as small as a world and as large as alone, bendyrulers: have you ever met someone so...

9:06am June 30, 2014

have you ever met someone so fucking allistic that you can almost smell the “LIKE To Support Awareness For Children With Autism! :)” radiating from them

I once knew someone so nonautistic that she actually lived in her own world, like for real. In a way no autistic person I’ve ever met actually did. And there was a time the autistic community was small enough that just on that description, people would privately email me and say “I know exactly who you mean.” I’ll call her Diane.

She was the mother of an autistic child, but she had no real autistic traits herself. What she did have, was an overabundance of anti-autistic traits. By which I mean, traits that were so opposite from autism that they made her impossible to interact with. Unfortunately, she had convinced herself that she had a gift for communicating with autistic people. She even wrote a book about how to “speak autistic”. It was horrible, because she had less than no conception of how to interact with us.

She was a very skilled manipulator, though. And she would manipulate autistic people into meltdowns. I know one autistic woman who never has meltdowns, never gets overloaded, and is severely hyposensitive to most sensory input. But Diane managed to overload her, somehow, to the point of having a screaming, crying meltdown. At which point Diane swooped in, hugged her, and told her that they’d just made a major emotional breakthrough in their communication with each other and that this meant they could become closer friends.

She was impossible to have a conversation with.

And when I say impossible.

I mean that you could say literally anything. Anything. And she would find a way to take it as a non-literally as possible. Every single communication had, in her mind, at least three or four layers of hidden meanings. And she’d totally ignore your literal meaning.

One of my friends once was on the phone with Diane. And my friend (I was in the room) noticed her cell phone battery dying. So she said “My battery’s dying, and I’m running out of minutes, I really have to go.” And Diane kept talking to her, and trying to find ways to prolong the conversation, because Diane was convinced that there was some hidden meaning to what my friend was saying, and that if she could just react to the hidden meaning then she could get my friend to stay on the phone with her. My friend said “I really hate to do this but I’m going to have to hang up on you,” and after four more warnings she hung up on her. Diane spent the next hour calling us back constantly.

One time I told Diane that her information on a friend of mine for her book was wrong. She said that my friend had grown up in an institution and only been set free after a doctor figured out she was autistic rather than schizophrenic. This bore no resemblance to my friend’s life at all. So I told her “This isn’t how my friend’s life went. She didn’t actually spend that much time in institutions, and she got out of them when she was still diagnosed as schizophrenic. Then years later she came across a description of autism, brought it to a psychologist, and went through the process of getting diagnosed with PDDNOS. She actually spent more time homeless than she spent institutionalized.” Diane got very angry at me and accused me of being jealous of my friend’s inclusion in her book. She said “You have more page time than your friend so you shouldn’t worry.” (I didn’t really want page time at all…) Then she insisted she would never talk to me about this unless she was in the same room with my friend and me – which I told her was impossible because at that point, I lived in California, my friend lived on the East Coast, and Diane lived in the UK. When the book went to press, my friend was described in almost exactly the same way, except instead of a doctor rescuing her from a lifetime of institutionalization, the doctor rescued her from a lifetime of homelessness.

It was seriously like she was incapable of taking anything literally. Ever.

She also had this thing where she’d fly autistic people to her house at great expense and then work them over and manipulate them until they’d say things like “Diane sees into my soul, it’s amazing.” Only after they got away from her, they’d feel like they’d been used, and it got really ugly. She tended to overload people and then call that an emotional breakthrough, like she did with the person above. And she did other things like that. Like getting an autistic person to cry meant she was getting us to “open up to her”. And she’d try to play matchmaker to set up autistic people with each other. (She kept asking me if I “fancied” this autistic woman I barely knew.)

But like…

She seriously lived in her own world. And she seriously was one of the most self-centered people I’ve met in my entire life. And she seriously fit every single one of the stereotypes I’ve heard of autistic people, along those lines. Impossible to actually communicate with. Lives in her own world. Totally self-centered and self-absorbed.

And yet every single one of those traits, she got by being the opposite of autistic. As in the extreme, polar opposite of autism. If there is an opposite of autism, she has it. And if there is an opposite of autism, then it makes a person into a true version of every autism stereotype in the book. Holy crap, all any autistic person I know who remembers her can say, is that we survived her somehow.

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