30 Days of Autism Acceptance: 9
April 9th: How has the pandemic impacted you? Has it changed routines? Do you like or dislike masks? What do you wish allistics and neurotypicals knew/understood about how the pandemic is impacting autistic people?
Well, on one hand, the pandemic didn’t really affect me that much because I already worked from home and I rarely left the house. I was already eschewing social gatherings. It was hard to get used to the mask, but mostly it was hard to remember to grab one. I do remember freaking out early on because my kids had picked up someone else’s trash. At that time, we were all still worried about service infections and we had to walk all the way home holding our hands out because we didn’t know if there was stuff on our hands and it was kind of scary.
It did affect me in that my family was now staying at home with me and having the kids go to school from home was difficult for everybody, including the kids. It wasn’t fun. It took a lot of adjustments and getting used to things and adjusting our schedules and then they would switch everything and then we would have to get all adjusted again and it seemed like once we would get settled then they would switch it all up on us again.
What I read from other autistics was that behind our joking about already masking and already staying at home there was a lot of anxiety over what was happening; a lot of fear, just outright fear, especially as a lot of autistics seem to have other physical ailments and a lot of us seem to be chronically ill and so I think it was a very scary time for a lot of autistics out there.