Content Disclaimer: Autism is a wide spectrum of different experiences; this article explores one personal experience and isn’t meant to present a generalised view of how autism can affect someone.
I’m Dhillon Lalji, the senior editor for identity at The Oxford Blue. I’m 20 years old, mixed-race, autistic. I’m in my second year studying PPE, the best degree in all of Oxford, and my dream is to be a broadcast journalist one day. I’ve been on The Chase (my episode is next week), done work experience for a major UK media network, and managed to get a distinction in my prelims last summer. Introducing myself this way in my column’s fourth article may seem strange, but it will make sense by the end of this article.
If you’ve read any of my previous articles, you’ll know that I like to challenge stereotypes that surround neurodiversity, with previous pieces focusing on generalisations, friendships and exam stress. This week, though, it’s time to look inward.
One often-cited stereotype about autistic people is our tendency to have ‘special interests’: things we love that we focus on to the finest degree. Sometimes, this can be simplistically caricatured in the media through young kids who love LEGO, or adults who’ve never given up on their childhood love for Doctor Who. Valid as these are, our special interests can be absolutely anything, and range far wider than that. Anyone who knows me, for example, will know that I’ll stop whatever I’m doing on a Saturday evening to make sure I’m caught up on this week’s episode of Strictly Come Dancing, or that I have encyclopedic knowledge of my beloved Luton Town FC. But there’s one special interest that’s far more damaging than these examples of harmless fun: me.
Specially interested in myself, how narcissistic is that? The answer: not at all. In fact it’s almost the complete opposite. I can’t quite believe the person that I’ve become – the person in that introduction. And so, I spend so much time captive to a mind that desperately tries to convince me I’m anything but me, in a self-sabotaging attempt to disrupt all the personal progress I have made (of late). To an extent, it’s understandable – I spend a lot of time masking, and so knowing my real thoughts is more difficult than it may seem. To show just how exhausting this can be, let me take you inside my identity…
My proudest achievement is that I get to say I study PPE here at Oxford. I’m aware saying I’m proud to be a PPEist puts me in the company of your least favourite union hacks and political society officers, but it’s an achievement younger me never thought I could pull off. Ever since I decided to study the subject three years ago, my mind was set on accomplishing this goal. However, I had other interests before settling on politics; I was a keen historian, then a linguist, then an app developer, then a mathematician. I’ve often tried to purge this fact – and any traces of it – from my memory, as I find it incredibly destabilising. The moment I get a difficult essay question, a challenging lecture or a poor problem sheet grade, the nasty voices of my mind bring this up at the first opportunity, making me feel like a lesser, inauthentic, fraudulent PPEist who should never have chosen to study this course. This really upsets me, as I’ve loved every minute of my degree, and am so excited to be in the second year of this journey. These fears can be easily defeated though. Whenever I’m in a tutorial, an insightful lecture or in conversation with my fellow PPEists, I feel like I belong again – a feeling I never experienced in my younger days.
But it’s more than just my academic choices that spin/churn round and round in my mind. No part of my identity is immune from the dreaded questioning. I know the answers to all the questions, but my constant and compulsive need to self-study won’t let me get away that easily. My sexuality, my cultural identity, my religious beliefs, my social class, my career aspirations and ambitions; everything is always on the table. This comes from my reduced sense of self and comprehension of my own feelings, brought on by my autism but by no means something experienced by all autistic people. When I’m tired, sick or nervous about something, I’m not able to properly recognise those feelings in myself; my body’s on alert without knowing the reason why.
To clarify, there’s nothing wrong with questioning your sexuality, cultural identity and your academic choices throughout your life. They are valid questions to ask yourself, and you deserve love if you ever go through that. My issue isn’t the questions themselves, but the frequency with which they recur in my mind, even after having worked out the answers. This is accidental self-sabotage, preventing me from taking the risks I must take to achieve different/new goals. For example, while applying for an internship, the academic questioning appears in an attempt to put me off my dream role. If I develop feelings for someone, doubts about my sexuality hold me back from risking rejection. If I want to make a new friend, questions emerge over whether I’m actually like them, or just putting on a mask. Whenever I try to embrace either side of my mixed culture, my mind makes me think I sound or look ridiculous.
It’s an incredibly exhausting experience, one I wish I’d never have to go through, but I’m working on that, getting help, and improving with each passing day. To any other neurodiverse people who come across this article, if you experience this too, you’re not alone.
However, this self-examining doom loop only makes me more determined to achieve whatever I set out to in life. I want, in the distant future, to look back on a lifetime of achievement: getting my PPE degree; having a successful career; making lifelong friends, and finding love. Moreover, I want to do all of this without the constant self-questioning I currently experience. One day, this will happen, but for now, in the words of Elphaba from Wicked, I have to continue ‘Defying Gravity’, by not letting my negative internal thoughts pull me down. If anything, going through this makes me all the more proud of myself for how far I have come, and how far I hopefully still have to go/and how much further I hope to still go.