as small as a world and as large as alone, i never know what to think about the...

3:59am May 3, 2015

Anonymous asked: i never know what to think about the stone-language posts. i would love to hand stones back and forth with someone. i have many stones, i love stones, i would love to show them to you. but i don't know if i'd really get any deeper meaning out of it. i don't know if i'd be able to understand or 'speak' it as a language. i don't know if i have the (or an) autistic language. sometimes i doubt myself because of that. because of when people talk about automatically understanding other autistics.

Not all autistic people automatically understand all other autistic people. It’s more like, some autistic people automatically understand other autistic people who have a certain amount of things in common with them. If you haven’t met anyone with sufficient things in common with you, this won’t happen. It also won’t happen if your commonalities with other people push you apart rather than bring you together. (Which can happen.) These things are good when they happen for people, but they’re far from universal. And some people have a language that is unique to themselves and no other autistic person speaks it. (For that matter, in my case, “my language” is not limited to autistic people, nor universal to autistic people. There are many, perhaps most, autistic people who don’t speak it, and many nonautistic cognitively disabled people who do speak it.)

I kind of raised my eyebrow when I was in that group and they were talking about speaking “the” autistic language, because it was clear to me they were talking about “an” autistic language, and they’d just decided somehow that “real” autistic people spoke that language and aspies didn’t, or something along those lines. (And don’t get me started on aspies supposedly not being real autistic people.)

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