Canaries in the Coal Mine

The autistic need for autonomy

When I lose autonomy, I feel it in my body before I can put words to it. The walls start closing in from all angles. Breathing gets harder. Tears start streaming. Internally screaming. These aren’t phrases I reach for to sound dramatic — it’s the closest I can get to describing what it’s actually like.

Most people need some autonomy in their lives. That much is ordinary. But for autistic people it isn’t a preference sitting near the top of a list of nice-to-haves. It’s load-bearing. Take it away and the whole structure starts to come down.

What we need most is autonomy over our own bodies, our own decisions, and our own future. Not control over everyone else. Not to be awkward for the sake of it. Just the basic freedom to act on what we believe is in our own best interest. When that goes missing, when autonomy isn’t allowed, it doesn’t register as an inconvenience. It feels like suffocating.

There’s a saying that autistic people are the canaries in the coal mine. I think this is what it actually means. We’re not more fragile than everyone else — we’re more sensitive to the gas. We notice the air has gone wrong before anyone else does, and we go down first. The mistake people make is to look at the canary and decide the canary is defective, when the thing they ought to be looking at is the air.

Because the thing that poisons us isn’t hardship itself. It’s incoherence. It’s being told our view of reality isn’t true when we can see, plainly, that it is. We’re asked to nod along, to swallow it, to carry on as though the contradiction isn’t there — and we can’t. It’s like a toxic chemical we have to keep swallowing, and it eats at us until we break down.

So here’s the part I want to say plainly, because it so often gets written down as something else on a form.

When we break, the first instinct is to look inside us for the fault. A name gets found for it — anxiety, depression, a disorder, a difficulty — and once there’s a name, the conversation tends to stop. Nobody asks what was being done to us in the months before. Nobody asks what we’d been made to swallow. The autonomy that was taken away never gets entered into evidence. The breakdown becomes the diagnosis, the diagnosis becomes the explanation, and the cause walks free.

I’m not saying the distress isn’t real. It is. I’ve felt it take me apart. But it’s a wound, not a defect — a response to something, not a fault in the wiring. There’s a difference between someone who is ill and someone who is being slowly poisoned and has finally started to show it. Treat the second as though they were the first, and you’ll medicate the symptom while the gas keeps leaking into the room.

That’s the canary problem up close. The bird goes down, and instead of clearing the air, they get very good at keeping it breathing in conditions that were never survivable in the first place — and they call that care.

So I’ll say it again, plainly: we’re not mentally ill. We’re sick of being pacified into submission.