I Am Not A Person, I Am An Autistic.

‘I am not my disability, I am a person!’

Interesting, but in terms of autism how accurate is it.

I suppose what it gets down to is how do we really understand ‘a person’.  Other disabilities, sure I’ll give you that, as far as I know.  Blind people are people who can not see, deaf people can’t hear, paraplegics can’t use their legs.  But autism is a neurological disorder or difference (for the PC mad).

Not saying it is easier or harder to have autism, I have no idea.

But if the difference is neurological what does that leave of my personhood.  I think, sense and feel differently, that’s a pretty fundamental difference I think.

I am autistic.  Autism defines me, it is my prison and my saving grace.  It would be easier to not be autistic but I believe the harder road is my path to truth.  In other words if I had a choice I would remain autistic.

I do not know how anybody else thinks or feels, in fact I often don’t know how I feel until I find myself in tears or self harming.  But I can see other people ‘get’ each other.  Not across the genders of course.  But there seems to have developed a truce based on mutual tolerance that doesn’t require understanding.  I don’t mean male/female there are those who relate better to the other side (regardless of sexuality), and there are even some capable of limited translation.

But NTs have an instinct to communicate, to learn their societies’ communication systems, we have to learn differently.  But so much human communication is subconscious that if we can’t pick it up, you can’t teach us.

Yeah, yeah, no I don’t mean body language or game playing, I studied that stuff and it is not reliable in real world settings.  Yet somehow you understand one another.

Glowing book with blue lights on black background.

And you can pick us!

Oh not consciously!  If it was consciously it would actually be handy, you would know and most of you would help us.  You are mainly like that, most people help if they possibly can.

Maybe it is like some science fiction writers have conjectured, a thing that looks like a human but does not respond like a human will ‘creep out’ people.  Subconsciously you know we are wrong.  It disturbs you, you look  for a reason.

This is necessary, people need a short hand to understand each other; evolution, God’s plan or a mixture it doesn’t matter.  But then again most people don’t like to think that they make decisions subconsciously, we like to think of ourselves as rational creatures who process things logically, intellectually.  But no one has the time.

As far as I can tell we autistics process various things subconsciously too, we learn some stuff easier than NTs.

But for the sake of humans’ continued existence most things must be processed under the conscious radar.  So we can’t see 90% of the iceberg.  But if 99% of the icebergs have a rounded bottom chances are that nature & industry will not have adapted to dealing with flat bottomed icebergs.  Yes in a terrible juggling act I have managed to mix metaphors to the final conclusion.  I am the 1% and you are trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.

I believe that most people would identify their thoughts as the fundamental thing that makes them a person, an individual person.

I am not a person, I am an autistic.