Fern Brady Quotes

For most autistics existing in a world not built for them, anxiety is the baseline and constant background hum that their daily life has to play over.

The idea that meltdowns are manipulative is absurd and a cause of gross misunderstanding between autistics and the rest of the world.

I was continually over-identifying with fiction to try and find a template for myself and my story (143)

I was continually over-identifying with fiction to try and find a template for myself and my story.

Just you wait, I thought. I’ll think of something really clever to reply to you in about a decade, just as soon as I replay this scenario in my head dozens of times.

sheer panic at any kind of uncertainty

I like meeting new people as it means every day is a new opportunity to redeem yourself, to make a fresh start at being seen as a normal woman and practice at it. It's when people get to know you that they realise something seriously off and that's harder to rectify

I now understand that an aversion to holidays is extremely common in autistic people – the disruption to routine, the unpredictable nature of travel, the lights and noise of the airport and the extreme temperature change on arrival creates a special kind of sensory hell. Sameness is what I thrived on. I’m told that the appeal of holidays for most people is the novelty and break from the humdrum of everyday life. My family concluded among themselves that I was an arsehole. I didn’t know why I was so unhappy on holidays either, so I had no other option but to agree with them.

How were you supposed to know not to mention necrophilia at Christmas dinner?

For all her flaws, my mum never raised me with dysfunctional attitudes to food or made me think I was greedy or not thin enough. She was always clear she disliked me for me.

It was absurd that you could just copy what the other person in your house was doing and it would make life more normal, more stable.

It's uncomfortable that this isn't all good or all bad or a happy ending or a sad ending, but just a mess that everyone muddled through. It's very painful to start loving someone when holding on to the idea of hating them keeps you safe.

It's 2022 as I write this and I'm still waiting to find someone I respect to speak openly and in detail about meltdowns. I'm really annoyed that I have to be the one to do this.

Every attempt to fit in resulted in me being more weird and more isolated from normal people.

I marveled that women could get away with saying the most insulting things as long as they maintained a soft tone of voice.

No one ever asks me about the men. All they ever want to know about is the naked bit.

Arguably, men made me hate men; stripping just let me see them at their most men-ish.

I guess if I enjoyed sex and didn't feel there were any consequences, I was robbing them of the idea that chastity was vital for social approval and a way of being held in high esteem.

In my teens and early twenties I frequently had the sense that a madwoman was driving the car of my life while I sat in the back seat observing it and wondering how we ended up here. This was one of those moments.

It made perfect sense to me that my skin was bursting open in disgusting weeping pustules. The emotions felt volcanic and I'd never been good at communicating that to people in words so now my body was doing it for me.

Though masking is incredibly taxing and causes us a lot of existential turmoil, it’s rewarded and facilitated by neurotypical people. Masking makes autistic people easier to “deal” with.’ —Devon Price, Unmasking Autism

Mum’s theory that I’d simply seen pictures and copied them – rather than accepting that I felt depressed and sought out reflections of that in the culture around me – was such an asinine line of thinking that I didn’t bother challenging it.

She was a librarian, dammit. She knew books. She used the Dewey Decimal System. She taught the children to search with their eyes and their brains. They were encouraged to ask Moira for help, rather than punch titles into a screen. Moira believed all children needed to live through that awkward, precarious moment when they had to disrupt the silence of the library and approach the librarian. It built character.

Trying to kill yourself never pans out the way it does in films. In hospital they do ask you if you meant to kill yourself but it's such a factual box-ticking exercise that to answer with any kind of emotion would be mortifying. There's no 'It was a cry for help' box but there should be. I feel like the doctors and the general public need to raise awareness of how embarrassing most suicide attempts are. When you're in a backless hospital gown with your worst pants on it's really hard to hold your nerve and say, 'I wanted to die?

As I came off stage at the gig that night, I told my agent I didn't feel right. "But you did great out there." "But I feel weird." The words sounded strained as I said them. I knew this was a big disastrous feeling so couldn't work out why it came out of me so tiny.

It's very painful to start loving someone when holding on to the idea of hating them keeps you safe.

I wasn't sure how they'd got mental illness conflated with me having done something wrong but there didn't seem to be any chance of reasoning with them now.

Lots of the jobs that were predominantly held by men didn't require anything like the same number of social calculations as the jobs held by women.

Since euthanasia is illegal in Britain, when someone has a stroke and isn’t going to survive, the doctors starve and dehydrate them to death.

A lot of allistic people I know are primarily motivated by social approval so push any rogue queerness down into their subconscious or suppress their thoughts and only get comfortable with it later in life.

The song was a big sweeping orchestral number and the violins swelled as she screamed. It was a preposterous song to bottle someone to.

Research has shown that the amygdala is either enlarged or too small in autistic people, which explains why we perceive aggression and certain emotions so differently from others.

I grinned. I’d passed their Protestant filth test with flying colours. I felt like Princess Diana must have felt when she was first invited to Balmoral and made the Royal Family love her by shooting a stag.

The question implied that stripping had clouded my judgement and made me a grizzled hag gazing angrily into the middle distance rather than giving me perfect clarity over the fact that the world hates women.

In a strip club, groups of men are in a safe space where they’re encouraged to play up to hypermasculine ideals - and because they believe no one in power is watching them they project all their shame and irregular feelings about women onto the strippers, who they believe exist in a vacuum and won’t ever speak out about their behaviour or, say, write about it in a tell-all-memoir.

My parents’ belief that my dead relatives could see everything I was doing from heaven was niggling me. Well, at least from heaven you can see how little money I have, I reasoned with Papa’s ghost, figuring that in the afterlife he’d be blessed with an angelic, non-judgemental attitude and would just be smiling down on me benevolently.

Reading about why stripping is appealing to some autistic women, I realized there was more than one of us. Thinking back over some of my old workmates, there were possibly even loads of us. My pragmatic views made sense: of course I enjoyed a job that was highly tolerant of weirdos, almost impossible to get sacked from, had none of the fluorescent lighting that made most offices or supermarket jobs overwhelming, involved the same routine night after night and the same dumb conversations with men with no tricky social cues to read.