I had a sudden realisation about spiky skill sets and the reasons that autistic people have problems recognising their own remarkable skills as anything other than ordinary (to them). I had this thought while thinking about octopuses, and their ability to go through tiny gaps because their bodies are unlike most other corporeal bodies.

So with a spiky skill set you might have wonderful talents in one thing, and on the other hand, difficulties with doing other things which are expected of you. Autistic people, for example, might have longer processing time for almost everything, because that’s the way our neurology works, but its likely to be more juicy at the end of it, or we might have bigger needs for resting, looking after our minds and bodies, or have stronger reactions to sensory things which make some activities stressful. So all of this translates into things you’re not skilled at, like multi tasking, or being in noisy environments while holding a meaningful conversation, etc.

But we are only human, and this is where I want to make my point. One way that autistic people mask is that we need, we yearn for, instinctively, like everyone else, acceptance in our tribe, support from our elders, safety in our social sphere. So when an autistic person in an ordinary circumstance displays a particular skill (say a natural eye for photography), they’re unlikely to get much attention about it. They’ll get a bit of interest, but no one seems amazed at just how weird this is. However, they will be picking up on an almost constant pressure, both overt and covert, to pull themselves up on their ‘deficiencies’. ‘Pull your socks up’, ‘just try harder’, ‘be more organised’, etc etc. So what the autistic person does (if they can) is begin to pull themselves towards this middle band of normalcy, because that’s the message they’re getting all the time. Pull that outlandish skill downwards, and pull up your own actions towards the band. Ignore your needs, learn to dissociate if you need to to in order to ‘function’ within that central band. The stress and strain of the pulling upwards is exhausting, and that is called masking. But the pulling down of your skills is also a form of masking.

And now I think its a bandwidth, or a spectrum issue. That the middle bandwidth literally cannot perceive of things outwith that spectrum. Like cats’ hearing. We humans just don’t hear a lot of the sounds which they do. And, actually, with animals, humans are so arrogant that we also don’t care about that actually, and assume intelligence is only something which looks just like us – (this is a whole other subject which some people are discussing right now).

Imagine, as a way for Autistic people to flourish, we had our own kind of autistic nursery, just for us. I don’t mean in a Brave New World kind of way, removed from our families, and obviously its bad news to start separating people out into types. But all this begins in early childhood. And I know this idea would be unpopular, because it’s generally considered ‘good’ for autistic kids to be exposed to the kids in the middle, to show them how it ‘should’ be done. But, in this nursery, the spikes would be understood, relieved and encouraged, and that would be accepted as their normal mode of being, so we would learn how to reach up to and enjoy those high spikes, and live with and respect, those low spikes. We wouldn’t spend all of our precious energy pulling them up and down to fit into this middle band we’ve been told over and over again is the superior, the proper place to be – ie the ‘norm’.