Dear John,

This has been said far too many times to children to encourage them to aim high.

It’s obviously false because although many people are held back by lack of self-confidence, no amount of self-confidence can overcome basic physical limitations. So if people want to fly unaided, no amount of wishing can make it so. (And yes, there are various ways of falling with style, but that’s not flying.)

Likewise, there are 6 Nobel Prizes awarded per year, each to a maximum of three people, and mostly for well-taken lucky breaks. It’s entirely possible to be the best scientist in your year in the entire world, work hard for your entire career and still never even get a look in.

Now I don’t want to put upward limits on your academic, professional or personal achievements.

But there are some things which other people think are easy that you will never be able to do well because of your autism. (All of these are things that I’ve also come across some other autistic people who can’t do either.)

You will never be able to cope well with unscheduled telephone calls when you are paying attention to something else. Calls where you’ve booked a time beforehand or where it’s the other person’s job to answer are easier. Text-based communication is fine.

You will never be able to listen properly to someone in a noisy room. The effort of filtering the noise is just too great. You can make it easier by being at the edge of the room, but you’re never going to have a good conversation on the dancefloor.

You’re never going to cope well with fast shifts in attention. Suppose you’re in the middle of doing a difficult maths problem and someone comes over to talk to you. And yes, it’s really important to love the person in front of you, but the effort in shifting attention to them and back again takes more energy for you than an hour reading an well-written academic non-fiction book. And they just don’t get that unless they know you well.

And you’re never going to get good at eye contact. Not speaking to a crowd or congregation, not even speaking to an individual. Sure you can (and will) get better than you are now at it, but it’s now more than 20 years since I started speaking to groups of people for a living, and I’m still worse at eye contact than a typical 11 year old.

Fun anecdote – I once had to fill in an incredibly long and overly-personal medical questionnaire. It also used technical jargon in a non-technical context without defining it, which always has been a bugbear of mine. So I answered some of the questions correctly but not helpfully. It asked if I had “restricted mobility”; I replied that I couldn’t fly unaided. (It’s obviously a restriction on my mobility, one I share with all other people, but not most birds.)

I sent off the questionnaire and thought no more of it. Until a few weeks later, I was subjected to a long interrogation over the phone one evening by a humourless old man who claimed to be the Chief Medical Officer of the Church of England and was utterly incapable of considering that his words might be read to mean anything other than what he had intended them to mean…

All the best,

Future John

PS – I went back to add the ‘m’ in the title, because I knew you’d appreciate it.