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8:50pm June 4, 2014

As a disabled person looking for someone whose brain works similar to yours…

…don’t stick within your own narrow diagnostic category.

For instance.  I’m autistic.  Technically my diagnosis is autistic disorder.  I’ve in the past been diagnosed with PDDNOS and developmental disorder NOS, among many other things.  

Within the autistic spectrum itself, I have found people ‘like me’ who have been diagnosed with autism and Asperger’s, PDDNOS and atypical autism, high functioning and low functioning, with intellectual disabilities and without.

I’ve also met people very much like me who had severe epilepsy that meant constant seizures created perceptual processing issues very like mine.

i’ve also met people very much like me who had diagnoses of severe or profound intellectual disabilities, or were presumed to anyway.

I’ve met people very much like me who had dementia.

And what do I mean by 'like me’?

I mean that when we walk into the room, we understand each other without having to talk.  That’s such a rare experience for an autistic person that you stand up and take notice.  Often, without even knowing each other, we can have elaborate conversations without saying a word.  Or one of us will understand a lot about what the other one is thinking, without any words being passed between us.

This isn’t telepathy, it’s what happens when you’re so in tune with someone that you can just understand a lot of what is going on with them.  It happens to me a lot with people with dementia, and it frustrates me.  I want to shake their nondisabled companions and say “Can you just give her the extra twenty seconds she needs for that thought to make it through her head?  Because that thought is moving, you’re just not giving it enough time.”  

But any time I do that they get in my face and said “But she has Deee-MENNNN-CHA!” as if saying it slowly and in baby talk will make me understand that she isn’t thinking.

It makes me really mad.

But anyway, if you’re looking for others like yourself, don’t limit yourself to a diagnostic category.  You’ll often find people who 'speak your language’ who had a stroke or something else that you wouldn’t expect to be the same as whatever you have.  But the brain is a complex place.