An autistic woman’s social support mostly comes from people who are just as fucked as she is, eyewitnesses have said.

Paige Thomas, 29, has reportedly formed a network of people she can lean on in troubled times, despite the fact that they are all as troubled as she is and probably unqualified to give her any advice she can actually use.

Thomas said: “It’s really balanced. I advise my friends on their current personal disasters, they advise me on mine, and everyone’s happy. Well, nobody’s happy, that’s sort of the point.”

“The question ‘How are you?’ is a bit of an in-joke for us, almost always followed by a bout of nervous laughter and ‘You go first’,” Thomas continued. “You’ve really got to try and gauge it – whoever thinks their struggle is least life-altering should go first. Otherwise you get a situation where Talia’s telling us that she weed herself on the Clacton Pier log flume while Yuichi’s waiting to ask whether grief is a permanent state of being.”

“It’s not all doom and gloom, though. Sometimes one of us has a stroke of good luck. But never all at the same time.”

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