“It’s not the end of the world,” my mum used to say as I cried inconsolably over something that most people would regard as trivial. Perhaps someone else took the particular cookie I’d fixed my eyes on, or the books I’d carefully lined up had been dusted and moved.

The thing is, when you’re autistic and you’ve got an idea in your head about the way things will be, anything which disrupts that expectation does feel calamitous. The certainty we were relying on has fallen in ruins. It literally is as if the world shattered under our feet.

When people try to console us by “putting things into perspective” it can actually make it much worse because they are demonstrating a lack of empathy: they’re projecting their perspective onto us, and it doesn’t match our experience.

For many autistics, having a predictable environment is very important. We need our routines so we can feel at ease, and when we go outside our usual bounds we like to know what to expect in advance: to be prepared. When I go to new places I research beforehand so I know the layout and how it looks.

I’ve learned to manage my expectations up to a point but I don’t always succeed, and when something doesn’t turn out the way I thought it would the blow can be crushing. The feeling is so intense that I can’t see past it and be objective. It might as well be the end of the world.