Autism

Created: 2024-02-08 12:24:27 - Touched: 2024-12-11 14:15:43 - Status: In progress

Language About Me

I'm Autistic. I am an Autistic person. I'm not someone with Autism, as I cannot accidentally leave it at home. Nor am I a person who has Autism, as if it were the flu. I am not on the spectrum, as if it were a colorful bridge. I certainly do not suffer from Autism as if it were a knife stabbed into my flesh. I have no interest in a cure, nor do I care about an understanding of the circumstances that give rise to neurodivergent brains so that they could be prevented (both the circumstances and the resulting divergent brains).

I am Autistic. I am an Autistic person. This is not something I need to overcome. I do not need to avoid "letting my Autism define me." Autism is a neurotype, a structural difference in neurology. It is integrated into the way that I think, that I feel, that I experience and interpret the world around me. It does define me, in so far as my fundamental experience of personhood. I can no more experience myself and the world without those filtering through the lens of Autism than I can experience my vision without light moving through the lens of my eye.

Communication

I have differences in the way that I communicate with others. I tend to be more direct, use less subtext and implication, sometimes struggle with analogies. Autistic Disturbances: A Review has some interesting ideas about some of the primary differences and how Autistic communication can be poetic.

I struggle with analogies and other non-literal communication mechanisms sometimes.

I made a flowchart that shows what the process is for me to communicate with someone face to face (or over zoom) with audio. I call it a trombone flowchart because it is shaped similarly to the slide on a trombone. It has around 95 states, and each state is something that requires at least 50% cognitive conscious control to manage. For example, the muscles that position my tongue in my mouth to produce an L sound when speaking is something I have to manually do. There are no automated shortcuts. I literally do the statistics for some of these steps in my head. It's no wonder that communicating for me is exhausting and I strongly prefer media like asynchronous text.

Trombone Flowchart

Sameness/Adventurousness

I have a need for sameness and consistency and routine, but I also crave novelty and have a difficult time focusing on mundanity or things I'm not already interested in. Openness to Experience.

There is a lot of debate among Autistics and non-Autistics around the question Is Autism a disability?. As one might expect, the cost of having to meet neurotypical expectations, plus by the indifference of the society that inflicts it, can cause a lot of damage. Existing in this world causes Autistics a lot of Trauma. The cost and the damage can be further compounded by commonly co-occurring conditions, like ADHD and PTSD.

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