7:20pm June 24, 2013

➸ Trying to find the right words: deducecanoe: Trying to find the right words: another reason I don’t...

Trying to find the right words: another reason I don’t identify as aspie

stripesweatersandwaterbottles:

kinkykinkshamer:

josiahd:

Is because I don’t want to be in spaces dominated by creepy men who think they’re too intellectually superior to have to listen…

Yeah I don’t use it because I’ve never got any definition of it, and I get fed up by people who try to call me that just because I can write it have accomplished things. It’s really insulting to be told that you can’t have any other autism label if you accomplished anything. The flip side of that is that nobody like me can follow anything so WTF. So I deliberately use autistic, and resist terms like aspie or high functioning that have never been officially applied to me even at my best. (I even one had a doctor take me aside and tell me “don’t let anyone call you AS”. Not because it’s bad, but because it’s never fit. I’ve always been called autistic or atypical autistic because too much language SNAFU too young that was too well recognized when I was finally diagnosed.)

Personally I don’t believe the differences are captured well by the diagnostic categories. But since they exist, I refuse to let anyone believe I’m an aspie if I can write, not without a fight, because that is just too WTF. I feel kind of responsible, as a minority form of autism among the autistic community (not because I’m not aspie but because of my set of traits), to represent people like me to some degree, at least some of us, because a lot of people don’t even know we exist. And because many of us can’t communicate our experiences, those of us who can have worked hard at it, so I want to get them across especially when they are non stereotypical. And many of my predictions based on those experiences are starting to be borne out by science finally. Not that we need science to tell us who we are, but it’s heartening.

Notes: