9:17pm December 3, 2014

“Being an unemployed, nonverbal rich girl can be quite luxurious and relatively stress-free, especially with a get-out-of-jail-free label like autism.”

—

Barb Rentenbach, Synergy

I am continually amazed by people who can admit their luxuries without embarrassment, especially when one of the luxuries involves getting away with stuff due to being autistic and generally thought not to know any better. I know a lot of “low functioning” autistic people who will admit to this at least among each other. And honestly when you have as little power as a nonverbal autistic person has, manipulation of this sort is not always wrong. It’s a survival tactic, a way to secure freedoms that most nondisabled people take for granted. And a way to avoid punishment for things you truly can’t help.

I know that when I went from verbal but only partially communicative, to functionally nonverbal but more communicative in writing, people treated me differently. There have been times I’ve been in the bizarre position of trying to convince staff or agencies to hold me accountable for my own behavior.