to be with the performance rather than with me. And one conclusion, drawn early and never questioned - that the fault was mine.
Five essays on a life explained late.
- Unmasked at Midlife - why a generation of autistic adults reached their forties, fifties and sixties without ever being seen, and why the answer, when it arrives, so often lands as grief rather than relief.
- Everyone Masks - conceding that impression management is universal, then asking what makes the autistic version cost more to run, buy less belonging, and fail more often than it works.
- The Loneliness Snowball - how isolation feeds itself, and why "but you like being on your own" is a disability being recorded as a preference.
- Rights You Have to Ask For - the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, handed over a counter you must walk up to and ask at, when asking is the disability.
- Take Me As I Am - an open letter to everybody who ever decided what I was.
This is not a recovery memoir and it is not a guide. It is an argument, sourced throughout, written by an autistic adult who found out late and then read everything. Where a claim rests on evidence, the evidence is named. Where it rests on one life, that is said plainly. Where the evidence could not be found, that is recorded too.
Written for three kinds of reader. The person who suspects. The person who already knows, and is somewhere in the long unpicking that follows. And the person who is not autistic, and who loves, lives with, works with, teaches or employs somebody who is.
That third reader is why this exists as a book. There is one finding inside with measured evidence behind it, and it is this: the only intervention that reliably works does not require the autistic person to do anything at all. It requires the people around them to know something.
Every essay here has been published free on the author's website. This is the version you can put in somebody's hands.
Silvino Rodrigues writes from Australia and has published five previous books on a single premise: that the work of understanding should not fall only on the person being misunderstood. He was identified as autistic in midlife, after a thirty-year career.
