Chris was assessed with autism at the age of four and once an Asperger syndrome diagnosis came at age twenty-five his optimistic attitude helped him to recognize his strengths. Instead of looking into weaknesses Chris started concentrating on his strengths and encouraged people diagnosed with autism to concentrate on their own strengths. A former primary school teacher and a special education tutor, Chris now uses his teaching and guidance to benefit the autism community as an award-winning writer, blogger and speaker. After leaving his teaching job he launched the “Autistic Not Weird” website which is used to share his thoughts and insights about his autism. Chris is a published author with two books, “Underdogs” and “What We Love Most About Life”. His recognitions include Autism Hero Awards 2017 & 2018, Learning Disability and Autism Leaders' List 2018 and National Autistic Society Professionals Awards 2019.

As a former primary school teacher, what challenges did you face during your teaching profession?C: I’d say the biggest challenge for me as an autistic teacher was similar to the challenge that so many autistic pupils face: that the environment has been designed with the 98% of non-autistic people in mind. What I love about special education (where I work now) is that it’s so flexible, and that you’re allowed to teach whatever methods work for the students - rather than using the same method for every single student like you have to in mainstream.

What inspired you to start the “Autistic Not Weird” website?C: After I left mainstream teaching, I just assumed I wouldn’t work in education again. I soon came to realise how many opportunities I was missing to help and guide young people by staying out of the profession, especially since I was still keeping my autism a closely-guarded secret at that time. I felt that if I started a blog about being autistic it could be another way of offering guidance the way I had enjoyed in teaching, even if in a completely different way. Going from secrecy to telling the whole internet was a pretty huge step, but it took off a lot faster than I could ever have imagined!

How can your book “What We Love Most About Life: Answers from 150 Children Across the Autism Spectrum” help people to better understand autism?C: “What We Love Most About Life” is a deliberately, overtly, shamelessly positive autism book (since there need to be more of those!). And whereas it’s not designed to be a teaching tool, I’ve had many people telling me how much it’s helped them understand autistic children’s perspectives. It basically contains 150 autistic young people (aged 3-18) from twenty different countries, all telling the reader what they love about life and about seeing it through autistic eyes. As well as their insights being sometimes funny, sometimes loving and sometimes ingenious, it also serves as a reminder of the massive variety of personalities you find on the autism spectrum, and how individualised we truly are. (https://autisticnotweird.com/book)
My novel series, “Underdogs”, has also been seen as useful to those curious about autism and neurodiversity in general. It’s a dystopia series where teenagers who escaped an attack on their special school become the last people free to fight for the rest of the imprisoned British population. The characters are deliberately written as individual people rather than walking representations of their conditions, whilst also learning how to make the most of the advantages their neurology gives them - having spent their whole lives being led to believe their neurology is supposed to only be a weakness. (https://chrisbonnello.com/underdogs/)

What challenges did you face during your school days? How did you motivate yourself to face those challenges?C: I spent my school years in mainstream education and for the most part I was ok – largely because I was academically clever and had very few sensory issues. If either of those things had not been the case, I imagine I would have struggled the same way so many autistic students do.
Socially, however, things were a bit of a mess during my teenage years. Teenage bullies don’t need much ammunition to target someone effectively, and I gave them plenty of ammunition to work with! I managed to get through it by remembering that once school was over, I’d most likely go for the rest of my life without ever seeing them again. And my exam results would be better than theirs too, so in the long run I’d come out on top. (Whether or not it was true I don’t know, but it kept me going.)

What are your other hobbies?C: Writing novels used to be my hobby before it turned into a literal job! Underdogs 2 is halfway through the editing process now and I’m also working on the subsequent books. Besides that I’m a huge chess geek, although these days I prefer teaching chess to playing it since I’ve seen how much good it can do for young people (especially those with impulse control issues). I’ve also recently taking up ‘speedcubing’- solving Rubik’s cubes as fast as possible. My currently record is 24.389 seconds. I also do a lot of voluntary work as captain of my local Boys’ Brigade group.

What is your favorite place to visit? What do you love about that place?C: I don’t think it’s places I love, but the people I’m there with. For example, I’d rather spend a day on the sofa watching my godchildren play videogames than be in some fancy place on my own (except, of course, for the days where I really need to be alone).

What is your suggestion for families of children with disabilities to empower their children?C: Independence skills and self-advocacy mean everything. A lot of the time disabled people are not only disabled by their conditions, but also by the way society makes assumptions about them. I know several students whose learning difficulties have been compounded by people choosing not to give them learning opportunities, on the assumption that they wouldn’t learn anyway. Of course, that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. So the more opportunities you can take to teach children to advocate for themselves and do things by themselves, the better off they’re likely to be as adults. Oh, and society has a nasty habit of talking to disabled people through their parents/carers, on the assumption that the person themselves won’t understand or can’t communicate back. So teaching them to say (or type) phrases like “I’m right here, you know, and I can hear you” may help to raise a few eyebrows!

What tips/advice do you have for those in our community who want to become a writer?C: Write for fun, not to get published. Write for the sake of self-expression, not to become “successful”. I wrote the first draft of Underdogs in 2010 as a coping mechanism for unemployment - I had no intention of publishing it, but it helped me tolerate my days and did me a lot of good. I couldn’t possibly have predicted publication and success nine years later- and if I’d written it specifically to get it published, it most likely wouldn’t have worked. It succeeded because I didn’t have the approval of others constantly on my mind. And the same was true for Autistic Not Weird. I didn’t plan to get any awards or international speaking engagements from it. So start off by writing for your own reasons. Success might come later, or it might not. And even if it doesn’t, it’ll have done a lot of good for you anyway. (Plenty of my novels will remain unpublished forever, but they were so much fun to write!)

Any special message for our community?C: Define yourself by your strengths, not your weaknesses. See yourself for who you are, rather than who you are not. Trying to get rid of your autism isn’t “fixing” you, but damaging you. Learn how to be the best autistic person you can be, not some fictional non-autistic person you think others would approve of. Because trust me, I’ve tried being “less autistic”. It didn’t work, and it made me feel worse. I only started being successful when I started recognising my strengths (including those based in my autism), and finding places in life where I could play to those strengths.