Autistic people may appear ‘negative’, ‘pessimistic’ or ‘critical’ when sharing their thoughts or concerns about something, but usually we are just being realistic and helpful if we can.
Often, I have no clue what forms are asking or their instructions can be interpreted 5 different ways. I try to call for help if I can, but I have to hype myself up for it because I rarely do phone calls. If I can’t get help, I have to guess, and this rarely goes well.
@AutisticAdam@actuallyautistic
Filling out forms was easier in the pre-digitized days when I could put an asterisk or double-asterisk or triple-asterisk (and so forth) indicator for placing my interpretation of the numbered question with my full answer and background understanding onto pages of end-notes. I either numbered the pages or used one page for each footnoted/endnoted response. Digital now usually ends up with stock-answers gleaned from decades of learning, or more often ends with copious notes in hand and an hour of waiting on hold for a telephone call to get to a human because those chat text bots on those company websites cannot handle the wording of my reasons for calls. My stock-ending for such phone interactions with the human is for me to thank them for their time and patience in listening to and attempting to assist me with this call.
Here I want to talk a bit about the phrases and common wordings we use to describe our experiences.
I, like @AutisticAdam, always thought I was clueless about forms and paperwork because their instructions were ambiguous, and I always experience crippling anxiety about them. Note that there's almost always an implied "compared to everyone else" in these statements. A notion of "I'm struggling but most people seem to be doing fine."
And it's true that forms are ambiguous. It's mostly on purpose too. The openly stated reason for bureaucracy is to slow things down and make them predictable (making sure a certain percentage of people will fail a task is making things predictable), thus controllable, after all.
What I want to point out here is the language we use to talk about ourselves as #ActuallyAutistic people, like "clueless" or "overwhelmed" or "incapable". All frequently used by autistic and NT people alike to describe autistic experiences.
For many things these words can be appropriate, especially depending on the individual. If someone can't read facial expressions or stand being touched, they are well and truly incapable and overwhelmed. There's nothing wrong with that.
However, when we say we are clueless about something like paperwork, which is in a lot of cases deliberately designed to be ambiguous and difficult to get through for the average person, I believe we are making an undeserved judgement of our comprehension abilities.
I believe the average NT person is just as if not more clueless about the paperwork. For one reason or the other though, it looks like we are quite a bit more negatively impacted by having to do them.
I think the reason is that both the perceived and real consequences of failure are not equal for autistics and NTs.
A mistake in the paperwork is brushed off as "honest" if it's from an NT person (probably due to the social advantage they have among themselves), and even corrected by the clerk as a show of solidarity and kindness. From an autistic person, the same mistake would be deemed either "misleading on purpose" or a result of "not giving a f*ck", and punished by an enforced redo, delays, fines, loss of rights and opportunities... the list goes on.
The failing here, I believe, isn't in the capability of comprehending the instructions for filling out forms but the inequality in the treatment we receive as a result of mistakes made during the form-filling as autistics vs Nts.
Sorry for the wall of text.
In summary, I believe our language about ourselves attribute a lot of issues we face as a result of societal mistreatment incorrectly to our personal failings, or at the very least, to the wrong skills and capabilities.
@CynAq@actuallyautistic@AutisticAdam I can definitely confirm what you wrote here. I've been dealing with bureaucracy related to my disability pension and taxation of it with three countries for almost a year and a half now, and even with several social workers helping me, it's been a nightmare, and nobody has been able to figure out how I should file things. It's not even that the forms themselves are impenetrable, every time we've asked for instructions or clarifications, we've been told to submit a totally different form, which then, inevitably gets rejected. I was even recommended to get a lawyer, just in case, so...
So it's not us, these systems are designed to force people make mistakes. But that definitely hits folks like us harder.
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