2:59am May 22, 2014

I can pontificate as well as the next autistic person with an advocacy perseveration.

youneedacat:

But that’s not my most important contribution to the world, and it’s not my most important contribution to autistic self-advocacy.

(As usual, while this focuses on autism, it applies to lots of other things.)

I honestly think the most important contribution I can make is to dig deep inside myself, learn who I really am, and tell the world in detail that I exist.

Not because I’m somehow special or better than other people, whether nonautistic or autistic.

But because people like me are underrepresented in the autistic community, at least in this autistic community. And because people like me matter. And because a lot of people like me never develop the level of language skills I’ve developed.

And even though there are people like me who can be themselves in such a thorough and beautiful way that it shines like they are transparent to the light of a thousand suns…

…lots of people don’t know how to listen, and won’t see it.

So I’m here to translate the existence of people like me into a form people can’t ignore.

Someone once told me I was obsessed with ‘my issues’, in some kind of morbid and twisted way.

I had no words to tell him that I talked about these things because, in the community he and I were part of, I was the only one talking about them. I was the only one like me who had managed to stick it out as long as I had. Other outsiders — like-me and not-like-me but all not-like-the-mainstream-auties-there — came and went, but usually the coming was brief and the going was fast. Because it became very clear that the existence of autistic people outside a very narrow framework wasn’t welcome.

So I made it my job to describe myself in excruciating detail all the time.

I did it so that people would understand that at least one of us wasn’t going away.

I did it so people would understand forms of autism that were not theirs.

I did it so people like me would feel a tiny bit of welcome in a mostly hostile environment.

And I continue to do things like that.

The ideas I have about advocacy and activism and words-stuff and all that… lots of people have those ideas, and lots of people can say those ideas. And those ideas are bound to be wrong as often as they are right, because that’s what ideas are like. They are fleeting, situational, and never connected that much to reality.

But who I am, that is important. Not because I in particular am important, but because all of us are important. And because it’s especially important for people who are not in the majority to find belonging somewhere. And because it’s especially important for those who are in the majority to understand those of us who aren’t. To understand who we are. To accept who we are.

And because when I read Nobody Nowhere, it was the only person who had ever given me even a glimmer of hope that other people like me existed in the world. It didn’t matter that I disagreed with her on damn near everything at times, it didn’t matter that some of what we had in common wasn’t even autism (as if it mattered what label something was), what mattered was that someone was real, and was willing to share their reality with the entire world, and their reality helped me see my own reality, because we were both highly sensing autistic people when most autistic people who write about themselves are quite the opposite of us. We occupied the same broad area of autism. It was luck that she was the first autistic person whose book I ran into.

I want to do for others what she did for me.

I know that I have already done for many others what she did for me, because they have told me.

I also want to expand things so that it’s not just people like me, it’s not just people like the mainstream. I want people to understand the full spectrum, bursting with diversity and strange beauty in every color of the rainbow and many colors that are outside the realm of visible light. I want people to know how many forms we come in, and that being different from a norm does not make us less real.

So one of the most important things we can do is learn who we are, and be ourselves with all our might.

That can be a form of activism (although anyone uncomfortable with that word certainly doesn’t have to claim it). And it can be done by anyone, regardless of communication skills or cognitive skills. In fact many of the best at being themselves have no language or interpretive thought.

We live in a world where being ourselves is dangerous. Where we are hated for who we are and made to pretend we are things we are not. We live in a world where even places that are supposedly ‘autistic space’ are really only for some kinds of autistic people. And many of us, me included, want to make it so that it is available to all of us.

We are like a giant landscape that is beautiful and terrible, dangerous and sublime, we are rocks and trees and plants and hills, and every one of us is important. This doesn’t mean we’re all nice, or that we’re all going to be sitting around a campfire holding hands, or even that we should be aiming for that (especially since there are autistic people who are known serial bullies and stalkers of other autistic people). But it does mean that, just in terms of the forms autism can take, exploring our differences and similarities is a beautiful thing.

And it’s not a thing that’s done, really. Not on any large scale.

So I may pontificate sometimes, like all of us do.

But the really important posts are the ones where I’m just being who I am, as intense and as true as I possibly can.

And those are the really important posts when you do them, too. Whoever you happen to be.

The world needs us to be who we are. It’s dangerous, and nobody can make you do what you don’t feel comfortable doing. But don’t let anyone tell you that being who you are is unimportant, or that it has no impact. Being you, unashamedly you, in public, has an enormous important impact you will never fully know or understand or see the consequences of.

“

Telling

Laura Hershey
What you risk telling your story:

You will bore them.
Your voice will break, your ink
spill and stain your coat.
No one will understand, their eyes become fences.
You will park yourself forever
on the outside, your differentness once and for all revealed, dangerous.
The names you give to yourself
will become epithets.

Your happiness will be called
bravery, denial.
Your sadness will justify their pity.
Your fear will magnify their fears.
Everything you say will prove something about their god, or their economic system.

Your feelings, that change day to day, kaleidoscopic,
will freeze in place,
brand you forever,

justify anything they decide to do with you.

Those with power can afford to tell their story
or not.
Those without power

risk everything to tell their story and must.

Someone, somewhere
will hear your story and decide to fight, to live and refuse compromise. Someone else will tell
her own story,
risking everything. “

Laura Hershey. Yes, this. That. Sentiment.