We all make mistakes at some point. Some people make mistakes with a shocking frequency but I think the majority of us take some pride in ourselves and want to do our best most or all of the time.
Sometimes I make mistakes although I hate it when I do. I tend to internalise it and put it down to my autism as the cause, as if I would be perfect if it wasn't for some unrelenting and cruel disability. It stares at me, holding me back, like it is jealous of me reaching my potential. I become incredibly fed-up and angry at what I perceive to be caused by some genetic injustice or design error. By no fault of my own I have got this malfunctioning brain that is making me mess up in a way that no one else would do, who would identify as neuro typical.
Cue lots of tears, frustration and shaking a fist in the direction of some vague deity concept. I get all theological and philosophical, wondering about why a (possibly Christian?!) God would make me from a design that had inherit mistakes in it. I ponder predestination and if I am "meant" to experience all this supposed autistic-derived suffering because human freewill is potentially a nonexistent construct?! God has already decided before I was born of my life's trajectory and I am merely a puppet controlled by its cruel puppet master, toying with its humankind.
I think of the unfairness of why I was born with such quirks. I can recognise autism had given me lots of benefits such as thinking in the way that I do and approaching tasks in novel and creative ways. I see that if utilised properly, it could be of great use in some workplaces and wider society. I get all that.
But I fail to ever see how sensory overload is a personality style but rather it is somewhat of a curse. It appears to me to be outside of a cognitive style. I might explore this later.
So there I am, getting ridiculously over the top and contemplating some deep topics all because I had made a mistake at work.
And actually when I calmed down and started to be a bit more rational and logical, I realised the instructions I was given were nonsensical or lacked the preciseness that I required. I had a wild stab in the dark guessing what was asked of me, and in good faith I completed the task to the best of my ability.
The trouble is, the instructions lead me up the wrong garden path (not literally!). After talking with some neuro typical people, I realised too that autistic people don't have some monopoly or rather unique experience to dealing with vague instructions. Yes, we do require a higher level of accuracy in instructions and find reading between the lines a challenge, but the neuro typical people of this world do not possess some weird unspoken-about mind reading skills.
So I started lowering my fist and the last tear fell. I began to realise that in this case I hadn't made a mistake but the person issuing the instructions wasn't clear. Perhaps the system itself of how work was communicated needed revision. It wasn't about mistakes or failures, it was more about a failure in communication to get across what job needed to be done. This is not even passing the blame onto the person setting the task but as a reminder to us all that clarity in writing is important. It helps organisational efficiency and cut down the unnecessary emails required to decipher the intended meaning.
And you know what? This happens to everyone, autistic or not. Mistakes can happen because one's autism can be a mitigating factor in creating different approaches to problems and understandings and sometimes not. However being on some autistic spectrum doesn't automatically mean that every setback and difficulty must be because of cognitive developmental disorder. I think I need step away from the automatic assigning all problems and life challenges to autism. I expect if I had spoken to a colleague about what I had been asked to do, they may not have been much clearer either.
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