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6:19pm June 10, 2014

About autistic cousins (ACs)

karalianne:

I was out of things for a while. It happens. But when it happens, then when you return nobody knows who you are because the people you knew aren’t there anymore. And it takes a long time to rebuild the kind of trust and camaraderie that you had with the first group of people. But the memory of the way it was with them is still there, and it hurts to know that you can’t be as easy with the new folks because there isn’t that history anymore and you can’t just say “I’m a cousin” and have everyone get it the way they used to.

And I could probably say more but I think it’s extraneous at this point. Just. I still feel like I’m struggling to fit in, in a lot of places. ASA* was my safe place, and for a while the autism blogging community took its place. I don’t have a place like that anymore - LJ sort of does it, but it’s not the same. And Tumblr will never actually be safe the way ASA was. (And anyone who thinks Facebook is safe is very confused.)

*alt.support.autism, NOT the Autism Society of America.

I so badly wish we had something like it used to be.  There’s also an innocence that the autistic community lost when some bullies started tearing through it and trying to fuck with everyone’s relationships, and after that it’s never been the same, and most people now can’t even remember what it was like before that, let alone long before that.  I mean I remember being frustrated that fewer people were political back then, but now it’s swung too far in the other direction, where if you’re not highly politicized then people look at you sideways.  On balance, I’d take the other way.