Last week I got called kind of at the last minute to do an interview with NPR. Jim Sinclair and Michael John Carley were also interviewed, and the reporter I think went to a GRASP meeting. They keep moving the projected time for airing around, but right now, it’s something like “Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday of this week, on All Things Considered, or else next week sometime, but we don’t really know yet so this is very tentative.” They’d had two separate tentative dates on which they’d been going to put it on Morning Edition, so I can vouch for the tentative part. Right now they’re trying for All Things Considered.

But the theme of the show is autistic pride, apparently.

I hope I answered the questions well enough. A lot of them had very complicated answers and we were on a short time limit. Also, the reporter asked a few more biographical questions than I was comfortable with, although surprisingly I was able towards the end of those to say “Can we talk about my views, not my life, people can read my blog to find out more of the biographical stuff.”

I am very interested to hear how it sounds with all the interviews put together.

Anyway, what I’m likely to do, is once it airs, I’m likely to try to answer the questions in more detail on my blog, if I end up thinking that what I said was too un-nuanced or something. It was really difficult because it seemed to jump around a lot between things like “What’s wrong with cure?” and “Are there any autistic strengths?” (then “Give examples”) and of course the ever-impossible-to-give-a-short-answer-to “When did you learn to type?” (which I think was the one where I was finally able to articulate my fed-up-ness with the autobiography thing).

It got really confusing when he asked about “Is there an autistic community?” and I said “Actually there’s several,” and then I think he thought I was talking about subtypes of autism, when I was talking about social groupings of autistic people, and then there were lots of sidetracked sorts of questions on that. I hope the editors focus more on views than on my life.

But I think that contributing to a radio broadcast about autistic pride is probably a decent contribution to Autistic Pride Day, which is good, because I’m too exhausted to contribute much else unless I get a sudden burst of energy.