1:02pm March 1, 2012

Because it needs to be said again

I am the sibling of an autistic person.

But also…

And the sibling of someone originally diagnosed as hyperactive.

And the daughter of an autistic person.

And the daughter of a person with chronic illness.

Hell, all four of them, like me, have chronic illness and psychiatric issues at minimum.

And here’s the thing.

In a family where everyone could be classified as disabled in different ways. Including my entire extended family, at least everyone I remember offhand.

You don’t have the luxury of self-pity for being related to everyone else. Most “sibling issues” sound nonsensical when you finally hear of them.

You also rarely attribute your problems with your relatives to whatever they’re diagnosed with. My autistic brother started molesting me when I was eleven and he was twenty-five. He threatened to rape me and threatened to kill me and taught me misogyny and made sick jokes about taking me to see the bodies of missing children. (No he was not involved. The cases were solved and he had nothing to do with them.)

So nobody tell me the issue is I never had actual problems with an autistic sibling. The thing is?

I never once. Never even thought of. Never even considered. Deciding that he did these things because he was autistic.

Neither did he. He later told me he was angry at the world and had power over me so took it all out on the one person he had power over. That’s not an autistic people thing. That’s a generic fucked up power trip thing.

Every one of us has hurt each other. Every one of us has helped each other. We have problems because we are a family. A somewhat dysfunctional one. But the dysfunction isn’t because we are disabled.

I’ve talked to other people from families where everyone is disabled or neuro-atypical. They report the same experience: Everyone just considered each other a person. And we generally blame any problems between us on our assorted character flaws. Not on disability.

This isn’t absolute. But it’s pretty much how it works. And it’s so different from families with one or two disabled people who get totally singled out as the cause of the problems.

This is why I’ve always felt completely out of place in support groups where the common theme is having a disabled family member.

The scary thing? I’ve seen several support groups for family members of disabled people. Where they do not allow their members to have a disability. Or not an obvious one. Or not one that is a large part of their identity. Because it would mess up the pity party. Some are quite explicit about that reasoning.

So… yeah. I have plenty of family stuff to piss and moan about, don’t get me wrong. You don’t even want to know all of it. But none of it is to blame on disability. We are not all burdens on each other. That whole line of reasoning breaks down in a family like mine.

12 notes