5:15am July 30, 2013

➸ codeman38’s tumblings: mulder-are-you-suggesting: Before I was diagnosed with Asperger’s,...

Before I was diagnosed with Asperger’s, several people suggested to me that I might be autistic. I was in denial about this possibility for a long time, because most of the stuff I ended up reading about autism was filled with all kinds of nonsense. So, for the…

It took me a long time to realize how to apply external descriptions of autistic people to myself. Not “this is how I am” but “this is how people see me”.

Before I learned to do that, I alternated between believing I wasn’t autistic, or was barely autistic if at all, because I couldn’t relate to the stupid guesses experts make about how our minds work. And thinking I must be autistic, because I identified completely with the descriptions of other autistic people.

Knowing what I know now, I went back and read a book by Lorna Wing about the autistic spectrum. I was careful to apply outward descriptions as how people see me, not as how I am.

I discovered that my childhood was almost exactly the pattern of development associated with “classically” autistic children who learn to speak, right down to wildly fluctuating abilities and superficially better expressive communication than receptive. Today, I’d have been recognized as autistic in a heartbeat. Then, people knew I was different, but not why until I was 14.

The only differences were:

1. I’m primarily passive, not active but odd or aloof. This is the rarest category. But I fit that category exactly.

2. I have autistic catatonia, and lost a bunch of skills including speech. This is heavily correlated with social passivity.

3. I fit descriptions of severe autism and mild autism equally well.

But other than those three things, my development was shockingly normal for an autistic person. It’s just that most people think “normal for autistic” means “stereotypical autism”. It doesn’t. At all. Whatsoever. I’m very much not stereotypical, but also very much normal, far more so than I ever guessed.

Another reason it surprised me, was…

I’m not normal for the online autistic community. I’m very different from most people here. I’d long since figured that I was part of some rare subgroup. Especially since I’ve been housebound so long I haven’t seen people outside the internet.

But…

Turns out that “normal” autistic people (even “normal for autistic people who learn speech”) are not the norm online. Probably because we ARE weighted toward people who do well with language.

Either that or online people represent a broader group than are normally diagnosed young. Which is also possible.

But whatever it is. I’m not the norm online. But aside from those three things, I’m fairly normal for an autistic person who learns language after a delay. Many traits that I had singled out in myself as unusual for online autistic people, were right there in the book as highly typical traits.

Mind you. What the book said was normal. IS NOT the stereotype of what a “normal autistic person” is. But it IS what’s normal among autistic people diagnosed and studied in childhood.

Which is not all autistic people. It’s those autistic people who are most likely to be diagnosed young. There are many, many kinds of autistic people who are less likely to be diagnosed young. And they are just as autistic as the rest of us. They are not some lesser kind of autistic. They are not necessarily even less severely disabled. They’re just not picked up on as fast.

And as for the thing where I matched the descriptions of severe, moderate, AND mild… I expected that. For one, I really seem to have traits from both ends of the spectrum. For another, I don’t think we can really accurately divide autistic people up in such a simplistic way.

I do think I also represent an unusual subtype in some respects. But it overlaps with what’s apparently bog standard for autistic development. And I didn’t expect that.

But I wouldn’t have understood any of that until I learned to see myself as others see me. It took that understanding to decipher what I fit and didn’t fit in the book.

I think autistic people’s self descriptions are far more likely to be accurate towards autistic experience though. With the warning that we don’t all have the same experience. Some of us are polar opposite of each other. So just because you don’t identify with some or even most autistic people, doesn’t mean you’re not autistic, or less autistic. It just means you’re different.

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