The Power of Reaching Out

* I love the picture below. It's from Perrault's Fairy Stories, and is Beauty (from Beauty & The Beast) and was painted by Edmund Dulac. Naturally, in my head, this is how I waft through my home, in this exact nightie and dressing gown combo, and this exactly how I look like when I am stressed, and having a bad day. My family & friends will happily testify that this is not *entirely* accurate.

Autism on a bad day, is a messy thing.

It's not what you'd call a photogenic disability. Our disability is loud and confused, frightened and bursting with anxiety. It is unpredictable and screams in desperation. It makes a lot of noise. To my shame, sometimes I make a lot of noise back.

We live in a flat and I have spent a not inconsiderable amount of time worrying about being evicted. I have spent long nights, imagining my neighbours, on all three floors, plotting together to get rid of us. To put an end to the unpredictable shouting when the anxiety gets too much, when a yell is the only physical manifestation of that panic that helps.

The crunch for me came on a day when I was overwhelmed by the weight of responsibility of being a single parent, holding down a full time job, doing an Open University Degree, and raising two incredible, funny, loving, brilliant children, and trying to juggle a laundry pile that seemed to be tripling in size like a malign version of the magic porridge pot, but with duvets. I had a meltdown.

My head was so suddenly filled with noise and fear and just too much stuff , that I yelled out loud for everything to just stop. A neighbour, who I had never met, emerged onto her balcony and asked if everything was alright?. I hastily pulled myself together and explained that I was autistic and had just got a bit overwhelmed.

"Oh. I didn't realise". The confusion and worry slowly drained away.

Of course she didn't realise because I had never told her.

That night, I composed a letter to all my neighbours. I explained who we were, that we were a family living with autism and the occasional noise was due to sensory reactions by us, to colour, noise and the general messiness of living (I have no idea what it's like for my children, but for an idea of what my head feels like just before a meltdown, find a copy of Setting Sun by The Chemical Brothers, stick some headphones on and turn the volume up to 11. It's the closest to the inside of my head on a bad day that I have ever found)

That not just me, but all of us beautiful, brilliant autistic girls and women, can became so overwhelmed by sensory input that we can struggle to cope with it. So we try and push the noise and the colour back out into the world and out of our heads, where it hurts.I wanted to try and help them understand the psychic pain that afflicts so many of us, because it can hurt our head too much to manage the constant sensory input.

I explained about neurological disability and what that meant. And how it affected us. And I apologised.

I added in a leaflet printed out from the National Autistic Society, which explained about ASC and meltdowns. I then posted my letter to every house in the block. All twelve homes. And I sat back, and panicked some more.

I had no idea what to expect. In the event, not much happened. I had a beautiful and kind letter from the elderly couple downstairs, telling me not to worry. And radio silence from everyone else.

But slowly, I started to notice a few more people saying hello. The young man upstairs carried my shopping and the couple downstairs seemed a bit more chatty.

Crucially, I ended up having a very long chat with my new neighbours across the landing, one of whom had worked with SEN children. They were lovely and supportive.

Nobody mentioned my letter, but everyone seemed a little more human. A little more understanding. I'm not convinced all of them like living in the same building as us, but hey, flat dwelling is sometimes noisy by definition. I also realised that being liked isn't a particularly realistic goal in and of itself.

What I realised is, that if you are true to yourself and try and rub along with integrity and honesty, some people will just like you anyway. In short, trying to make our neighbours like us was never going to work. What I needed to do was be open, let them know what was going on, and trust that they would join the dots by themselves.

And so my letters sailed off through their front doors, to an uncertain destiny.

And I started to panic less. I had no option but to sit back, content(ish) in the knowledge that I'd done pretty much all I could do. I still have no idea what my neighbours really think of me, or us, but I know now that, even if they are not happy, they understand. They have context.

Reaching out to them was scary, risky even, but I think it paid off. We may not truly be friends, they may not like me, (or maybe they do, but it's not worth worrying about) but we understand each other a little more now, and that has made all the difference.

xx