Photo by Steffen Junginger on Unsplash
I’ve known for a long time that I’m different.
Growing up in the UK from a Bangladeshi background, I was one of the few non-white faces within school.
But it was only until I got to my first office job that I first realised that my differences would provoke additional challenges. Before that, I naively thought that the workplace was a space that was genuinely open, and driven towards the most effective way of working.
With my recent autism diagnosis, I feel like I’m having this experience all over again. With this new lens, I’m seeing all the ways that I’ve been navigating additional barriers, often without even realising they existed.
On Tuesday, I went to a ‘begin to workout’ gym class. The description stated it was a light class to help people begin strength training workouts. But in practice, my personal trainer decided to do what was essentially a High Intensity Internal Training style class. There was little explanation, instead it was about doing several different movements in quick time to maximise an ‘efficient’ workout.
I was p***ed off. The trainer kept trying to ‘motivate’ me by telling me to have less breaks and just to try harder. At one point I actually explained to him that the reason I came to this class was just to get a basic introduction to strength exercises and see how I can add them into my practice. It was not push my body to its limit. He then explained to me that this was not possible, as there were too many people (there were four of us, in a class with a max total of 6).
I did the class, only to find myself barely being able to walk the next day. I had to subsequently cancel a dance class that I really wanted to do because it would have been a terrible idea.
The really annoying thing about this was that I knew this was the case as it was happening. A lesser, younger version of me wouldn’t have dared question a personal trainer. But now I knew that some of the exercises were pushing me beyond a reasonable limit.
My autism diagnosis has helped me make sense of episodes like these.
For starters, when I follow instructions, I take them literally. My tendency is to carry on, even if I’m overexerting myself. Because I thought that this was what everyone was experiencing, I would push through anyway. Unsurprisingly, I would injure myself a lot.
I also find the instructions in classes so contradictory. On the one hand, I had this personal trainer telling me that ‘everyone goes at their own rhythm’, but then we went to the next exercise which explicitly was around ‘no breaks beyond 15 seconds between exercises’. These two facts are very contradictory.
My modus operandi is to follow through on instructions. This means I will try very hard to do what I’m told, to a fault. the actual advice I’ve needed is not to go harder, but actually to go slower. Unfortunately, this sort of advice doesn’t seem to exist in Personal Trainer training 101. The answer to everything seems to be about pushing people harder. This has meant I’ve experienced a cycle of pushing myself so hard I get injured. And when I return, I’m even further away from my fitness goals than I was in the first place. I then blame myself for not being able to follow through with an exercise regime. At no point did anyone tell me that these are meant to be moderate workouts where you aren’t meant to always feel terrible after them.
I’ve felt betrayed by the experts that have guided me in many situations. Rather than properly assessing what I need, I’ve been instead told to follow a cookie-cutter solution that was not meant for me.
When it doesn’t work, I internalised the idea that it was my fault because I was too lazy. Even now, when I push back around poor advice that I know won’t work for me, I end up getting judged for this. Either I’m making excuses for being lazy, or I’m too arrogant to take people’s advice.
For better or for worse, I’m learning to accept that people will judge me for being different. It won’t necessarily be directly because of things such as my skin colour. Instead it will be the fact that my needs and truths are very different. For example, I will know in my heart that someone’s well meaning advice would be terrible for me. Expressing this however, will simply mean that the narrative of the ungrateful, aggressive minority gets further forged.
There is no silver bullet that will magically dismantle inequalities. But recognising these exist are an important step. For me, the autism diagnosis set this out clearly.
For those of us who are different, being clear in who we are and what we believe becomes even more paramount. Following the crowd will probably not work for us, so we need to be able to actively stand for our particular needs.
It won’t be like a Hollywood movie. Backlash happens, friends are lost.
But if we want the best life for ourselves, we don’t have any other choice. We must learn to take a stand for what we really need.