Being autistic means having a brain that's wired differently; it can make someone see, hear and feel the world in a unique way and sometimes that?s incredibly overwhelming. It?s like all the senses are firing all at once, with no filter; it?s like getting too much information at any one point and not necessarily knowing how to process that. Everyone on the autism spectrum is different: some find it difficult to say what they need, and how they feel, while others find it hard to understand people and how society expects them to behave. Sometimes it can mean people are skilled in things that others aren?t, but sometimes it means the things everyone else finds easy are the most unbearable challenges you can imagine. My sister is autistic, like around 700,000 other people in the UK. She wasn?t diagnosed until she reached her twenties, meaning she?s spent the majority of her life suffering immeasurably but not being able to effectively communicate that to those around her. Although 99.5% of people in the UK have heard of autism, only 16% of autistic people think the public understand autism in a meaningful way; awareness is not translating into understanding and it?s about time that changed.
You may see an odd man muttering to himself on a bus, or a young girl practically curling up into a ball in the corner of a restaurant; you may see a young child having a tantrum in a shopping centre, or a teenage boy not really understanding his best friend?s joke. Autism is complex and p...