It’s been just over a year since Stim: An Autistic Anthology was published by Unbound, so I thought I’d talk a bit about my story in it about selkies and having a terrible time at university. I was quite surprised my pitch got accepted because I was worried it was very out there indeed— “it’s a story about how hard I found it growing up as an autistic person, except also it’s about evolution and a seal who pretends to be human.” But I guess one of the points of an own voices collection is that sometimes your own voice says something unexpected about the experiences you’ve had? And these were my experiences of being autistic, for better or worse. And I’m glad my wonderful editor Lizzie-Huxley Jones took a chance on them, and then made my drafty thoughts better in so many ways.
In the last year I’ve been happy and sad to discover the experiences I talked about in Stim weren’t actually uncommon at all; that lots of people have got in touch to say they related to the selective mutism and the disordered eating and the rest of it; the feeling that what it is to be a human and a person has somehow been constructed to exclude yourself. Happy because it’s nice to know you’re not alone; sad because it’s also terrible to know you’re not alone; these things were awful, they shouldn’t have happened more than once to so many different people. And I hear that the university experience hasn’t changed enough in the 16 years since I was a first year; that it’s still impossibly difficult for a lot of people. I hope autism awareness and autism acceptance does something to change that? I wish I could be confident that it would.
But I guess most of all I’m glad to have had the chance to have a voice, to assert my place in a world that I feel is bigger than neurotypical convention pretends. I’m glad that selkies – seals who pretend to be human – are becoming more of a metaphor for the wideness of human experience, of a demand that all of us get to tell our stories. And I’m glad to have been a part of a collection that asserts that so strongly. It’s something that has meant a lot to me.
Robert Shepherd: Writer 