Dear John,

People often use autism (or any other type of neurodiversity, real or claimed) as an excuse for bad behaviour.

Being autistic might well mean that when you are writing a letter, you need to work harder on the wording so as not to offend people. I still fail on that sometimes! But you should still put the effort in.

It might mean that you find it really hard to cope in a noisy room and have to go and have a sit down outside. It doesn’t mean that it’s ok to kill everyone in the room to make it quieter.

Of course, the flip side of this is something you know well. If you’re really concentrating on something, you’ll often be fidgeting or doodling. There are teachers who got you to sit still, and you learnt to sit still by just disengaging from everything going on around you (and occasionally falling asleep in lessons!), but a good teacher would allow you to fidget as long as it didn’t disrupt others or damage anything.

Temple Grandin, who is a noted autistic writer, lists the following key bits of advice she gives to young autistic people:

• don’t make excuses
• play well with others
• mind your manners
• sell your work, not yourself.

In other words, don’t let your autism hold you back from what you might accomplish. Autistic people can achieve all kinds of things, and you don’t know your own limitations until you hit them. Don’t let autism stop you from having a go at something and giving it your best shot.

But also don’t let your autism create too many problems in relationships with others. You have sensory processing issues and difficulty reading relational signals, but you also have self-control. Self-control has long been recognised as a key component of what it means for people to live well. The importance of restraining ourselves for the sake of others is there in Aristotle, and it’s all over the New Testament as well. (e.g. 1 Corinthians 10:32-33, Galatians 5:23.) Learn self-control.

You’ve actually done pretty well at that so far. I don’t think the way you learnt was necessarily the best way – more sympathy and training with less punishment would probably have been more helpful on balance, but the past is what it is…

The challenge for you going forwards is that you’ve got so good at not speaking up, that you need to learn how to choose to speak up again, but to do so in a way that is effective rather than offensive.

All the best,

Future John