autism - Sari Piittinen

Tag: autism

Got that superstar shine bright feeling

Posted on April 21, 2024April 21, 2024 by Sari Piittinen

In the past two months, I’ve moved to a new city and started at a new job. These are both huge changes, but somehow I’m still in one piece.

I was unemployed for seven months before being considered for the position of a tech comms coordinator at Kempower. There’s a lot I want to say about what’s been happening in these months.

First of all, the unemployment period really sucks. It’s like your whole life is on hold. My situation was somewhat more complex because I also knew I wanted to change careers and steer towards technical writing. This was scary because I had no idea if I was doing the right things to convince people I could manage in a technical documentation role.

I found some strength and motivation from a strange place. Well, not so strange if you know my history as a Jpop and Kpop fan, but in any case, as a 38-year-old highly educated Finnish woman(-ish), I’m hardly the ideal target audience. But in the latter half of 2023, there were three audition contests taking place in which members were being chosen to debut in new groups. One was for JYP’s new North American girl group, but following all the Kpop training principles, and another for a Jpop group with also Kpop style expectations in skill, talent and hard work. The former resulted in the group VCHA, and the latter in ME:I. (The third audition was for a boygroup, but my favourite didn’t make it. Because of that, they don’t get a mention. Suck that, JYP!)

These young girls with their big dreams ended up inspiring me and gave me hope for my own “debut” in a new career. I now consider VCHA’s “Girls of the year” very much my song, and had scribbled “Leap high! Leap high!” inspired by ME:I’s audition show in my job hunt brainstorming notes.

One of the girls auditioning for ME:I used to be in my favourite Jpop group, Angerme, so it was especially sweet to see her start this new chapter in her life. This is exactly the kind of opportunity she left Angerme for. And now the opportunity I’ve received is exactly the kind I left the academia for. Angerme was great for her, and the university was great for me, but it was time to move on.

Because I was sick of feeling like my life was on hold, I decided to move to Tampere before even getting a job. It’s only a coincidence that very shortly after, my position at Kempower started becoming more and more a thing. Now I’m glad I moved when I did because moving and working at the same time is a combination that my brain can’t even comprehend. Managing a move especially alone, with two cats to consider, was a lot. But now life in the new city feels exciting. I’m not sure it’s still fully hit me that I live here now, in the city of events and concerts and all kinds of things that previously would’ve required me to plan an overnight trip. Now I can just take a bus, or walk. It’s incredible.

But on the topic of job hunting… Surprisingly, one of the aspects I feared the most about it in general – interviews – ended up going quite well! Now, after the fact, I believe that all interviews taking place remotely ended up working in my favour, since I’m very comfortable with appearing on camera online thanks to my streaming and remote teaching experience. I also didn’t have additional stress from travels or in-person interactions, which could be a mild inconvenience to a neurotypical person, but to a neurodivergent one, might add about 80% more emotional, mental, and physical drain. Ok, I invented the figure, but the point is that by the time I even get to an on-site interview, I might have already lost the game. (Add to the fact that some people instinctively dislike neurodivergent people because they subconsciously mark them as ‘different’, and remote interviews might make some of those different traits less noticeable. Maybe.)

During this unemployment period I was interviewed by two companies, the latter of which was Kempower, my current company. Basically, the moment I made it to the interview stage I received encouraging feedback, but from every other company and position I applied to, there was zero personal feedback and I had no idea what I was doing right or wrong. I had my job hunting documents commented on by a professional via the unemployment agency, and she said there was nothing wrong with the paperwork. It was really just a combination of circumstances that led to me not being considered for positions.

And, funnily enough, it was a combination of circumstances that ended up in me being considered and selected for my current role. But mainly, I happened to send my application (for a different role) at the right time, was noticed by the right person, and then considered for this coordination position. Based on this experience, I can recommend approaching companies you are interested in working for, even if you don’t quite match the requirements. You never know – they might have something else for you. At the same time, it is a game of luck. Right time, right place, right person. Because of this I’ve kept telling people that it feels a bit like I’ve won the lottery.

I can’t actually speak much about the job itself yet because my first two weeks have been spent in different types of trainings. I know what I’ll be doing, but I haven’t physically experienced doing it yet, independently and unguided. But the vibes are good and hopeful.

But here’s the part that might interest autistics or otherwise neurodivergent people. How on earth do I suspect I’ll be able to do well in this job, despite my challenges and needs? Have I asked for things or even disclosed my ‘difference’? …Well. Since I don’t even have or aim to pursue a formal autism/adhd/whatever diagnosis, I also don’t think I can or should mention these in professional settings. My support needs are quite low and can be met with simple things like flexible work hours, hybrid or remote work, lack of competition between colleagues and a sense of independence/autonomy. These are things that a neurotypical person could expect from a job and benefit from, too.

So, I’ve been honest about focusing better at home, excelling at independent work, and disliking competition. It has worked well enough to land me the job. All of these aspects are also either already a part of my job or will be once I get properly settled (I still need a fair bit of guidance, so autonomy is “in progress”).

I’ve also landed in a team that appears to make adjustments and changes even without my needing to ask. Their tradition has been to meet once a week in the Lahti office, which for me means travel there early in the morning. I’ve told them about the details of my travels, but also underlined that I’m prepared to do the trip once a week, and that I can manage it. Even so, the team is now changing its Lahti meetings to once every other week – not only because of me, but perhaps I was the “final nail in the coffin” – and also considering sometimes having the team meetings in another city. I feel like I’ve somehow ended up in a job and a team that takes everyone’s wellbeing seriously and is willing to invest in their people.

Because I’m not used to being treated like this by a job, I think I still need to convince myself I deserve it. Just like my move to Tampere may not have fully sunk in yet, neither likely has this job. I can’t believe I’ve basically landed every expectation, hope and dream I had for my new job. The position is permanent, not just 6 or 12 months. I can mostly work from home. The team is supportive. We have flexibility in work hours. Our values match. The team works towards shared goals instead of colleagues being in some strange competition against each other. The work itself will require me to be precise, which fits me perfectly. I’m not sure I could ask for more.

This is why I have strong hopes or even beliefs that I can shine in this role and in this company. Of course I have moments of insecurity, especially when I’m in the office and don’t know how to do small talk, but I also wasn’t hired to do small talk.

So, fingers crossed things will go smoothly from here. Leap high!

Neither timid nor brave – autistic

Posted on February 6, 2023February 6, 2023 by Sari Piittinen

I recently watched the first season of the Australian “Love on the Spectrum” series. The show mainly follows single autistic people who are trying to find love, but also features some autistic couples to show what their love and life is like. There’s a lot I dislike about the show, even if it gives sorely needed exposure to adult autistic life, but that’s not why we’re here today. I’m here to discuss how two specific scenes, I feel, are especially great for discussing how autistics, but especially autistic adults, can be misunderstood, and how I feel I have been misunderstood in my adult life.

Sharnae and Jimmy – screenshot from Netflix.com

First, we need to meet Sharnae and Jimmy. When we are first introduced to them in the show, Jimmy seems to struggle with facing the camera and answering questions. He appears quiet and overwhelmed by the situation. Sharnae encourages him to engage, and he is eventually able to participate in the discussion.

The very first impression of Jimmy might invite many different types of interpretations of his character from others, especially neurotypicals. He might be interpreted as shy or timid – anything that is the opposite of “bold”. And that’s where people really go wrong. The physical, mental, and emotional responses or traits brought about by autism don’t equate to personality traits. In a (worth your time) YouTube video that I recently saw, Yo Samdy Sam said something insightful: “A lot of what we think are autistic traits that will always be there and they’re just a part of autism are actually expressions of autistic distress“. I guess it should go without saying that there is no sense in judging a person based on how they behave in a situation of distress. And to many autistics, such a situation of distress doesn’t require being filmed on camera, but could be caused by what others consider typical every day life: for example, dealing with the sights, sounds, and social expectations of modern city life.

Jimmy singing to Sharnae – screenshot from Netflix.com

A later scene shows exactly how wrong such hasty interpretations of a person like Jimmy would be when he takes a microphone and sings to Sharnae, accompanied by a live pianist, before proposing to her on camera. This is not something that a shy or timid person would do. It’s a bold move, but not necessary bold or brave in the same way as people typically understand it. And this is the part where I start mirroring my own experiences into the scene: I don’t know what Jimmy was thinking or feeling at the time and how this scene came to be. But if I were to guess, he got the idea to do this for Sharnae, and once it felt like the right way to go about it, there was no other possible way of doing it – it would’ve haunted him forever had he not done it exactly this way. Once something feels right, there’s no option but to go for it; there’s no room for worrying about what others might think. There’s only the right way.

Just to underline again: I don’t know if that’s how it actually went for Jimmy. But this is how basically everything in my life has gone for me. I’m very easily interpreted as timid, shy, quiet, withdrawn, the ultimate introvert, and when I eventually make some unexpected decision or move, I may be suddenly perceived as brave and people may pat me on the back for “opening up” and “really showing myself” with the unsaid, but implied meaning “unlike before”. An experience of this that felt somehow extra condescending happened during my teacher studies. I was already 36 at that time and people I’d never met before were complimenting me towards the end of the studies, saying how I’d really made some kind of a breakthrough in opening up. I’ll be honest. I don’t think I’d changed at all. All my abilities were always there; the circumstances just didn’t allow me to show them until the end with the assessed teaching and solo presentations describing our individual journeys. I’ve always embraced situations where I’m given the stage to freely share something about myself or something that I’m interested in. How do you think I ended up streaming on Twitch? So yes, I included a clip of a music video in my presentation about my journey and had fun with it because that’s what I do, I do things my way. Was it brave? No, it was necessary. I can’t half-ass me.

Emotes I drew to use on my Twitch channel

And that’s really it. The big and small choices that I make have to be authentic to myself, and me only. It’s kind of weird because while I care way too much what others think in social situations, in other contexts I don’t really care at all. As some examples:

I chose to pursue doctoral studies not because I wanted a degree or anyone told me to, but because studying video games (and leaving Pello) felt like the next right move. I barely had any idea what doctoral studies were about; I just wanted to do research on video games.
Whenever I’ve chosen to wear something outrageous or wear a bright lipstick or dye my hair a vibrant colour, I’ve done it because I’ve wanted to and it’s felt right. I’ve never considered how it might impact other people’s perceptions of me, my employability, etc. (My thought process is that if people can’t handle something as simple as this, they can’t handle any of me.)
I’ve rejected attempts at romance because it hasn’t felt right and live by myself with two cats because that feels right. I’ve received a lot of crap about this from some relatives, but I’m not about to date someone just to please people who have no real interest in who I am as a person and what my needs are.
I started streaming video games on Twitch at 35 because I wanted to claim a multimodal space where I could really express myself without being talked over by anyone.
I’ve insisted on having my own aesthetics everywhere even if they are terrible, which explains why I learned how to draw my own emotes for Twitch, use a childish font on this website, and even learned how to cut my own hair. I’ve had an online presence since I was 15, which means that since then I’ve had websites, online blogs and social media profiles that I’ve needed to reflect my character and personality…

Throughout my life, I’ve heard comments from others about how this or that thing that I’ve done is “brave” and I’ve more or less felt confused because – like I said above – to me it wasn’t brave, but necessary. At the same time, it’s easy for me to say this because I’ve received relatively little explicit criticism for any of the things that I’ve decided to do (aside from the relatives who think I should be pumping out babies). Either people have judged silently or any “bold”, authentic thing that I’ve done was actually pretty cool… I think they were, anyway. Obviously, duh.

In any case, I think this may again be a case of my brain being wired slightly differently. I’m into following rules, I have very black&white thinking about some things, justice and fairness are incredibly important to me, and along those lines, if something feels the right way to do something, to me it’s the only possible way to do it.

Anyway. Timid? No. Bold or brave? Eh, debatable.

How teaching teachers made me think I might be neurodivergent

Posted on December 3, 2022December 3, 2022 by Sari Piittinen

…Actually, a few different things have led me to think I am most likely on the autism spectrum in the past year, but many of my challenges have culminated in my experiences this past year teaching two different groups of (mostly) already experienced teachers.

To provide some context, the course I’ve taught these groups is designed to improve the professional communication skills of future English teachers. It’s usually taught in our university to students who have little to no previous background in teaching. However, in the open university, most students are looking to complement their existing pedagogical competence with the formal qualifications to teach English. Some of them may have been teaching for as long as twenty years.

Enter me, instructing them to (among other things) analyse teacher-to-parent messages and write one as a written assignment. Many of them think of it as insultingly easy. (But when I assess their texts, I often notice that they do need my feedback on their language skills.)

The setting alone would probably be challenging to anyone. The course can’t be changed greatly between what is taught at uni and open uni despite the different contexts because the teaching must be more or less directly comparable, with the same content, workload, and so on.

In addition to this, teachers as students are different, in surprising and less-surprising ways, from my ‘usual’ students at the university. I love my uni students. They take initiative and they have patience, problem-solving skills, and ambition, and I can usually trust them to work efficiently independently and in groups.

This is where things get a bit ranty, but the purpose is to give some background to why I found the experience at the open uni so challenging.

My open uni students would interrupt me with clarifying questions while I was in the middle of explaining instructions (completely throwing me off my game); many of them would try to do as little as possible for the group tasks, so that I’d have to ask them for additions to their analysis (which I’ve never had to do with the same course at uni); some would stubbornly want to do much of their practice teaching session in Finnish because “that’s how I usually teach” regardless of me telling them that in order to assess their teaching in English, it needs to be in English; they’d ask me strange questions like “what should I write in the self-reflection if I didn’t learn many new things” (the answer is what you just wrote). The only time I’ve had to deal with plagiarism and the only time I’ve had a student make me feel anxious in class because they couldn’t help but be rude also happened at the open uni.

All these different, unexpected aspects should be something that a healthy, neurotypical teacher could handle without much or even any issue. (I imagine that teachers of children and teens experience much worse on a daily basis.) However, they shot up my stress levels and social anxiety. I broke into tears after one particular teaching session where I was constantly interrupted with questions (thank god it was a remote one and I was at home). I was also shocked that I had to tell teachers to put more effort into their tasks and, you know, not to plagiarize. Having to justify assignments that I’m used to students doing happily – and with good to excellent outcomes – also contradicted everything I was used to. They broke me by breaking my system. In addition, while teaching always tires me because it requires social interaction, these sessions drained me entirely.

This experience, therefore, has really made me think about my limits and boundaries… Because my brain can’t handle this. Not the social pressure and not having my usual every-day teaching experience turned upside down. I usually go into class with a plan in mind and reasonable expectations of what’s going to happen. I know I will need to answer some questions, so I’m prepared for that and allocate energy for that. (Not for being bombarded with questions and “I don’t understaaand” comments before I’m even done explaining.) I know I will need to problem-solve some small issues, and I actually enjoy finding solutions. (But I’m not ready to have the entire existence of tried-and-tested teaching methods questioned.) When my expectations and preparations match the concrete events, I am a happy teacher who walks home from campus thinking how awesome her students are. When the opposite happens, well, I basically break down and think people are needy energy vampires and I should isolate into a bubble with my cats and never re-emerge.

Basically, I have needs, mostly regarding the ability to prepare mentally ahead of time for what’s about to go down (and sometimes, there’s no way to prepare enough, which is why I won’t be volunteering to teach this course at the open uni again).

To elaborate on my needs, in addition to challenges I’ve mentioned above, I also struggle sometimes with any group planning tasks with colleagues during development days and other events where we’re expected to sit down and spontaneously come up with solutions or ideas on different topics. I’ve had colleagues ask me unexpectedly about my courses and my answers sound like “…uumm yeah it’s a nice course, going well, yeah” or “yeaahh I dunno I just survive using these materials kinda, haha”. And I promise you I’m not an unqualified fool, I just can’t improvise certain things… most things… at all. I need time to formulate oral answers, I may need time to even look at materials ahead of time.

And I didn’t even get to the social aspects yet! Put me in any group of three and I can guarantee you I’ll be the quietest person in the group, the one barely talking. This is not just because I’m unprepared, but also because much of my energy is going into overthinking everything in the social interaction (“I should say something, right? But what should I say? Oh god, it looks like I’m not contributing at all, this is bad. I know, I’m going to nod in strong agreeance so people see I’m still actively here and participating. Am I nodding convincingly enough? I’m going to try a smile, too. Good. Oh, I have an idea. Should I say it? Let me– Well, everyone’s so busy talking, maybe now– oh, no this person is talki– now the other person is– maybe now– oh, the topic changed. Uh, well, I guess what I had to say wasn’t that important anyway…”). I am just going to guess that neurotypical people don’t think this way?

You can probably imagine how useful my contributions are in group work settings like this, combined with zero preparation. I do much better when we have scheduled a specific time to discuss a specific topic ahead of time (for example, if I’m introducing a course to someone who is going to be teaching it for the first time).

There are also some other wild observations I’ve made recently in terms of social behaviour. For instance, I’ve thought I can’t be autistic because I can have eye contact with people. Not being able to have eye contact is one of the first traits that people, including medical professionals, associate with autism. I’ve lately come to realize that I actually do struggle with eye contact somewhat – but especially with men. Almost like I’ve had “less practice” with men because I don’t exactly stare into my dad’s or my brother’s eyes when we talk (we are all more or less eye-avoidant, I suppose) and most my male friends are online. And I actually prefer less eye contact in general. While teaching, I know I need to have eye contact with students, but even then I don’t really rest my eyes on anyone, but try to keep my gaze moving. I’m not very comfortable with prolonged eye contact. I didn’t realize this as much until I also met some more male students at the open university. Sometimes the eye contact was so intense it almost felt like an intrusion. Super intense. It made me want to hide.

To overcompensate, I might also do super intense eye contact if I’m, say, visiting a doctor, because it seems like the normal thing to do. But at the same time, when I went to get my glasses, my poor optician had to ask me repeatedly to look at her so she could see whether my glasses fit correctly, since I kept looking away. So… Is my ability to do eye contact actually typical, or something else?

Now I’m almost at the point where I’m tempted to start copying here my entire compiled list of autistic traits that I experience to varying degrees. But instead, I’ll just raise one more that has stood out to me more since last spring: stimming. In Wikipedia’s words: “Self-stimulatory behavior, also known as “stimming”and self-stimulation, is the repetition of physical movements, sounds, words, moving objects, or other repetitive behaviors.” Stimming seems to often happen in situations of overstimulation, but can also be a sign of excitement or happiness in autistic people. For me, it can be rocking from side to side or back and forth, not being able to sit or stand still, and there’s a specific motion where I circle a finger around the shape of my nails. There are other weirder ones that I only do when I’m alone at home because I’m conscious about them on some level (one of them was pointed out as weird to me by someone, so I stopped doing it in the presence of others).

I find that stimming brings me comfort or is my way of expressing comfort. For example, I may start rocking if I’m having dinner and/or drinks with friends because I’m happy. But I also found myself stimming almost unstoppably in the practice teaching session meetings for the open uni students. There were moments when there would be, for example, a song coming up and I’d be excitedly moving before the song even started, while everyone else was just standing still. Me, I had energy to burn, it had to go somewhere. I think in this case my stimming was a combination of excitement and anxiety: a part of me enjoyed just experiencing the (mostly excellently conducted) sessions, not expected to do anything too demanding, but at the same time, I was conscious about my role as the assessing teacher, i.e. an outsider.

Because I continue to have these strong experiences of just not being quite like other people, I keep wondering whether there’s still something more about myself that I haven’t yet discovered. As discussed above, most recently, my search has led me to autism, but especially in women which can look a little different as girls and women may be under more social pressure to learn how to mask (to hide their “weird traits”). I might not be autistic, I might just be weird, or some other things. But my unusual and sometimes extreme physical and mental responses to events that should be fairly normal surely suggest something.