April is World Autism Awareness Month, and in a world that still struggles with inclusion, acceptance, and understanding, it seems more important that ever to talk about autism awareness. Ultimately, autism awareness takes a variety of forms, so when it comes to being authors who have both feet firmly in the world of autism, it’s impossible not to talk about it.
Admittedly, talking about it in a timely manner, by which I mean, posting a blog post to match World Autism Awareness Day (April, 2nd 2026), is even more impossible, Do not ask me to meet content calendar deadlines because these feel far too arbitrary to me. Why should there be only one day dedicated to autism awareness? Does it mean people are entitled to ignore us the rest of the year?
My tiny inner rebel wants to strategically avoid the due date simply because autism awareness is relevant every day of the day… and also because, no matter how hard I try (and believe me, I do), I can’t physically bring myself to respect these types of deadlines. I don’t see a meaning in them, so my brain rejects them automatically.
Why Does World Autism Awareness Matter To Us?
It’s a fair question. After all, why should it matter to us?
Well, as it happens, there is no such thing as a clear and simple answer. World Autism Awareness Month matters because autism needs more voices from inside the void. Enough of the people talking about autism while sitting at a safe distance from the neurodivergent tornado. Why would I do with the educated (or uneducated, you’d be surprised to know how many social media experts have zero experience or exposure to it) opinion of someone who watches from afar?
Everything always seems too caricatural from afar because the mind is constantly interpreting to make it fix conveniently unrealistic little boxes. Instead what does autism look like from the eye of the tornado?
That is where we sit. We are inside the box, and we took some of our characters with us. Are we the best placed individuals to talk about it? Everyone inside the arbitrary box named “autism” is. The box has blurry edges, and even when you’re in it, you can never quite site where it ends and where the non-box world starts. But one thing we know for sure is the malaise that comes with being, knowingly or not, inside the box. It’s precisely why we won’t shut up about it.
The Importance Of Being Vocal About World Autism Awareness
You may be wondering why people are becoming more and more vocal every year about autism awareness. What are we trying to achieve and what is there that the rest of the world isn’t yet aware of when it comes to autism?
This is a tricky series of questions, and people would have a lot of different answers depending on their priorities. To me, the key is awareness. It’s not so much a case of making others aware of my needs. I have spent far too. many years cautiously burying them deep, so deep in fact that I rarely know what I need at any given time.
Does it break me? Yes, every single day. I push and keep pushing, even when there is no fuel left in the tank because I only realise I ran out of fuel after I’ve burnt half the engine. But this is far from being an isolated situation. In the UK only, research estimates there are 2.5 million undiagnosed neurodivergent adults, who fall in either the autism or the ADHD category (or, more often than not, both).
My hope is that the more we talk about autism awareness, the more we can help raise their own awareness about it. Making them aware that they might be autistic and not broken after all is probably the most important mission for World Autism Awareness month.
Autism Awareness vs. Self Awareness
This may sound like an odd thing to say, but in reality driving the point about world autism awareness also helps a lot of undiagnosed, high-masking individuals to come to grasp with a more existential question, namely, who they are. Not being aware of your autism diagnosis means growing up without support. The reason why this is a common issue is that not every autistic person actually walks around behaving like Rain Man or, more recently, Attorney Woo.
Now, this doesn’t mean these representations are necessarily bad. Both Rain Man and Attorney Woo are characters who have Savant Syndrome and highly visible support needs. I will insist on the visibility, rather than the quantifying of the support needs. Many observers tend to assume that just because something can’t be seen, it doesn’t exist, or even its existence is acknowledge, it probably means that it is too small to be noticeable. To them, I want to say:
Individuals who grew up without either a diagnosis or support have manage to go under the radar because they have learned to hide their needs. Pretending you don’t have needs simply because you intuitively know those needs wouldn’t make sense to those around you does not eliminate the needs. The unmet needs continue to exist.
So does one avoid needs? By pretending they are not there. By pretending you don’t see them. By forcing yourself to act as much like others as possible. When you do this, you never get to b e yourself. You are constantly playing the character of what you think a normal person should be like to be accepted. You deny your own self, and in doing so, your own awareness of yourself. Being unaware that you are autistic means growing up while willingly throwing away your self-awareness in the hope you can be tolerated by those, close or not, to you.
So, I will never shut up about the importance of the World Autism Awareness Month. If it helps just one person to realise they may be autistic and to seek a diagnosis, then it’s a win. It’s one step closer to figuring out what they need and who they are.
This is also one of the reasons why YA fantasy is so important to me. YA literature typically acts as a self-exploratory journey for young readers who are in the process of forming their identity. Undiagnosed neurodivergent individuals are on the same journey, trying to come to term with who they are not and uncovering who they might be. That’s why the characters of The Dead Shadow have some of the traits they may recognise in themselves.
Like Rhode, they may respond to a deep emotional wound with logic and determination, unable to let go of their anger and rumination, even if it could cost them a lot.
Like Helena, they may have lived as a recluse, craving connection but never finding those who will accept them as they are.
Like Pamphilos, they can’t ignore the injustice when they see it, and they feel a need to rectify what they perceive as wrongdoings, even if it takes them a long time.