I’ve been reflecting a lot lately on how we navigate the world post-diagnosis. A recent conversation on this forum got me thinking about the famous Shakespeare monologue, and it made me look at who actually writes the social scripts we are forced to play.
It puts me in mind of the line: "All the world's a stage and all the men and women merely players."
The tricky thing is that neurotypical society writes the social script of the play.
Meanwhile, autistic people put together the structure of the theatre—solving complex problems, finding objective truth, and mapping out the patterns.
Yes, that putting-on-an-act thing is exhausting. The social performance script is a parasite that drains off the energy needed to build the structural one. Personally, both before and since diagnosis, I have been trying to live life in the most efficient way to maximise my autistic potential and minimise the cost of neurotypical performance parameters. The difference post-diagnosis is that it's much easier to see this.
In Shakespeare's plays, Hamlet, Malvolio, and Coriolanus all map the specific dangers of the neurotypical stage for autistic people with brutal honesty. The plays don't end well for them.
But those plays were written 400 years ago. Now, after diagnosis—like so many other people I read from on this forum (including a recent great point by McLovin123 ) —I am given the tools to rewrite the context.
Are we entering a new age of autistic acceptance generally? I don't know. We are in a messy transition period, but hopefully, yes. I observe that the answer is mixed, but I hope so. Concepts of the double empathy problem and being neurodivergent are gradually breaking through into schools and the workplace.
Personally, I aspire for a new age of acceptance of my own and others' autism. Maybe the more autistic people there are who can do the same, the more accepted and even valued we will be by neurotypical society. I hope so, not only for the individual people but for the sustainability and the structure of the theatre.
On the nature of hope (at the risk of an unnecessary pivot into even older text stories), in Hesiod's original 8th-century BCE text Works and Days, Pandora doesn't let everything out. As the plagues and miseries pour into the sky, she panics and slams the heavy lid back down. By the will of Zeus, Hope (Elpis) was caught right under the rim and remained trapped inside the jar.
So I realise that I had given up on hope—seeing it as some sort of thing that floats around widely, like maybe the way I saw some neurotypical people use it as a sedative, an excuse for inaction as Nietzsche argues. I can now see that it's something one has to actively open the box to get to.
When the box is opened, maybe that's a metaphor for opening up one's past experiences for examination. In that box, what is trapped is the hope that fuels action—the raw energy that fuels capacity and rebuilding.
I hope that's true.
I'd love to open this up to the forum: What does "opening the box" to retrieve that active, rebuilding hope look like in your own post-diagnosis life? How do you stop treating hope as a passive wish and start using it as fuel?
(Note for transparency/moderators: The thoughts and metaphors here are entirely my own lived experience, but I used an AI tool to help me clean up the structure and typos before posting.)
