Thin Slices, by Sarah Whiteside

I’m at the kitchen counter again. Distant traffic passes. My son is at the table, eyes on a screen. A too-familiar soundtrack fills the room. It sometimes feels like this will never end. Him there, me here, the same tinny music on a loop.

He calls me over to show me what he’s built. It’s a fortress, designed to keep the zombies out. I stand beside him, my hand on the back of his chair. The screen is a blur of colour and light. I blink. It’s about the 700th one he’s made. My attention slides off towards the window where the world waits in its blaze, trees melting into sky.

Reaching up, he takes me by the chin and turns my head back to the screen. But I can’t see what he sees.

* * *

1980. It’s playgrounds that scare me most. The wide-cold open space and figuring out how to cross it. Bells ring. Patterned concrete passes under running feet, lines blurring. I watch the other girls. I learn to look like them. Survival depends on staying in the middle, staying invisible. The best place to hide a pencil is in a pencil case.

1988. It’s double maths. I’m in the back row with the others, laughing when they laugh, swinging on two legs of a regulation plastic chair. Sweat pools at the backs of my knees and under my arms. The room is loud with heat, close with stifled talk. Itchy jumper. Itchy skirt. I live a life constricted by confusion and self-loathing. It’s impossible to hear the teacher over that.

There’s what they mean to teach. And then there’s what you learn: be careful not to say too little; be careful not to say too much; don’t give anything away.

I look out of the window, then at the clock. Twenty-seven minutes left. I’m waiting for the bell, even though it doesn’t mark the end, only a different room for more of the same. I’m counting the days and weeks, the years until it’s over: that’s the only sum I’m doing.

1997. I never speak in class. Silence marks me out. The other students share their thoughts with ease. The room swims with ideas, too fast to catch. It’s not as if I don’t have thoughts myself. I can almost taste them, in their music and their grit, but they won’t make it past my lips. If I try to talk, nonsense comes out. So I don’t.

* * *

2017. Three brain scientists from three different US universities – Noah Sasson, Ruth Grossman, Daniel Kennedy – publish a report laying out their work on the role of stigma in autistic experience. Up to this point much of the research in this area has, they say, focused on the communicative ability of autistic people themselves. Sasson et al point out that social interactions always involve more than one person. They turn their attention to nonautistic people. Asking participants to observe and rate ‘thin slices’ of videotaped interactions they aim to learn about all-important first impressions nonautistic people form about their autistic peers. Across all three studies they find that participants see autistic people in the videos as more awkward and less likeable. This is the case even though they aren’t told which ones are autistic.

In 2023, a smaller study led by Danny Dunn, a young autistic graduate student in Sasson’s department at the University of Texas, asks both autistic and nonautistic participants similarly to rate similar ‘thin slice’ interactions and finds that, while both groups see autistic people as more awkward and less socially skilled, only the nonautistic participants ‘report lower interest in socially interacting with them.’ In other words, autistic people aren’t put off by awkwardness. Dunn calls his study ‘awkward but so what’.

* * *

Mothering means waiting. It means waiting with the other mothers—pencil in a pencil case. You wait outside gym halls and in playgrounds, by nurseries and schools. You wait on a litany of classes and clubs to be over. You wait, the lot of you, along the shoreline of your child’s experience, a ragged row of cross-armed Penelopes. It reminds me of that old Guinness ad, all moody black-and-white—grizzled surfer, surfboard, wave—with a voiceover saying: She waits. That’s what she does.

Things might, or might not, be going well in there. That story isn’t mine to tell. One thing is certain: whatever happens, I’m responsible. Responsible but powerless. I’m crossing not only arms but fingers and toes too. Crossing everything.

Sometimes he comes out screaming. Sometimes he throws a toy. Sometimes I get called aside and told a list of the latest misdemeanours. They never say it’s my fault. They never say it’s his. They never say that. They just keep smiling, smiling and talking. The other mums, probably glad it’s not them, pretend not to hear.

During the first few weeks of school, it doesn’t take long for things to fall apart. There are meetings with management. There are fidget toys and strategies, plans for part-time attendance. It’s clear nobody knows what to do.

One morning, a girl from my son’s class comes up to us in the playground. She invites him to her birthday party. Then she says: ‘are you going to be bad again today?’

When there’s no official story, no label to describe you, you get the unofficial ones instead. You’re bad. Or odd. Nobody can quite put their finger on it but everyone agrees. They don’t say it’s my fault, but I’m the mother after all.

I don’t understand what I’m doing wrong.

* * *

We are in an NHS paediatric unit, a doctor observing. The child plays on the floor with a speech therapist. I sit behind them with his dad, the two of us on matching plastic chairs designed for children. The perspective is all wrong. We look like giants. Small cars drive on small roads. Two heads bent over the game.

The child has a plan. The therapist also has a plan. She’s testing to see how flexible he can be in response to her ideas.

(Spoiler: not very.)

‘He got hurt,’ she says. ‘We need an ambulance.’

‘No we don’t,’ he says.

I look up. The doctor’s watching me across the room. I look down and away. On the phone, before the assessment, she asked if there were any autistic people in the immediate family.

‘If you’d asked me a year ago, I would have said no,’ I said, gripping the receiver. ‘But the more I read, the more I understand I’m probably autistic myself.’

It was the first time I’d said it to anyone other than my partner. The moment it was out, it sounded made up. I’m not sure if she believed me.

I barely believe it myself.

Doctor and speech therapist go to a different room to confer.

My partner leans closer, lowering his voice. ‘That doctor’s autistic,’ he says.

The child picks up a plastic telephone. He presses the buttons. His dad joins him. We wait. We act like it’s a normal day. The doctor might come back any moment. She might say our son is autistic. She might say he isn’t. I’m 99.9% sure he is. But I still need them to tell me.

The child keeps coming over, bringing me things. The car. The telephone.

‘Look,’ he says.

But I can’t see what he sees.

The doctor comes back in. Words are coming out of her mouth, words that seem devoid of content. Then she says, ‘based on what we’ve seen today there’s enough evidence for a diagnosis.’

Child and father keep playing on the floor. I’m not sure that I heard her right. After that I can’t take much in, except the way she keeps using words like ‘we’ and ‘us’. The message slowly clarifies. Us autistic people. We are like this.

Autistic doctor.

Autistic mother.

Autistic child.

The doctor talks about her own son then. He’s autistic too. When he was the age their child is now, he used to like playing with cars.

‘He used to like things that were predictable,’ she says, shrugging. ‘Don’t we all.’

She hands over a leaflet. That’s the end of it. We step back out onto the same street.

* * *

Many people still believe that autistic people lack empathy for others. This view has been propounded by prominent academics and has filtered down into wider society. In 2012 autism researcher Damian Milton—who is autistic himself—counters this when he coins the term ‘double empathy’, suggesting that autistic and nonautistic people are like two cultures, speaking different languages. It’s not that autistic people lack empathy, he says, but that the two groups experience the world, express emotion, and interact so differently that it’s hard for members of either group to empathise across neurotype. This does not affect the two groups equally, he says. It’s autistic people who are expected to change to fit in with neurotypical culture—whether through ‘social skills’ classes in childhood, or an expectation to join in with gossip in the workplace. Milton suggests it might, therefore, be autistic people who gain the greater insight.

* * *

At the door of one of the city’s libraries, I take out my earphones and absorb the hush. Waiting in the queue, watching the librarian behind the desk, I become certain she’s autistic. I’m not sure how I know this. Perhaps it’s the way she makes eye contact without quite making it, or the way her voice rings out in the quiet, vaulted room. She appears marooned there on her dark wood island, surrounded by a sea of books, at the mercy of whatever blows in through the door. There’s something brave about her, brave and vulnerable. I think she must be tired by the end of each day.

At the front of the queue, I hand over a pile of books. Some of them are children’s books, I say, others for the music library. I tell her I hope it’s all right to return them all together. I say this even though I know it is. That’s how I know I’m trying to make a connection. The librarian gives a similarly long answer. I think she might want to make a connection too. Yes, it’s fine to return all the books here. She just needs to put the ones for this library in this box and the rest of them in that.

She’s checking the books as she talks, looking inside the front covers to see which library each book must be returned to. She opens one of the children’s books.

‘Ah, Portobello,’ she says. ‘The last time I was there my child bit someone, so we haven’t been back.’

We laugh.

‘Happens to the best of us,’ I say.

It occurs to me the meaning of this exchange will be invisible from outside. It will look, from out there, like two women making small talk as they complete a transaction. From in here, it seems to me we’re having a neurodivergent conversation about neurodivergence. Some of it is in the words we say—when she told me her child bit someone, I felt like she was telling me her child is autistic—some of it is hard to explain, momentary judgements made from thin slice interactions.

Collecting my reserved books from the shelves, I remember nursery rhyme sessions at Portobello library when my own child was small. All the other babies sat on their mothers’ laps while he crawled off towards the shelves, pulling book after book out onto the floor. I remember going along behind him putting them back, still miming bus wheels and winding bobbins at the back of his head.

He still doesn’t like groups and joining in. Honestly, neither do I. It doesn’t matter. Now we know about autism, we just don’t go to stuff like that.

I glance back at the librarian, still standing at the counter, then down along the length of my own foreshortened body. I’m wearing jeans, trainers, and a stripy t-shirt. I can see just the tips of my hair, which is cut into a nondescript sort of bob. There is nothing particular to mark me out. But the recognition between us was mutual. I saw myself being seen.

In the library’s autism section, there’s a book by an eminent academic, a specialist in the field. I saw it last time I was in. I know it argues that autistic people lack empathy. Silently, I make my case for the defence. I tie myself in knots, trying to get my story straight, until I stop believing it myself. Anything I lay down here in black-and-white, I know it’s not quite true. And then I want to take it back. Meanwhile, he continues on, unaware of my existence.

I takes my reservations to the counter: a collection of Paul Auster’s writings and a book about neurodivergence and education. The same librarian is still there behind the desk. She stamps the books. When she hands them back to me, she puts the neurodivergent book on top of the other one.

‘Looks interesting,’ she says.

‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘She’s good.’

I want to tell the librarian to read it. I want to say that it’s written for the parents of children who bite people in libraries. Instead I mumble a goodbye. I look in the general direction of the librarian’s face. The librarian looks in the general direction of my face.

In his poem, ‘The Scottish Constitution’, Robert Crawford writes of those who are ‘shy, tongue-tied, then eloquent, / Catching your eye and holding it forever’. The librarian and I don’t catch each other’s eyes of course because – yuck! – why would you? And yet the meaning holds. As I step back out into the bustle of a Saturday afternoon—awkward but so what—I’m still smiling.

* * *

The GP is younger than me—in his middle thirties perhaps. Bright pictures, probably drawn by his children, are pinned up on the board behind his head. He takes time to check we haven’t met before, to say he’s glad to meet me. Knowing how many patients he must see each day, I appreciate that.

After he’s checked my blood pressure, made a referral, and arranged a follow-up appointment, we get talking about autism. I’m trying to write an essay about it. He has an interest in it: as a medical student, he had a part-time job working with an autistic girl who wasn’t able to attend school. He became so interested in autism, in fact, that he read several books by a famous academic in the field. He says the name. It’s the same person who wrote the book I saw in the library the other day.

I can’t help myself. People in the autistic community take issue with the idea that autistic people don’t have empathy, I say. I tell him about Damian Milton and double empathy. I tell him that everybody—autistic or not—has difficulty with communicating across neurotype.

He glances at the door. Doctor and patient. He holds all the power of course. I’ve used up all my time and more.

‘I have to admit, I did get the impression from those books that autistic people lacked empathy,’ he says. ‘I’ve met some autistic adults and that wouldn’t be true of them, I’m pretty sure.’

In other words, he had accepted the idea that autistic people lacked empathy, despite the evidence of his own eyes, because he read it in a book. I’m sure he’s not alone in this. If I hadn’t been researching autistic experience for the last couple of years as if my life and the life of my child depended on it—which in a way it did—I probably would have accepted it too.

‘The trouble is,’ I say, ‘it sort of filters down into the culture, an idea like that. It makes things harder for autistic people. All this new autistic-led research, it takes time for it to get known. It takes time for people’s views to change. Meanwhile the education system is still based on the old ideas. And the health service.’

He laughs. I hope I haven’t gone too far.

‘I’m glad to stand corrected,’ he says.

As he says this, he does stand. He goes to the door and opens it. I read his intention perfectly. We say our goodbyes. I leave.

* * *

I hear an interview with Jodie Wilson, an autistic veterinarian and researcher. She describes a study she recently conducted at La Trobe University in Australia that aims to explore the experiences of autistic people accessing mental health services. Based on the overarching theme of ‘we don’t know what we don’t know’, it shows, in line with Milton’s double empathy theory, that poor outcomes are often based on mutual misunderstandings between autistic patients and the nonautistic professionals aiming to help them.

I prick up my ears.

It’s easy to get angry on behalf of autistic people who seem to have been mistreated, she says, but failures are traumatic for all involved: she never met a healthcare professional who wanted to fail at their job. Not knowing isn’t a problem, she says. It’s when you think your knowledge is complete that things go wrong.

* * *

In the kitchen, sun comes round a corner and illuminates the table’s far end—toddler fork tines, dropped paint, the singe of a science experiment that got out of hand—scars of our history.

Our life in thin slices.

Sometimes it feels like this will never end: him at the table, my hand on the back of his chair.

It will; he’s changing all the time, venturing out beyond the bounds of what I know.

There’s some new monster on the screen. I feel him flinch. One day he’ll be gone for good, out the door into a future I can’t imagine. I wanted him to be formally assessed for autism. I wanted to give him the chance both to understand himself and to be understood by those around him. We all want to be seen as we are, whether there’s a name for it or not. But it doesn’t always work that way; even with a diagnosis we can’t control how others see us.

With NHS waiting lists for adult assessment now stretching to many years, it will be a long time before I get a diagnosis myself. But I already have what I most need: the recognition that comes from hearing stories like my own and rereading my past in the light of them.

All this time and it turns out there’s nothing wrong with me.

There’s nothing wrong with my son either. Unless you count a highly sensitive bullshit detector, or the way he’s seriously allergic to coercion. He fights any curtailment of his liberty as if his life depends on it. He won’t—can’t—do anything but be himself.

I am so proud of him for that.

I drop a kiss on the top of his head; for once, he lets it pass. Together we turn back to the zombies.