9:38pm July 10, 2014

Celebrating one set of skills is not the same as putting down another set of skills.

I grew up being told that my highest strengths were worthless. That they flat out didn’t exist. That, if they existed, they were meaningless. Or worse than meaningless. Bad. These were not strengths that were wanted in the world. They were ugly. They were unwanted. It would be better if I never even looked too hard at them, because all I would find would be emptiness. That if I looked where those abilities should be, instead of abilities I would find endless, crushing deficits. The kind of deficits they talk about when they say you don’t have a mild, or a soul, or a cohesive personality structure. The kind of deficits they mean when they talk in front of you about how you don’t really exist anymore, how it’s not even worth treating you because there are real patients with real hope for their futures.

And that is what I believed for a long time.

I believed that as I was losing skills — cognitive, physical, sensory, motor planning — it was all, 100% loss. It was only when I began talking to other autistic people, that I thought maybe there was something beneath all that.

Because here is what I was told I had, some of the time:

The absence of, or severe impairment in, thought.

The absence of, or severe impairment in, sensory perception.

The absence of, or severe impairment in, movement or motor planning.

Donna Williams’s writing told me to look deeper. For all that I disagree with her on practically everything, her writing told me there was more to me than an absence of something. Her writing told me that there was life in the void. That sensing was a perfectly valid way of understanding the world, even if most people are totally disconnected from it themselves.

So I started going deeper.

And I started digging into the places that nobody talks about.

And I started talking about them.

No.

I started celebrating them.

I started celebrating what it means to be a highly sensing autistic person in a world that wants to make you over into everything else.

I started celebrating the life in the depths of the ocean in the voids that nobody sees, because they’re too busy looking for islands on the surface (and marveling at the tallest islands, if they can find any).

I started celebrating.

And this was a good thing. I firmly believe, then and now, that these skills need to be celebrated, in a world where they are utterly defiled.

I’m someone who can cross over. I can use the skills the world forced me to learn, in order to communicate about the world I inhabit most naturally. There are people who inhabit the same world I inhabit, but who can’t tell you about it except in their own, personal languages. Each one has their own language. And they have ways to communicate about things you’re not even perceiving, if you don’t share that world with them. (And you can’t just decide you’re going to share their experience of the world. If you can’t, you can’t.)

So for the sake of those of us who can communicate in English about things that are decidedly outside of language. And for the sake of those who can’t. I have found it important to celebrate these things we can do. They range from little things like being able to predict events in the house by the sounds of footfalls and the tapping of doorways, to the ability to think and act outside of the ‘mental widgets’, the frameworks that most people seem to use to guide their thoughts.

These are important abilities.

We have important abilities that should be celebrated.

But I’ve occasionally encountered hostility, resentment, and resistance from other autistic people, when I celebrate these abilities.

They believe that by celebrating a form of autism that is not theirs, and in fact celebrating abilities that they don’t have and may never have, then I am directly insulting them. Some of them come right out and say it. Others just get inexplicably nasty in interactions that shouldn’t have a component of nastiness to them.

The thing is, though?

Every kind of autistic person has a set of strengths and weaknesses. And some autistic people are going to be polar opposites. So when I celebrate what it is to be a highly sensing autistic person, then there will be a highly not-sensing autistic person around, somewhere, who won’t even understand what I’m trying to celebrate, because sensing is not a part of their consciousness, at all.

They have other strengths to celebrate. Other strengths that may or may not (depending on what they are) be as devalued as sensing is. But other strengths.

And they should not have to feel resentful that some very sensing autistic people want to say that sensing is a good thing. They should not have to feel jealous or like they’ve been spurned somehow. As I said, they have their own strengths, often strengths I can never hope to have.

It is not wrong to celebrate your strengths.

It is not wrong to celebrate your strengths even if it makes people without those strengths uncomfortable.

There should be a way to celebrate all of our varied strengths, so people can see that by celebrating one thing we are not putting down something else.

Maybe the problem is that Western society does this: It always elevates one set of people by putting someone else down.

So when highly sensing autistic people want to elevate ourselves out of the cesspool we’ve been told we belong in, then other sorts of autistic people may feel that we are somehow trying to put them down. To say we’re better than them. To say that our skills aren’t just valuable, they’re more valuable.

So I want to be very clear:

People like me are not bad. We have skills that are extremely important, and extremely undervalued. In some circumstances, those skills work better than conventional skills. In other circumstances, those skills work worse than conventional skills. We need people like me in the world. We don’t need us just for our skills. But we do need us for our skills, among other reasons.

And none of this takes away, not in the slightest, from the skills of other types of autistic and neurodivergent people. We all have skills that have been devalued by our societies. Some of us also have skills that have been highly valued by our societies (but the way that plays out is not always good). We need all of us. Nothing I say in celebration of my own skills should be taken as meaning that conventional skills, or skills that are very different or opposite from mine, are useless.

Celebrating one kind of skill does not mean putting down any other kind of skill. Celebrating one kind of person does not mean putting down any other kind of person. Try to remember that, when you see us celebrating ourselves. We are not putting you down, not unless we say something really obvious. Celebrating ourselves, celebrating things you don’t have, doesn’t mean putting down what you do have. Even if, sometimes, we get frustrated at living in a world that puts some of your skills above some of ours.

And this is important to understand. Because celebrating autism is not the same as celebrating one kind of autism. There are at least dozens of ways autistic people’s minds can be configured, and each one deserves celebration without having to put down everyone else in the process.

And remember…. if you see someone who is celebrating an ability that has long been treated as if it’s not even there, not even an ability, not even real, not even valid? That’s not the time to express your irritation or jealousy that people aren’t instantly celebrating your more conventionally valued abilities. Because we need time, we need that chance to celebrate the abilities that nobody wants us to celebrate, nobody wants us to acknowledge at all. And that’s not about you and your abilities. It’s about us and our abilities. Just for that moment, we need that moment to say “This is our moment and we are valuable and so are our abilities,” without anyone trying to tell us how horrible we are for not including their abilities too.

Because anyone and everyone whose deepest and most important abilities have been treated like trash our entire lives – whether or not we also had other abilities that people praised us for – need to be able to celebrate these abilities. Need to. Without having to fear offending people whose abilities are different.