9:37pm November 28, 2014

Misunderstandings occur partly because of this.

You can get all the traits required to diagnose autism. All of them. By solely going into any single one of these categories:

• Personality traits
• Sensory and perceptual differences
• Pure cognitive differences (includes language among many other things)
• Motor planning differences, motor skills, catatonia, etc.

I don’t have the spoons to do it but I could take each of these categories and show you not one but many ways difference from the norm in that area, fulfills full criteria for the diagnosis of autism.

The reality is that most of us have a messy mix of these factors, to the point many of us can’t easily map out which traits fall under which, or, say, tell the difference between cognition and perception. (Sensory perception is input, cognition is internal processing, and movement is output. That’s the easiest way to explain. But there’s still tons of grey areas.)

Autistic people who are very predominantly one thing can have trouble understanding how another autistic person is even autistic. Like if for you, autism is almost all personality, you’ll have trouble grasping someone for whom it’s almost all sensory. And don’t get me started on the complications thrown in by people whose ratios of each trait change constantly, or over the course of a lifetime. People like me.

But this is a huge source of misunderstanding between autistic people. So even if I’m not as able to articulate it as I would like, I just want to throw it out there. I hope to be able to elaborate more in the future.

Notes: