Sometimes it’s easy to forget I’m autistic. I have sort of built a life for myself where my weaknesses are minimized and my strengths are (mostly) highlighted. My job allows me plenty of decompression time, I can sort of pick my time slot, and my schedule is very predictable 90% of the time. The problem comes when I’m thrown a curve ball, and I’m repeatedly reminded that the world isn’t built for my brain.

In the first half of July, I had jury duty. To be clear, I didn’t get picked, but I had to attend jury duty selection, which means a week of my life was put on hold with a metaphorical piano hanging over my head. The funny thing is, I think actual jury duty would be far easier for me to deal with than the selection process, but let’s talk about the ways in which this was not an accessible or smooth experience for me as an autistic person.

Faces on cameras

It is overwhelming for me to stare at 60+ people on camera and know they are staring back at me. When I taught remotely early on in the pandemic, I didn’t require my students to show their faces, and I didn’t show mine. Every face is a lot of data or background noise/sensory input to deal with. Being on camera, even if I’m meant to be idle while waiting, feels performative. I’m hyper aware of every micro expression I am or am not making. As autistics, we’re often penalized for our resting bitch face or lack of expression, so I sat there for hours schooling my face into something close enough to mild interest that no one would say anything. On top of this, there were no captions (if there were, I couldn’t figure out how to turn them on). It’s hard to understand people when Zoom is cutting in and out, and I assumed I could turn it on and never asked anyone to do so preemptively. Things got garbled, especially when I was trying to listen and not look at myself or other people.

Schedules? Don’t know her

This was honestly the worst part. I never knew when anything was supposed to happen, or we’re told one thing but other instructions contradict it. One paper says you will hear from us by 5:30 PM, the woman on camera says 5:00 PM. The orientation itself wasn’t bad, but it was 3+ hours of instructions and time killing followed by being stuck in OCD purgatory (more on that later). I didn’t know if I was allowed to get up and go to the bathroom or if I could run my dogs outside really fast. The same thing happened during the selection process when we were initially told they would tell us who was on-deck to speak to the judge, so if we needed to get water or pee, we could. Then, they stopped telling us and just started calling people. The flipflopping on the setup was frustrating because as soon as I thought I got a handle on what was going on, it changed. On top of this, you never know what day you can or will be called. They say check your email after 5 PM every day this week to hear about the next day. That’s a lot of time to have zero predictability in my schedule. By Wednesday, I had no idea what day it was and felt completely unmoored. I didn’t even know if there was a possibility of being called on Friday. The paperwork made it seem like yes while the judge that talked to us made it sound like it didn’t happen. Nothing makes sense in jury duty selection.

Checking OCD trigger central

I have checking OCD (I came to understand that’s what it was during a therapy appointment during the pandemic). It used to manifest as checking my dad’s Fitbit all day while he was at work to monitor his heart rate because the fear was if I don’t check, he might have a major heart event, not realize it, and die. Since he passed, my checking OCD has been mostly under control. On the first day of jury selection, they said the worst thing they could have to me, “Check your email every 15-20 minutes.” Now, to normal people, this translates to check your email at least 2-3 times an hour. My paranoid, anxiety ridden self took this as check your email every 5-10 minutes, don’t believe it, refresh it, do it again, and check your phone. I was so afraid that I would get involved in something and miss an important email that I basically sat at my computer from 11-4:00 (when I got an email from them) doing nothing but futz around on Twitter and check my email. Once I realized I got an email AND a text if they needed me, that curbed my checking anxiety a bit, but the feeling of being yanked back into that spiral was horrible.

Yes or no questions

I hate yes or no questions, especially when people demand it be a yes or no under penalty of law for lying. Logically, I know I’m not being hauled off to jail for not 100% correctly answering a question (note: I don’t mean untruthfully, I mean not correct), but the fear is there. It trips me up in answering things because I don’t want to answer in haste and lie, but then, I think too hard about a question and get confused. Have you ever taken a standardized test or read a government form and had to parse it out for 10 minutes because you think you know what it’s asking, but you don’t want to be penalized if you’re wrong? That’s the autistic experience of dealing with the legal system, and people wrongly assume you’re lying if you spend too long thinking before you answer. I, unfortunately, was called to speak to the judge to see if I qualified for a case. The questions that were asked confused me, and I said as much. “Would you be prejudiced against a defendant just because they’re a defendant?” I sat there for a second not understanding why anyone would feel that way, asked the judge to explain it because it made zero sense to me, only to realize that was exactly what they were asking. My favorite was the judge asking if I had any conditions or anything that might make it impossible to fulfill my duty as a juror. I have never been a part of jury duty, so I honestly have no frame of reference as to whether or not I would be a functional human being in this situation or if I would just power down and dissociate. It’s hard to answer when I honestly don’t know. If you say that though, people look at you like you’re crazy, so I kept that to myself but said something else that got me disqualified from the case.

Bonus: misgendering!

Always fun when you have to use your full legal name for something when it’s a name you never use. I tried putting (Kara) next to it and still got full named. In a pre-service survey they ask if you’re male, female, or nonbinary. I put nonbinary. I’m 90% sure I did. On Zoom, I filled in my pronouns as they/them. I wore something gender neutral, I moved my computer to only show me from the shoulders up, I had my hair pulled back. I did everything I could and get miss-ed and ma’am-ed by the judge repeatedly. Once he said, “men and women” and “he or she” repeatedly during his warm-up speech, I figured it was a lost cause, but it still was like the moldy icing on the already stressful cake. Before someone says, “Why didn’t you say something?”, we all know rule one of jury duty and the legal system in general is don’t bring attention to yourself.

Kara, what was the point of this?

This was not meant to be a rambling complaint-fest. I wanted to point out that something most people find to be a minor inconvenience is actually stressful for some of us. Obviously, there’s always the financial stress of missing work when you get called for jury duty, but in this case, it’s more so the mental stress and anxiety this whole process causes in people who need clearly delineated information, consistency, and predictability. A week of constant anxiety feels like overkill for such a mundane process, but that’s what it was. The worst part is, I don’t even know what accommodations someone could ask for if the process is supposed to be random. Randomness inherently runs counter to what I need, but I wish the expectations and schedule could at least be more clear cut and not taken for granted by those who deal with jurors every day. For jury duty to be the fair and equitable process it hopes to be (though we all know its not), accommodating neurodivergent jurors would be a great place to start.