3:02am April 19, 2015

“Because I could see that all these kids were weird and even they didn’t accept me, I knew I was the strangest one of all.”

Sean Barron, There’s A Boy In Here

Describing what happened to him in institutions.  I once attempted to describe this phenomenon in a book review of someone autistic who’d managed to make a lot of friends in institutions.  I was trying to just say our experiences had been different, but he somehow managed to take it as an insult, and to get his blog followers to write about how wonderful he was for being able to do something I hadn’t been able to do.  Which, of course, made me feel even worse: Other autistic people were able to make friends in institutions, so why were such experiences so few and far between for me? Was I defective somehow, even for an autistic person?  Was I showing how i wasn’t the right kind of autistic person, the kind who in their teens could somehow manage to make friends because they were so sweet and nice? 

I wasn’t sweet and nice, I was weird and strange and sticking out in all the wrong directions.  And many times, I would come to a mental institution and within seconds everyone would judge me to be the ward outcast.  I’ve talked to lots of autistic people who had this experience.  It turns out it’s not rare after all, and it doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with us, it just means we’re not among the rare autistic people who do manage to make lots of friends in such places.  And they aren’t better than us, and we aren’t better than them, we’re just different.  But it took me a long time to be able to see this, especially with grown parents of autistic children, who should’ve known better, harping on a very young adult autistic person for saying hir experiences were different than someone else’s.

(via autiequotes)

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