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Lived experience, Autistic Pride Day Symposium 2024
Christina Chun now schedules her masking, and Sharon Zivkovic asks for accommodations
In short
At the 2024 Sydney symposium, Christina Chun described masking after diagnosis as a cost to be budgeted, and Dr Sharon Zivkovic described accommodations as something she now felt able to demand.
Read it instead, 4 minutesThe transcript
The story
In 2024 Christina Chun kept a schedule for masking. Asked on a panel at the Autistic Pride Day Symposium in Sydney on 9 June 2024 what had changed since her autism diagnosis, the chief operating officer of Social Enterprise Australia said she had started “allocating very specific masking time”. Masking was still necessary, she said, in order to function in life and to get her business off the ground. Since diagnosis she had given it a set budget, with a very intentional schedule for how much time she gives to other people and to situations.
Kyriakos Gold, who hosted the session, had asked her how she had connected with the right people and brought substantial projects to life before diagnosis, and whether anything was different after it. She joked first that she was even better at connecting the right bots and technologies, then said it had not really been a joke. She had been building out a team of bots, to the point of naming them, because together they formed an ecosystem that took a work process from start to finish. When she talked about them enthusiastically to her boss, she said, the boss told her she had a problem and that they needed to hire people.
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Sources the story draws on
- "Putting on My Best Normal": Social Camouflaging in Adults with Autism Spectrum Conditions (opens in a new tab), Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 47(8), pp. 2519 to 2534 (Hull, Petrides, Allison, Smith, Baron-Cohen, Lai, Mandy); PubMed Central
- "Having All of Your Internal Resources Exhausted Beyond Measure and Being Left with No Clean-Up Crew": Defining Autistic Burnout (opens in a new tab), Autism in Adulthood, 2(2) (Raymaker, Teo, Steckler, Lentz, Scharer, Delos Santos, Kapp, Hunter, Joyce, Nicolaidis); PDXScholar, Portland State University
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