Autism Discussion

[IronWill1]

I have autism. I don't struggle with it, its simply apart of who I am. however, sometimes I feel like when I tell other people this it changes how they view me personally. I've had a few good interactions come from when I bring it up. I usually do when its appropriate I feel (like when someone asks what my stimming is, for instance.) I feel like more often then not, the people who find out about my status as someone with autism, their first reaction is to infantalize me, or something a long those lines. they seem to think that me having different needs means I should be treated like a child. does anyone else with autism relate to this? I feel like I can't be the only one.

[Felid131]

I have the opposite thing, where everyone treats me based on how capable I actually am, but I sometimes struggle with self doubt. Maybe because I pretty much never bring it up. But I do struggle with problem solving quite a bit. Seeing how effortlessly other people glide through life looks like magic or like they're another kind of entity sometimes. But when I'm at home not consuming content, I don't feel so much like an idiot I think because there's no one else superior to compare to.

[JINSBEK]

I’ve never brought up being autistic except when other people talk about it. I don’t get queried on my eccentricities because I don’t demonstrate the usual interpersonal-affective difficulties that warrants an autism diagnosis (and clinical or therapeutic intervention). My stimming? I dance, play and compose music in my head (body movements are engaged too), do push-ups, squats (thanks Zack Fair), stretches, cardistry, maybe hum or sing. As a kid, I obsessed over animation, joined drama club and choir, and tried to emulate my favourite characters in mannerism and voice, so I went from being a 12-year-old who couldn’t identify tone, facial expressions, and body language (my brain did literally nothing with people pointing fingers; a dog follows human hand gestures, I didn’t) to an adult who was just as obviously intentional and expressive as any other, if not more so.

With autism being an umbrella term for a polygenic syndrome with numerous presentations and developmental pathologies (no two autistics are alike except if they’re identical siblings), I don’t find the term at all useful for me since it’s so non-specific. Everyone has different sensitivities/sensory processing disorders/executive dysfunction/affect and so on, and so much of the dysregulation overlaps with ADHD that maybe the primary diagnostic difference is that somebody is capable of affect and the other isn’t. “Low-functioning” and “high-functioning” don’t do help for me at all, because while I may be “overtly” “high-functioning”, in my worst days as a hospital emergency department worker, I’d come home completely nonverbal and unable to generate spoken or written language. When I’m fine, I can practice MMA, dance my way into the VIP Presidential Suite of a party, and network like nobody’s business. Someone might call me an overachiever, now. But, buddy, I couldn’t even wipe my own ass as a 5-year-old, and I was still drinking out of a baby’s bottle at that age too. Eating with a spoon and fork? Tough challenge, and everyone else made fun of me for not being able to pick up my own food.

Did it take years? Yeah. Did I get help? Hell no, I always got good grades, so nobody ever bothered helping me with a single thing. I had to do everything myself. If I hadn’t, then I’d be classed as gravely disabled and still be unable to wipe my own ass.

My fiancée’s autistic, too. Since meeting her, I’ve helped her build a foundation of strategies, skills, habits, and cognitive and neuromotor function to the point where last year she could no longer qualify for a neurological autism study in Australia. (Yes, she was formally diagnosed by a specialised neuropsychiatrist in Australia.) As a kid, she was classed as the eternal problem child, everyone wrote her off as the one that would probably need to live with her parents for the rest of her life. Now she’s killing it, on her own terms, and if you want to quantify that somehow, she was promoted to a managerial position less than two months after she started her first job. She’s emigrating countries and she’s dealing with attorneys and embassy workers and banks, and has worked and paid for her own cross-ocean travel multiple times, and she travels alone, unaided.

Is that to say everyone labelled or diagnosed as autistic can reach “that” level of independence or “success” (how you define success is up to you). No, my co-worker’s adult son will have to live with them for the rest of his life. He actually managed to go to college, because he saw his older brother do it and he wanted to do it, too. And he manages to work 40+ hours a week, and even overtime, and still play competitive sports (man is a monster at basketball). But can he handle money? No. He hasn’t a grasp of numbers and quantities like that. He can’t juggle bills, he can’t pay for his own groceries, he can’t schedule things (hard to grasp the markers of linear time), so he’s a legal ward of his parents and every now and then the federal government sends a social worker to their house to make sure he’s not being abused or exploited.

I don’t see the great usefulness of a term that can be equally applied to me, a single guy and college-dropout who can manage his own care and affairs even after ten brain injuries and major loss of vision (I have a white cane) but can’t work more than 40 hours a week, as to him, a guy who actually finished some form of tertiary education and can work wheelbarrows’ worth of OT, but has no concept of money. I think it’s more useful to identify and focus on specific skillsets and issues (e.g. whatever kind of aphasia someone has) than to just call them “autistic”, because what works for me may be completely irrelevant, if not deleterious, to someone else.