Caregiver's Spotlight: Sarah Whiteside. 2024 Anne Brown Essay Prize Winner.
Highlighting The Wigtown Book Festival and Part 1 of Sarah's essay, 'Thin Slices'.
Dear Carer Mentor Community Readers, I’d like to introduce you to Sarah Whiteside.
Sarah’s publication is ‘Forgetting the Self.’ In it, she explores the nature of identity from her perspective as a late-identified autistic person and longtime meditator.1 She has an autistic son, whom she home-educates. In her words, all this means she has quite a lot to say about caregiving! And, she is an award-winning writer!
Sarah recently won the 2024 Anne Brown Essay Prize, and an excerpt of her essay ‘Thin Slices’ was published in the Scottish Herald.
The Anne Brown Essay Prize champions Scottish Writing Talent. The competition, organised by Wigtown Book Festival, is for the best literary essay by a writer in or from Scotland. It commemorates former festival chair and BBC radio journalist Anne Brown.2
2024 is the festival’s twenty-sixth year. Take a look at this highlights video:
Sarah had intense competition Anne Brown Essay Prize 2024 Shortlist
A quote from the website:
“It is plain from the calibre of the entry that Scottish writing is in fine shape. As judges, we were impressed by the scope and diversity of the contributions.”
- Brian Taylor; columnist, former BBC political editor and Anne Brown Essay Prize judge.
Sarah was the recipient of one of Scottish Book Trust’s New Writers’ Awards 2024. She has a degree in Creative Writing from St Andrews and lives in Edinburgh. Her essay is a personal story about autism and a critique of flawed social and scientific attitudes.
Sarah is fairly new to the Substack platform and is looking for ways to collaborate more with other writers here. I hope you’ll reach out and connect with her. I feel blessed that our paths have crossed.
In this first ‘Caregiver’s Spotlight Article’, I wanted to highlight Sarah’s achievement to remind us all that it’s possible to sustain our identity beyond caregiving, we CAN continue to share our talents, passion and gifts with others.
Congratulations, Sarah!
Carer Mentor will continue to shine A Spotlight on Caregiver’s, raise awareness of the person beyond the acts of caregiving and dispel the myth that we are superhuman heroes. We are perfectly imperfect humans, trying to do our best but often invisible behind what we do.
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This is the first part of Sarah’s essay published at ‘Forgetting the Self’ October 15th 2024.
I recommend subscribing to her publication so that you don’t miss reading the second half of her essay, in a couple of weeks.
Thin Slices By Sarah Whiteside
I’m at the kitchen counter again. Distant traffic passes. My son is at the table, eyes on a screen. A too-familiar soundtrack fills the room. It sometimes feels like this will never end. Him there, me here, the same tinny music on a loop.
He calls me over to show me what he’s built. It’s a fortress, designed to keep the zombies out. I stand beside him, my hand on the back of his chair. The screen is a blur of colour and light. I blink. It’s about the 700th one he’s made. My attention slides off towards the window where the world waits in its blaze, trees melting into sky.
Reaching up, he takes me by the chin and turns my head back to the screen. But I can’t see what he sees.
1980. It’s playgrounds that scare me most. The wide-cold open space and figuring out how to cross it. Bells ring. Patterned concrete passes under running feet, lines blurring. I watch the other girls. I learn to look like them. Survival depends on staying in the middle, staying invisible. The best place to hide a pencil is in a pencil case.
1988. It’s double maths. I’m in the back row with the others, laughing when they laugh, swinging on two legs of a regulation plastic chair. Sweat pools at the backs of my knees and under my arms. The room is loud with heat, close with stifled talk. Itchy jumper. Itchy skirt. I live a life constricted by confusion and self-loathing. It’s impossible to hear the teacher over that.
There’s what they mean to teach. And then there’s what you learn: be careful not to say too little; be careful not to say too much; don’t give anything away.
I look out of the window, then at the clock. Twenty-seven minutes left. I’m waiting for the bell, even though it doesn’t mark the end, only a different room for more of the same. I’m counting the days and weeks, the years until it’s over: that’s the only sum I’m doing.
1997. I never speak in class. Silence marks me out. The other students share their thoughts with ease. The room swims with ideas, too fast to catch. It’s not as if I don’t have thoughts myself. I can almost taste them, in their music and their grit, but they won’t make it past my lips. If I try to talk, nonsense comes out. So I don’t.
2017. Three brain scientists from three different US universities – Noah Sasson, Ruth Grossman, Daniel Kennedy – publish a report laying out their work on the role of stigma in autistic experience. Up to this point much of the research in this area has, they say, focused on the communicative ability of autistic people themselves. Sasson et al point out that social interactions always involve more than one person. They turn their attention to nonautistic people. Asking participants to observe and rate ‘thin slices’ of videotaped interactions they aim to learn about all-important first impressions nonautistic people form about their autistic peers. Across all three studies they find that participants see autistic people in the videos as more awkward and less likeable. This is the case even though they aren’t told which ones are autistic.
In 2023, a smaller study led by Danny Dunn, a young autistic graduate student in Sasson’s department at the University of Texas, asks both autistic and nonautistic participants similarly to rate similar ‘thin slice’ interactions and finds that, while both groups see autistic people as more awkward and less socially skilled, only the nonautistic participants ‘report lower interest in socially interacting’ with the autistic ones. In other words, autistic people aren’t put off by awkwardness. Dunn calls his study ‘awkward but so what’.
Mothering means waiting. It means waiting with the other mothers—pencil in a pencil case. You wait outside gym halls and in playgrounds, by nurseries and schools. You wait on a litany of classes and clubs to be over. You wait, the lot of you, along the shoreline of your child’s experience, a ragged row of cross-armed Penelopes. It reminds me of that old Guinness ad, all moody black and white—grizzled surfer, surfboard, wave—with a voiceover saying: She waits. That’s what she does.
Things might, or might not, be going well in there. That story isn’t mine to tell. One thing is certain: whatever happens, I’m responsible. Responsible but powerless. I’m crossing not only arms but fingers and toes too. Crossing everything.
Sometimes he comes out screaming. Sometimes he throws a toy. Sometimes I get called aside and told a list of the latest misdemeanours. They never say it’s my fault. They never say it’s his. They never say that. They just keep smiling, smiling and talking. The other mums, probably glad it’s not them, pretend not to hear.
During the first few weeks of school, it doesn’t take long for things to fall apart. There are meetings with management. There are fidget toys and strategies, plans for part-time attendance. It’s clear nobody knows what to do.
One morning, a girl from my son’s class comes up to us in the playground. She invites him to her birthday party. Then she says: ‘Are you going to be bad again today?’
When there’s no official story, no label to describe you, you get the unofficial ones instead. You’re bad. Or odd. Nobody can quite put their finger on it but everyone agrees. They don’t say it’s my fault, but I’m the mother after all.
I don’t understand what I’m doing wrong.
We are in an NHS paediatric unit, a doctor observing. The child plays on the floor with a speech therapist. I sit behind them with his dad, the two of us on matching plastic chairs designed for children. The perspective is all wrong. We look like giants. Small cars drive on small roads. Two heads bent over the game.
The child has a plan. The therapist also has a plan. She’s testing to see how flexible he can be in response to her ideas. (Spoiler: not very.)
‘He got hurt,’ she says. ‘We need an ambulance.’
‘No we don’t,’ he says.
I look up. The doctor’s watching me across the room. I look down and away. On the phone, before the assessment, she asked if there were any autistic people in the immediate family.
‘If you’d asked me a year ago, I would have said no,’ I said, gripping the receiver. ‘But the more I read, the more I understand I’m probably autistic myself.’
It was the first time I’d said it to anyone other than my partner. The moment it was out, it sounded made up. I’m not sure if she believed me.
I barely believe it myself.
Doctor and speech therapist go to a different room to confer. My partner leans closer, lowering his voice.
‘That doctor’s autistic,’ he says.
The child picks up a plastic telephone. He presses the buttons. His dad joins him. We wait. We act like it’s a normal day. The doctor might come back any moment. She might say our son is autistic. She might say he isn’t. I’m 99.9% sure he is. But I still need them to tell me.
The child keeps coming over, bringing me things. The car. The telephone.
‘Look,’ he says.
But I can’t see what he sees.
The doctor comes back in. Words are coming out of her mouth, words that seem devoid of content. Then she says, ‘based on what we’ve seen today there’s enough evidence for a diagnosis.’
Child and father keep playing on the floor. I’m not sure that I heard her right. After that I can’t take much in, except the way she keeps using words like ‘we’ and ‘us’. The message slowly clarifies. Us autistic people. We are like this.
Autistic doctor.
Autistic mother.
Autistic child.
The doctor talks about her own son then. He’s autistic too. When he was the age their child is now, he used to like playing with cars.
‘He used to like things that were predictable,’ she says, shrugging. ‘Don’t we all.’
She hands over a leaflet. That’s the end of it. We step back out onto the same street.
Look out for the second part of ‘Thin Slices’ in a couple of weeks or subscribe to
to receive it directly in your inbox.Thank you, to Sarah for collaborating with me on this first Caregiver’s Spotlight Article
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Footnotes
In fact, Sarah’s going on a weekend retreat this afternoon. Wishing her a fulfilling weekend!
Who was Anne Brown? Scottish Herald Obituary: Anne Brown, BBC journalist with a legacy unmatched in Scottish broadcasting.
‘Deeply devoted to radio, it was while working in Orkney that she embarked on what was to be her most significant achievement in journalism when she took up coverage of the scandal that was to dominate the islands for years to come.
..she published Orkney: A Place of Safety?, though for contractual reasons the BBC required that she use a pseudonym – Robert Black.
Political journalist James Cusick, then a correspondent for the Independent newspaper, remembers: “This was a complex story that required resolve to see past wild rumour, to establish facts rather than accept innuendo. Anne did exactly this. Throughout, she was willing to sacrifice the cheap headlines others fell for, and instead sought out the reality and institutional flaws that lay behind this uncomfortable saga.”
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Thank you Victoria! I'm touched by what you've written and appreciate the chance to share my work with a wider audience.
Congratulations to Sarah and how wonderful to spotlight her work here! Bookmarked to return and read and hop over to her site when my workday is done today.