“How are things with you?” my neighbour Ellie asked me yesterday from the opposite side of the road. Her little girl screeched to a halt on her pink scooter and pointed delightedly at Loretta. Cocker spaniels interlaced themselves around Ellie’s ankles. Her older children were back at school, the cat was waiting for them at home.
“Are you doing ok?” my client asks via Zoom. She has a high-powered, really stressful job, cancer, three teenage children (one autistic, one with ADHD) and is walking five kilometres a day to raise money for charity.
In these situations my eye contact fails, my gaze slips to the middle distance or the floor, and I invariably mumble something along the lines of “oh fine,” “can’t complain,” “you know, keeping on keeping on,” until I sound like something out of a Ministry of Culture’s handbook on mumbling Brits.
The slightly uncomfortable truth is that I am really fine. According to the Government I live alone – Loretta the dog doesn’t count, although she is a constant companion. My loner status means that I can form a bubble with my parents, and they live in the village next door. I am fairly proficient at WhatsApp, and only forget to turn my microphone on for Zoom meetings around fifty percent of the time. I have two things: space, and control over my own routine, and I believe that these things are vital for anyone with Autism during lockdown.
I suffered during the first few weeks of the initial lockdown last year. I didn’t know that I was autistic then, but I knew that I hung my life on routine. Every hour of my life I accounted for, and I felt something worryingly akin to jumping out of a plane with no parachute when I couldn’t follow my daily timetable. Suddenly, I couldn’t go to work, or travel up to London, or go to ballet classes. I was bereft and a little scared, I think. And I was not alone: many parents of autistic children struggled to explain the sudden lack of school, of a carefully planned routine. One friend of mine with an autistic daughter told me that it was the most difficult time that the family had ever been through. Gradually, I started to divide up the days into blocks of time, and give myself a new routine that was cast in iron for my own peace of mind. I got there eventually, but it wasn’t easy. It must have been even harder for autistic children who were dependent upon parents who were themselves stressed and suddenly having to work from home.
In terms of space, I was lucky to be ahead of the game: I moved to Suffolk around six months before the first lockdown. Covid had yet to send city folk scurrying to the countryside. Suffolk had always been the land of my childhood, of happy memories. During my first holiday there I was in minus figures – my mother was six months pregnant with me – but I don’t often tell people that because it is, to use a technical expression, a bit icky. Say the name Southwold and I am a child again in the back of my parents’ car arriving for the summer, sniffing the malt in the air from Adnams brewery as the bright sunlight bounces off the pastel cottages. Suffolk was pebble beaches, doughnuts and Knickerbocker glory’s in Walberswick and the wonky walls and spiral staircases of the cottages we used to stay in.
During the pandemic Suffolk has shrunk to my own village, the roads empty, the restaurants shut. Luckily, the sea and the wide, flat expanse of field and sky doesn’t close to the locals. One of the biggest indicators of a comfortable lockdown is space. Space is a commodity that I have, to an extent, purchased. Other people are not so lucky.
“Smug, Harriett,” laughs a friend of mine back in London when I mention an evening walk by the beach. “Very smug.” To be fair, I was able to call him smug in turn when my laptop broke: he mentioned that he had a guy down the road who could fix it. My nearest laptop mender is a thirty-minute drive away.
But I think that all Autistic people dream of space, of peace and quiet. I find it difficult to sleep in anything other than total silence. My place in London was two doors down from an illegal jerk chicken factory, opening onto a cut-through road navigated by a seemingly endless supply of roaring cars blaring music.
In lockdown, one would think, myself and many autistic people have got their wish. I can leave the house without having to worry about seeing a sea of faces. No one expects me to go out, I can communicate via text and email, which is what I have always preferred to anyway. It may be come as a surprise that I was often lonely in the past year. Autistic people, no matter how anti-social they can seem to neurotypicals, get lonely. A friend of mine who has an autistic son tells me that he is missing his friends. He doesn’t miss the noise of school, or the crowds, but he misses the people he cares about. I reckon that autistic loneliness may be qualitatively different from non- autistic loneliness, but having only experienced the former it is difficult to say exactly how. Perhaps we don’t miss the same aspects of things in the same way, but we certainly “feel the lack”, as the Italians say.
I approach the easing of lockdown with something akin to dread, or at least apprehension. Of course, like everyone else I am looking forward to the shallow things: eating out, doing a bit of shopping. But I am genuinely worried that my ability to withstand large groups of people has been severely affected. Pre-covid I thought that I was anti-social, but still neurotypical. I am coming out on the other side of the pandemic as an autistic woman, understanding why I need to periodically retreat from others, why I find faces and noise so difficult. I wonder whether I am capable of socialising to the extent that I used to, which admittedly wasn’t much compared to some people anyway.
Then, the distant, faint echo of regret when I remember a particular friend, or the sudden, albeit brief, oppressiveness of my solitude, is almost reassuring. No man is an island, the expression goes, and that applies to autistic people too.
