I saw a meme about autistics often having a pathological fear of making mistakes.

 

I don’t know any autistics with a pathological fear of making mistakes.

 

I don’t know any autistics with a pathological fear of making mistakes.

 

For those in the back, I don’t know any autistics with a pathological fear of making mistakes. 

 

Every autistic I know lives in the midst of people who are at least somewhat successful in neurotypical society (not all of whom are neurotypical; we do this to each other) who have a set of arcane, frequently nonsensical or contradictory, and utterly unspoken rules in their head. These rules are invisible to autistics and I swear some of them just get made up on the spot to justify “I feel bad and I am blaming it on you.”

 

Autistics inevitably and without any awareness break these rules.

 

Then comes the punishment. Some of these punishments are mild and some are devastating. Which, because the rules are a freaking secret, is in effect random punishment. You can’t predict it, you certainly can’t avoid it, and you can’t usually even learn from it because it doesn’t make sense.

 

I know an awful lot of autistics who have a perfectly reasonable fear of random punishment. We have learned to frame it as us making mistakes, but it is the dread we have learned will come if we “make mistakes,” the closed rooms and the fists, the shattered friendships, the grief in our existence we learn to recognise in our parents. It’s not the “mistakes,” it’s the punishment.

 

I pointed this out and someone said, yeah, that should be rephrased.

 

It should not be rephrased.

 

The people with relative power here should not get to build and maintain a social environment which is inaccessible to other people and punish those to whom it is inaccessible and pathologise perfectly human responses to that oppression. And these are not just two alternate ways of looking at things. If you punish a living creature randomly, this is what you get. Learned helplessness — the awareness that you cannot protect yourself — and emotional harm — because nobody can comfortably live that way. The creature, whether human or not, fears what harms it and which it cannot defend itself against.

 

And here’s the thing: you aren’t innocent. Nor am I. Because we all do it to each other. All of us. Without necessarily intending to or knowing about it (although sometimes you realise it later, or at least I do). I hurt, I blame you and retaliate a little or a lot; or I hurt, I am distracted from gentleness and am rough with you. It’s human. It has to be actively resisted. And even then we will fall short. Every one of us is implicated.

 

I had a friend tell me earlier this year that they are afraid they will hurt me. Well, yeah, if we stay friends it is gonna happen. It always happens. And I am gonna hurt them too. I really don’t want to but I will. The test of friendship is in the aftermath, the trust, amends, and forgiveness. But I have faith in this friend because I have watched the conscious gentleness with which they treat others. I want to be more like this person. I want to be friends with them. I want the world their existence suggests is possible to come to pass.

 

If you have a little red wagon and you take it everywhere, and sometimes it gets away from you and bangs into things, because that happens, and sometimes when you are loading rocks in they are heavy and you drop them rather than placing them gently, and sometimes you leave it outside in the rain, and once you dropped it off the garage roof to see what would happen (and then, okay, then you did it a few more times because the clang was tremendous), and after 7 or 8 years you look at it, there are going to be dents and scrapes and rusty bits. Those aren’t pathological. It’s just what happens when you are a wagon in daily use in a rough life, and what happens even more when some little twerp starts dropping you off garage roofs.

 

So much of what gets pathologised in neurodivergent people is just the dents and scrapes and rusty bits that come from being neurodivergent in a world built for NT’s, or even just from being human in a world that is at least as rough on humans as it is on well-used wagons.

 

If you blame the wagon for the dents, if you have professionals giving lectures on the distressing tendency of wagons to develop dents, if you start staging interventions on every shiny Radio Flyer you can identify to stop them developing dents while you are still dropping them off the roof and running programs to get dented wagons to polish themselves up, you know what happens? You completely miss what you are seeing. (But you build a certain number of exciting careers.)

 

Wagons are not sentient. You do not harm a wagon by pathologising it in your grant proposal and going on a lecture tour telling wagon owners about all the things they need to do to stop the wagon from developing the behavior of dents, even if you insist one of the things they should do is spend 40 hours a week dropping it down a ravine to get it ready to be dropped off a roof.

 

Even so, if you want your wagon to be as pristine as possible, be gentle with it.

 

Autistics, much as everyone misses the fact, are human. Hurting people to stop them behaving like they have been hurt has a moral component to it that banging up your wagon to keep the paint job fresh does not have. And if you want a person to be undamaged, step one is to try not to damage them. Nobody stays factory-new and shiny very long, and no matter how careful you are there will be some things you cannot avoid, but you can make choices within the range of what is possible in human relationships.

 

So let’s skip the feel-good memes about our so-called pathological fear of mistakes, which is actually a healthy response to a pathological situation, shall we?