Awareness is dead. Long live Awareness

So it’s over.

April and Awareness and Autism are long gone.

We’ve all grown as people and now we can get on with our lives, safe in the knowledge that we have done our duty and made the world a better place.

This was my first Autism Awareness day/week/month as a diagnosed autistic person.

That’s not to say I wasn’t an autistic person before, I just wasn’t aware of it. It was something other. Something distant and worth holding a flag for, for a day, but not something relevant to my life.

I read a lot of articles and books and blogs by autistic people. A creative bunch, frantically trying to pin down shared experience into words.

It’s helped me feel a part of something bigger. It’s helped me order my thoughts. It’s helped me to adjust myself in the way that I want to.

I’m no longer a square peg hammering herself into a round hole, I’ve decided I’ll accept some rounding on my corners, but I’m going to keep some other bits.

I’m going to be a rounded parallelogram.

And that’s a decision I’ve been able to make because of all the stories and personal accounts people have written.

Being a part of trying to share awareness has had the added benefit of increasing my own.

I am more aware. More aware of me. More aware of this enormous group of people. More aware of how exclusive some parts of the world are, for no other reason than a lack of awareness.

But now it’s over.

We can all go back to hiding in public. We can all go back to accepting things as they are. We can all go back to being faulty versions of normal.

Can’t we?