as small as a world and as large as alone, man i'm so confused by this whole "everyone gets...

5:34pm July 3, 2014

Anonymous asked: man i'm so confused by this whole "everyone gets the core of autism wrong" thing like i've done research and i've read stuff from people and i thought i'd come to a pretty solid conclusion and now it's kind of like nope, all that stuff is peripheral, everything i identify with and everything that's made other people think i might be on the spectrum is actually not important to autism at all? i don't have significant movement issues. i don't even know what differences in perception MEANS

By peripheral I don’t mean unimportant. I mean it’s not at the core of how autism works.

I experience all that ‘peripheral’ stuff too, some of it very strongly. Like social issues. I have all kinds of social issues. But social issues aren’t what make autism autism, as far as they know.

What make autism autism, as far as anyone knows, are a bunch of differences in how we think, how we process information we’ve taken in through our senses, and how we connect with our bodies and move them (which includes a lot more than physical movement, yes it’s quite confusing).

I’d give you examples but my brain is really not working right now, and I’m writing something else, so my brain is on the wrong track. And I understand this all sounds horribly vague and out of left field and probably upsetting too if you’re taking me at my word. And I’m sorry to spring that out of nowhere.

But like… social issues. Peripheral because they’re what happens when people of two very differing neurological setups bounce off each other. It’s the edges bouncing off each other that create the social issues, not a core of social-different-ness that creates them. At least a lot of the time.

Whereas, what you’ll find in nearly all autistic people, are characteristic cognitive patterns (there’s a few different common ones), characteristic ways that we take in and organize sensory information, and characteristic ways that we have trouble with movement – movement of our bodies, movement of thoughts, movement of memories, movement of lots of things. Those are things you’ll find in pretty much all of us, and those are the things that are most likely to make up the core of what is autism. Different autistic people will have different amounts of each, though, some with barely any of one issue but lots of another, and there’s reasons for that, too.

But the peripheral stuff is like… what we look like to other people, what our social skills look like, whether we make eye contact, that kind of thing. It’s not central to being autistic, but it’s an outgrowth of the central aspects of being autistic. It’s like the difference between roots and branches – they’re all important parts of the tree, but the roots are nearer the core, and the branches are more peripheral. That doesn’t make the branches unimportant or trivial. (And branches are more visible, and therefore more measurable, and that’s why people measure autism by the branches instead of the roots. But they’re starting to get a better look at the roots, and the roots are cognitive/perceptual/movement issues, in varying proportions and combinations by person. Then those core issues can combine in all kinds of ways to create a huge array of “branches” that look very different whether the insides are the same or not.)

I’m not trying to upset you. I just… really think that when it comes to autism, pretty much everything we think we know is wrong.

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