6:17am July 5, 2015

autistic blogger problems

Autistic Blogger: *posts a long essay about autism that took a lot of time and effort to put together*
Non-Autistic Commenter: Okay, I didn’t even read past the first line because you wrote “autistic,” and I’m a psychologist/special education teacher/social worker/random person on the internet who thinks they know everything and I was taught that the correct phrase is “person with autism.”

Also:

Autistic blogger #1: *Posts something long*

Autistic blogger #2: *Posts a fairly short reply*

Autistic blogger #1: *Posts a fairly short reply but one that relies on totally misunderstanding things that take a long time to clear up*

Autistic blogger #2: *Has to write a longer reply in order to clear those things up because there is no way to clear up the misunderstanding in a short way*

(Last two steps repeat about ten times)

Autistic blogger #1: I can’t believe you came on here and posted all this long crap that I can’t read.

Autistic blogger #2: I didn’t mean to, and you don’t have to read it – I know what it’s like to not be able to read long things, I can’t even read half the things I write, myself. But there was literally no other way to explain myself, because you sat there and said things where the only possible way to correct your misconceptions was to write things that took a long time to say. And you could get away with writing short things because it’s much easier and faster to post a misconception about something someone said, than to correct that misconception. I know you know something about writing long things without being able to read long things, because you’ve written things that are longer than I’ve ever written in my entire life, and you don’t seem to think there’s anything wrong with that. At any rate, if I wanted you to understand what I was saying, at all, I had no choice but to write something longer. But again, you didn’t have to read it, you still don’t, nobody’s obligated to read what I write.

[Conversations like this suck. Because they drive wedges between people, nobody “wins”, nobody feels better in the end, nothing gets accomplished, and both people come out feeling victimized by the whole thing to some extent. And often they leave things permanently awkward between the two parties.]

Notes: