Autism has never had just one face
🎧 Audio version in French, about 10 minutes.
Because this text is very personal, I chose to record it myself, with my own voice and my own intonation, rather than in a podcast format. It is my reading of the article, in French, if you prefer to listen.
When I look back at my path today, there are plenty of things that make me smile. Sometimes they make me wince too.
I think back to a colleague I worked with several years ago. A real ball of energy, if I can describe him that way and stay ''politically correct''. Always moving, always a thousand ideas at once, not always polite, sometimes blunt.
For a lot of people, working with him looked exhausting, almost impossible. And yet we made a formidably effective team. It worked. We understood each other.
I could not even explain exactly why.
Back then, I found it normal. Today, I wonder if we had simply found a natural way to meet each other, despite our different cognitive styles. Without analysis, without asking too many questions. Without a label. Without needing to justify anything. We just worked together.
I often think about that when we talk about neurodiversity. We sometimes try to understand what sets us apart, when a good part of our relationships is built around what lets us understand each other.
I have not forgotten that colleague. And he was far from the only one.
For years, I was drawn to the same type of people. Clients, to be clear.
Some conversations took an enormous amount of energy. Others gave me the feeling that I could think for hours without ever checking the time. I came out of those meetings stimulated. Calm too. As if we spoke the same language without needing to translate it.
Back then, I had no explanation for it. I only knew that I felt good with those people. That is all.
Then the years went by. My son received his diagnosis. I kept learning. Observing. Reading everything I could get my hands on.
And slowly, a question settled in. It came from an unexpected place: my clients. I recognized myself in the paths of several of them.
For a long time, I thought autism looked like something very specific. I did not recognize myself in that portrait.
My son, yes.
Me, no.
I had built a career I loved. I had led teams. I had grown in stimulating environments where my strengths had a place. I could see certain challenges in my daily life, but nothing that looked like the image I had of autism.
So I kept going.
The real questioning came much later. When I became an entrepreneur.
Looking back, I realize how many structures that helped me function had disappeared at the same time. Schedules were no longer set for me. I had to create my own markers, to decide alone what mattered.
And some things that had always taken a lot of energy became impossible to ignore.
I started to search. To listen. To ask questions.
Then I ended up noticing something. The people I clicked with most naturally were living things that spoke to me.
A family resemblance, a familiar language.
With them, I could jump from one idea to another without losing anyone. No need to explain every detour of my thinking. I felt understood.
And I had never really taken the time to ask myself why.
For a long time I looked for what set me apart from those people. Their challenges were not mine. What my son was living did not reflect my experience.
So the conclusion seemed obvious to me. We were different.
Today, I think I was only looking at part of the picture. I was mostly comparing what was visible. I was not always looking at what was happening under the surface.
The tiredness of always having to adapt. The need to understand how a system works before feeling at ease in it. The feeling of being very competent in some contexts and completely thrown off in others.
And the more I learned, the more some of my certainties started to crack. One of the most important ones was about empathy.
Because I had grown up with the same idea as a lot of people. Autistic people were said to lack empathy. I had heard it so often that it had become obvious.
Then I came across the double empathy problem, developed by Damian Milton and taken up in particular in a guide by the organization Sphère on neuromixity in the workplace. I love that word by the way, '' neuromixity ''
I reread some passages several times. They shook something I had believed to be true for a long time.
The idea is so simple. And that is what stunned me.
For a long time, a misunderstanding between an autistic person and an allistic person (the word means a non autistic person) was seen as the autistic person's fault. They were the one who was not picking up on things.
Milton turns that completely around. Neither one picks up on the other. Each struggles to read the other, like two people who do not share a mother tongue.
We have simply never asked more than one of the two sides to do the translating. So that is the problem and the solution at the same time. There it is!
And then I thought back to those conversations where I spoke the same language as the other person, without having to translate. That was exactly it. A meeting where, for once, nobody had to walk the whole way.
That is probably why some sentences hit me differently today. Sentences I have heard about my son.
'' I would never have guessed he is autistic. ''
'' He is so warm. ''
'' He is so expressive. ''
The worst one of all; '' and yet he is so intelligent ''
I know these comments are usually well intentioned. I am not questioning that. But over time, I started to hear something else behind those sentences.
As if there were a way to look autistic. As if autism had one precise face. And when someone does not match that image, many people have a hard time making room for another reality.
I think that is where something changed for me. I understood that prejudice about autism does not live only in books or in the media. It also lives in the images we carry without knowing it.
For a long time, I carried some too.
There are also all those people who do not recognize themselves in the descriptions they read. The ones who tell themselves: '' That is not me. '' Maybe their reality is different. Maybe the portrait is also incomplete. Maybe they are just not there yet.
And the further I go, the more what interests me are the encounters. What happens when two people really try to understand each other. The double empathy problem gave me words for that. But above all, it changed the way I see.
Today, when I think about autism, I think about my son. I think about that colleague, and about others I have met over the years. I think about several of my clients. And yes, I think about myself.
None of these people look exactly like the image I had in mind a few years ago. And that is probably what I needed to learn.
Maybe I spent my time looking for what made us different, when the real question was to understand what let us recognize each other.
Autism has never had just one face. We are the ones who sometimes forgot to look at the whole picture.
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The double empathy problem was developed by Damian Milton, a British autistic researcher. Some of the reflections in this article were inspired by the guide from the organization Sphère on neuromixity in the workplace.
Also worth reading: Succeeding in an interview when you are neurodivergent
Also worth reading: Interviews when you are autistic: the complete guide
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