I follow a Facebook Group in which one of
the members challenged us to write something every day for Autism
Awareness Month, providing topics for each day. The first day is just an
intro.
I run an "employee resource group" (ERG) or an internal website where I work that concentrates on autism awareness, support, hiring and research in my company. It has about 600 members so I wanted to share the posts I create with this group.
When I went to create the post I saw that I had missed what a colleague posted earlier in the week: A piece about the Autism Gap, and Autism Awareness Week. Both of them are worth reading, but the latter gave me some pause, and eventually the topic for this piece.
My colleague's post celebrates the week as March 26th-April 2nd.
April 2nd is Autism Awareness Day, and the whole month of April is for
Autism Awareness. I'm easily confused (a fun party game), I don't know
what authority decides these things, but it occurred to me that it
doesn't matter. Whether we are parents of autistic children, looking to
change recruiting and HR to accommodate autistic people, researching
autism, or #actuallyautistic - we are always aware of autism and always looking for the rest of the world accept autistic people.
Still, I accepted this challenge for this month and I will
do my best. I will post each day on a new topic around the subject of
autism. Most of the time my expertise will be sorely challenged or
utterly lacking. What I hope, though, is that as I share each topic some
of you will respond from your points of view as parents or autistics,
and we can learn from one another to help spread awareness and
acceptance the rest of the year. I hope you will participate and bear
with me.
