Why Can't I Just Enjoy Things?: A Comedian's Guide to Autism

If the majority of the population were autistic, we would've had cruel research into why these damn non-autistics are so unempathetic; they force small talk upon others, they eat smelly food on the train, and they force everyone to constantly look them in the eyes. Truly, the behaviour of egomaniacs.

adding it to the seemingly endless list of repair jobs generated by the ancient, creaking house of my personality.

There will always be idiots but they are in the minority and never forget their greatest weakness: they are idiots.

also had issues with leftovers. Once food was finished being food for the first time it was, in my opinion, over.

It could also be the case that, if you are autistic, you were just more affected by the incident to begin with. A lot of events that are traumatic to autistic people are not to non-autistic people, and vice versa.

Then again, a few times in my life, I have experienced the thrill of genuinely being able to help someone through telling them something that no one else would. It’s a hell of a high, but a risky one.

What if the unfair person you are standing up to is part of the system? What if you get these boiling reactions to what you perceive as injustice but the person dishing out the injustice is a bouncer? Or a policeman? Perhaps it is an abstract moral ‘superpower’ but it’s also another way in which autistic people are vulnerable, especially those who are less able to mask or suppress their reactions.

Much easier to exist as some kind of wandering podcast host, endlessly interviewing people.

If you are particularly heavily masked for decades and from a traditional background, you might have lived your entire life according to a set of assumptions without ever really figuring out what you wanted.

In some ways it is too risky to let some outsider define the potential of your child – after all, who died and made them king of functioning?

Autism diagnoses rarely come as a surprise in the sense that the recipient didn’t perceive anything different about themselves; they tend to come as a surprise only in that the recipient didn’t expect autism to be the answer.

To be blunt, I do not want to spend time having conversations I could have simply imagined in my head.

I feel as though my brain is a room that I have decorated and furnished in preparation for a very specific event, and the change of plans is like someone breezing in and declaring that "actually it's not a Halloween party, it's a baby shower", and leaving me to readjust everything on my own.

Often when people react to new information about autism they end up accidentally correctly pointing out evidence of autism as opposed to evidence of its absence. They end up like someone throwing up their arms in frustration and saying, ‘Oh! So I suppose this means everyone at the Trainspotters’ Guild could be autistic? Next, you’ll be telling me that all my shy friends in the university maths department are autistic too!’ My friend, the odds are good.