5:07am November 6, 2014

i-have-no-idea-what-type-of-autistic-i-am

I have no idea what “type” of autistic I am. Whatever my original forever-lost papers from back when dinosaurs ruled the earth say, no one would have a translation anyway because that was about 45 years ago and people forget fast when it comes to autism.

The age difference between Temple Grandin…

This may be presumptious but… I think I know what kind of autistic person you are. And like me, you aren’t the most common sort of autistic person online. (Not sure about off, because it’s been awhile since I’ve had the chance to meet autistic people offline. And autistic people you meet online can be a very different demographic than those you meet online.)

But anyway… you have a ‘feel’ to you that I pick up very clearly. The way you process information, the way your memory seems to work, the way you hold it together despite much more severe problems than other people are likely to be able to see. You’re not the same 'type’ as me (although there’s more overlap between you and me, than between either of us and the autistic community norm) but I’ve met others of your 'type’ before and they were always memorable and interesting people, like you.

I wish that I could give you details, but this is the sort of thing I know only by intuition/sensing/whatever you want to call it. Well, intuition combined with experience on one level or another with hundreds of autistic people. And this is the sort of thing where ti doesn’t take me very long to see “This person is a good deal similar to this other person,” Especially if I’ve seen people “like them” before.

And you’re very unique among the autistic community in general, but you’re not alone within the autistic community, and I bet you’d be even less alone among people who’ve never found the autistic community, never even heard of autism, or never aplied it to themselves. Many are diagnosed late, if at all, although there are others like you who were diagnosed early.

I wish I could give you names of some other people like you, but I remember people by the movements and shapes they create in my head, not by their names. So unless I’ve had someone’s name pounded into my head long enough, I tend to forget it.

By the way, here’s what I think the only real “subtypes” of autism are:

Imagine autistic people and cousins and other neurodiverse people as this giant landscape, only it’s a landscape in many more than three dimensions. Your position on this landscape is determined by what traits you have, and it’s not a static position, you may move around throughout your life, or even minute to minute. (Although the rate and amount that you change your abilities is actually one of the dimensions the landscape would use to put you in a certain location.)

Now let’s say that all autistic people, all cousins, all neurodiverse people, are placed on this landscape somewhere.

Your “subtype” is the people within a certain distance from you. Like if you drew a circle around you so that everyone 30 feet away and closer was within that circle (only the circle would be in many more dimensions than circles are – just imagine everyone within a certain distance of you iin any direction, if that’s easier. So everyone 30 feet away from you or closer is within your subtype of autism. And honestly the line should be fuzzy, so even 35 or 40 feet away could be your subtype. And you can define your subtype as narrowly or as broadly as you have to, any given day.

So to me, there’s a subtype for every autistic person, and it centers around that person on this invisible map, anyone within a certain distance is your subtype.

The DSM will never understand that. Ever. It’s too ocmplicated for them, and it requires acknowledging aspects of being autistic that the DSM has never acknowledged.

Anyway, I have met many autistic people who create the same movement-picture in my head that you do, and seem to be within that certain distance of you. Not that “many” has ever been a majority. But I’ve met enough autistic people that “many” is “many”.

An interesting thing about the way I see subtypes as centered around each person: Joel Smith (the guy who wrote the original Murder of Autistics page with me, and who got married at Autreat) is what I’d consider my subtype. However, he’s met people he considers to be his subtype who are nothing like me at all. That’s because while I am within a certain distance in one direction, they were a longer distance in another direction, or vice versa. So they were within his circle, but not within mine. So we could be within the same subtype as each other, and yet also each have people within our subtype who is not within the same subtype as other people within our subtype.

Of course, this is all just my opinion, and my seeing people as the same 'type’ as you is purely a result of my own experiences, perceptions, and intuition. But you’ll never find out what type of autism you have by finding out what diagnostic category you were put into. (IF they used the DSM back when you were a kid, it would’ve been childhood schizophrenia or childhood psycohsis, because autism was one of many childhood psychoses back then. I once read a list that had something like 20 or 30 different names for different types of childhood psychosis, and Kanner’s syndrome or autism is one of the few that actuallly survived, along with Heller’s syndrome (childhood disintegrative disorder, now considerd part of the autistic spectrum). Now they’re also trying to add a new one, multi-complex developmental disorder, for chlldren on the autistic spectrum who also experience (real or purported) psychosis. But I don’t put a lot of stock in PDDNOS/atypical autism, autistic disorder, Asperger’s syndrome, CDD, and Rett’s as a good way of categorizing autism. Rett’s is the only one that’s an actual well-defined physical condition, and I always wondered why it was singled out to be put in hte DSM under PDDs, when ther are many other physical genetic conditions that frequently result in autism. Even Down syndrome has a higher rate of autism than aveage. (The first person with autism i knowingly met also had Down syndromee, in fact.) But in all that alphabet soup, I don’t think there’s any information or wisdom to be found. For that, you have to look at the actual people, developing a good understanding of what traits make them similar and different from each other, and what traits commonly exist in autistic people that are never listed in the criteria or discussed in official articiles on the subject.

Notes: