I often find myself stumbling back into this place of confusion.

 

There is a despair that comes with seeing your traits labeled as “deficits”.  Your very way of thinking “disordered”.  With knowing that society is eager to know what causes people to think and feel and process the world as you do, and to prevent this from happening.  To cure you.  To make you like them.  There is an othering in all of this.  In being called “special” when you know what they mean is that it’s too shameful to even name you as you are.  To be told that you are not Autistic, you simply have Autism.  You are still first and foremost a person.  As if anyone else needs to be reminded that they are a person.

 

There is sadness and anger that comes as a parent when these same attitudes are projected towards your children, as if the so called “normal” children are preferable to your own.  As if yours is deficient.  As if you should wish to trade your child in for a typical model, if only you could.  As if to raise these people who you love more than anything in the world is something you ought to be pitied for.

 

There is so much despair, in all of this.  I keep thinking in time it will lessen, but it doesn’t.  It simply ebs and flows.

 

I want to light flame to such ideas.  To turn them to ash.  To join this movement that says we are NOT deficient, we are NOT disordered, we do NOT need to be fixed, because there is nothing wrong with us.  Nothing.

Many Autistics believe this.  there is nothing wrong with us.  We simply need to be ourselves.  We simply need to shed our masks and welcome supports, and if we suffer, it is because society has failed us, and not because we have failed.  But, I don’t want to simply be supported.  I want to give more to the world than I take.  I want to help others not to suffer.  I want to help make the world better, as so many others do.  And yet, I know…  I know, that if I don’t focus my energies on healing myself, I will spiral into a dark place.

 

I hate feeling this frail.  So devoid of skin. I hate that things others find easy leave me feeling wrecked.    I hate not knowing if I am doing or saying things that I will be judged for.  I hate that the smallest of things will spiral me into anxiety, that day after day I exhaust myself with my thoughts, that dysregulation churns within me until I am so beaten down that it’s hard to function

 

In so many ways this is what Autism is for me,so how can I blame others for thinking it’s something terrible?

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