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12:35pm December 13, 2012

Yes autistic people of this sort are real.

This is really hard to write. As in, this entire kind of post is slightly past my comfort zone intellectually right now. So this is taking a good deal of effort. And that’s why I haven’t gotten it written earlier.

Autistic people exist who get major, basic assumptions about reality wrong. Autistic people exist who really do have fantasy worlds. Not only that, but these things are common, they can be closely related to the traits that make us autistic, and they can be wholly unrelated to psychosis.

I wouldn’t have thought this needed to be said. But I’ve come across posts recently that present the idea of such autistic people as “myths” rather than the relatively common people we are. Especially common is the part where we get seemingly basic things about reality completely wrong – especially among those of us with any kind of delay in using or understanding language. Because kids learn about the world partly by asking questions and listening to our parents, and anyone who has that process interrupted in any way is going to lack that particular advantage.

Plus, anything that affects how we learn about the world around us will likely leave odd gaps of knowledge in areas where everyone else “just knows” something. Sometimes that can mean we lack common wrong assumptions about the world, but other times it means we lack common right assumptions about the world.

I know an autistic woman who was well into adulthood before she learned that her reflection was an optical phenomenon and not a person.

I am still in the process of learning that dreams aren’t real, that I’m located in my body, and that my subjective impressions of the world aren’t fact. (So, I don’t routinely disappear and neither does the world around me, they just seem like thy do. For instance.)

I still see “inanimate” things as alive, and not in an anthropomorphic way. I don’t see that as unreal, but many people do.

My relationship to time is really complicated. For awhile, I really believed that I could communicate back and forth with myself in the past and future because my understanding of time was really hazy. I now see that as inaccurate, although I still view time differently from the average person.

And these things represent only a few of many gaps between my version of reality and the ones most people in my surrounding cultures seem to have.

Oh and also I was really late to go through certain developmental phases involving differentiating reality and fantasy. Really late. As far as I can tell, early on, I simply didn’t have the cognitive skills to go through phases most people go through as toddlers. I went through such things later, in ways that looked much the same as how young children go through it, except mixed with having other capacities toddlers don’t have, in ways that looked really weird.

At one point I thought that if I believed hard enough in such things, they would come true. I think I had heard this many times, and I lacked the background and skills to be able to evaluate this as false.

I had read a lot of science fiction and fantasy, as well as fairy tales, and I had no reason to see many of the concepts in them as false when people around me presented similar concepts as true. And even when I saw some things as impossible, enough people said otherwise that I had reason to wonder if I was missing something.

And equating these things with psychosis? Please don’t. Treatments for psychosis don’t work on simply being mistaken or imaginative (which is what most of this is), and can actually make the problem much worse for autistic people in these positions.

And at any rate – I’ve met a lot of other autistic people with very similar experiences, for very similar reasons. And I’ve read about even more. And known parents whose kids had things like this going on. This is not rare and it’s not separate from being autistic. Just because some autistic people have never been mistaken about things like this, doesn’t mean that these things are unconnected to autism for those of us who experience them. And I’m sick of dealing with autistic people who want to make it sound like the rest of us don’t exist, just so they can avoid dealing with things that make them uncomfortable. None of these things are necessary to be autistic, but common in autistic people, absolutely.