Don’t Put All Your Eggs in One Basket

Autism as a cultural identity

I didn’t have the social imagination as an autistic child, and I still don’t have to engage in the make-believe of chocolate eggs and bunnies, let alone the Christian symbolism of Easter. For me, Easter is subjectively a social construct, so what doesn’t align with my values and beliefs may be meaningful to someone else. I’ve come to understand this as I’ve aged empathetically.

Previously, I only experienced confusion, often frustrating those around me who tried to rationalise everything. I have spent much of my life deconstructing constructs to reconstruct them, and reconnect the dots to apply some rationale in my head.

‘You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards,’ Steve Jobs famously said. So, you must trust that the dots will somehow connect in the future. Well, in the future, they did atypically connect me with my autistic identity.

I can’t fake my beliefs in such traditional concepts, but I wouldn’t ruin them for others, and I have respect. Naturally, as a kid, I didn’t have the emotional capacity to put it into context, so I was the child who was being ‘difficult’ again. Many autistic kids will be able to engage their social imagination here; this is just my lived experience.

There was no realism in it for me to grasp, and there was nothing to sense-check about the certainty of its meaning and symbolism. There’s always much chocolate here, but it’s not in the shape of eggs. I don’t hunt eggs, but it’s endearing to see the joy it brings to children and adults who do.

I don’t consider my failure to contextualise Easter to be a deficit anymore; in fact, it’s as if I’m culturally autistic now, as are many people around the world who do not celebrate Easter due to their cultures.

A cultural difference.

So, this is a reminder that some kids and adults may be ostracised for being socially awkward and not playing the social game this Easter. It can be a gamble for many of us, as the rules will confuse us, and we will lose. Then, we withdraw even more as a defence mechanism.

Be kind; don’t assume why that is.

Some of us were the kids, all the colours of the spectrum on the left, trying to figure it out. Still, many chose to see the deficits in our cultural conditions of being human and assumed it was everything other than our actual reality.

These traditional celebrations sometimes cause my grief for my autistic child to catch up with me, and I have to pause and reflect.

Not putting all your eggs in one basket is appropriate now, for all of us to understand.

I’m off to enjoy some rest, catch up with family and friends, socialize on my terms over the coming week, and take a well-earned break after a few hectic work weeks.

Have a wonderful Easter if you celebrate, and if you don’t celebrate like me, enjoy the rest.

Have a good Friday also, in the literal sense.