10:17pm November 20, 2014

When I first went to Autreat…

…and I kept repeating “I think my problem is that I’m outside my ordinary routine.”

I expected people to be impressed or something. Like “Wow, an autistic person outside hir routine, and who understands that that’s the problem.” With also a little bit of “Maybe they’ll think I’m for real if I keep saying this.” And ‘If I say it, maybe they’ll be proud of me for figuring it out myself.“

I was shocked by the non-response I got. One person said "You’ve only had a routine for a few years, I haven’t left my apartment except to the grocery store in the past fifteen years.” Most people were simply unresponsive: We were all autistic people outside of our routines, we were all stressed out, what was the big deal?

I found myself on the opposite end of this sort of situation once on a message board. An autistic man wrote an extremely elaborate desription of autistic shutdown, one that made it sound almost like a paranormal or spiritual experience. I wrote “Sounds like garden-variety shutdown to me” and got one of the guy’s friends mad at me for sounding dismissive.

I’m still not sure whether I did the right thing by saying that about the shutdown. On the one hand, I was genuinely trying to tell the guy that there was nothing magical oor disturbing about itt.. OTOH I may have come off dismissive and irritable because I was kind of irritated that he was making a shutdown into… more than a shutdown. IDK.

Notes: