Autism and Editing

While I know Autism Acceptance Month has ended, I am autistic year 'round, and it impacts me every day of my life.

I saw a statistic recently that stopped me in my tracks in the worst way. I felt like I’d missed a stair in the dark. Only 16% of autistic adults are employed, according to the UN. 16% That feels wrong to me on a gut level not because I don’t believe it but because it’s a stark reminder of how badly left behind we are.

Photo by Yusuf Onuk on Unsplash

I was diagnosed with autism in 2022, but I’ve been autistic my entire life and can confirm that working under someone else’s thumb was always a problem for me. Before transitioning to the editing and publishing industry (which was sixteen years ago, interestingly), I worked retail jobs for the most part. It was a constant litany of things that never made sense to me. The idea that if we finished our work early, we were expected to do random, pointless nonsense to “justify” earning our paycheck, for example. That never sat well with me because they wanted me on site to answer phones or talk to customers. If those people weren’t in the store, and I had done all my other work, why did I have to artificially look busy?

While some autistic people have co-occurring conditions that render them unable to work, there are many of us quietly late-diagnosed people who have navigated our way into industries that are doable for us. That said, it’s been nothing but pain and confusion for the majority of my professional life.

We live in a world that does not embrace what autistic people bring to the table and, instead, demands rigid conformity to rules that just don’t make much sense. Not to mention creating environments that are often outright hostile to us and our needs. If we were allowed to perform jobs in our way or had our needs accommodated, companies would swiftly find our value. Yet they do not.

Some people reading this may be skeptical at what an autistic person could possibly bring into a role, so I’d like to share what connections my autism has to my vocation: book editing.

I have been in the field of book editing for sixteen years now, as I said above. Being autistic has given me a huge advantage in some vital areas of our industry, such as pattern recognition, research, and story structure. The pattern recognition piece is pretty common to autistic folks — our minds pick up on them in ways neurotypical brains do not inherently do — and allows me to pinpoint things that others might not. For example, I will notice if an author used the same description of a person twice in a novel. I will also notice if they rely on the same sentence construction too often. Or if they have a particular pattern to how they lay out words.

My “special interests” include things like history, writing craft, sword fighting, police work, true crime, and about a million other things because I am also ADHD. As such, I crave novelty, so I have a large number of interests I have studied intensely on and off over time. This varied, often eclectic, expertise allows me to draw on a large number of spheres that provide my clients with the bonus of having someone who is able to identify when something has gone awry.

As an editor working from my home office, my space is set up to be what I need rather than what other people might prefer. My office overhead light is a comfortable brightness and color for me, I have a sit/stand desk that allows me to be on my feet and wiggle or dance if I need to. I frequently have music or soundscapes in the background that help mask noises that I find distressing. There are a lot of small accommodations I have made for myself that allow me to be comfortable. Not to mention working on my own schedule. If I cannot work on a particular day, I don’t. The exception to this is meeting deadlines, but that’s just part of life.

This freedom has allowed me to survive in my profession and continue to perform my duties. When I worked retail, I had no such freedom. I had to wear their uniform (which was often sensory hell for me), suffer through things like extremely bright lighting, fluorescent lighting, uncomfortable shoes, constant noise, needing to stand in one spot all day, and a large number of confusing social rules.

Being autistic means I have a whole lot of actual, genuine needs that must be met for me to function. My need for a certain sensory environment is not just a preference. I would equate these needs to my very physical need for a cane on bad days or my need to take medication for a migraine. They aren’t just little peccadillos I can ignore if I only “tried harder.”

I put that in quotes because that’s what I was told my whole life. I just needed to “try harder.” No matter how hard I was trying, no matter how much work I put into it… try harder.

This lack of autistic people in the workplace is not because we are “unemployable” or “not trying hard enough” or “hopeless.” It’s because we are being asked to do things that don’t work for us by inflexible people who neither understand nor care about about meeting the needs of those employed. It’s more of a facet of recent culture because a couple hundred years ago, it would have been, “Johnny doesn’t talk much, but he sure does know everything about sheep, so we let him take care of ‘em.” Or “Sally is a little strange, but her needlepoint is better than anyone else’s.”

While I’m not suggesting we should just turn the clock back to that time period and erase all progress humanity has made during that time, I think it would behoove people to consider autistic folks with a little more empathy. We may be a bit strange and have needs you don’t understand, but what we have to share is valuable, and we are also just people like you are. Someone with a physical disability, like losing a leg, is not less human. Nor are blind people. Or deaf people. We all still have things we can contribute to the world (Hellen Keller, anyone?).

Stop leaving us behind.