Working Together

- So I think one of the first things to me is that if you're gonna be a researcher and you haven't had a lot of contact with autistic people, have some contact with people and, you know, have a sense, some balance of personal and contact and, you know, exploration of topics and subjects and stuff maybe before it's even a formal research thing. And you have to be careful with the ethics of, you know, how to do that appropriately and in healthy way. And you know, at least, I can't give very quick advice to that, but I think you keep that in mind. In my first relationships, no, and I mean that in a casual sense of relationships with autistic people, other autistic people were tricky and different and stuff. Interacting with people with different sorts of social skills and ways of doing things and stuff, even though I have different ways of processing things, is different. And so even as an autistic person, it's not automatically simple or easy to really get it right and have those positive relationships. And then the other thing with that piece is to be really, really careful and sensitive to the consequences of those relationships and how to, definitely, I mean, it's important not to use things against people in those relationships too, and that can be hard because there's a lot of sense of dual relationship to this kind of work where we're being supportive to people, and we have our own lives, and we have our own needs.