as small as a world and as large as alone

4:37am July 23, 2014

clockworkcrow:

i keep reading up on autism symptoms in trying to figure out what specifically i am and it’s like

i read descriptions of autistic experiences written by allistic adults about autistic children and it’s like no, that’s not very much like what i experience… then i read descriptions of autistic experiences written by autistic adults about what they experience and it’s like… well that’s almost exactly what i experience.

and of course finding anything talking about autistic adults is next to impossible so it’s like.

ugh. idk.

There’s over a hundred books out there written by autistic adults, maybe over two hundred by now.

The problem you are probably having is this:

Nonautistic people write about how they view us from the outside.

Understanding how their descriptions apply to us requires several abilities on our part:

1.  Understanding how other people see us and our actions.

2.  Understanding how nonautistic people see us and our actions.

3.  Understanding the (often wrong) things nonautistic people infer about the reasons for our actions.

It took me ages to gain those abilities, but once I did I could see exactly how and why I was diagnosed with autism by nonautistic people.  But first I had to come to understand myself through the eyes of other autistic people.  Our own self-descriptions are more accurate than the descriptions from outside of our point of view.  But the descriptions from outside are what drive diagnosis and much of research.  It really took me a long time to realize exactly how autistic I looked, because I could not see myself from outside, let alone from such a strange point of view as nonautistic clinicians have of us.

For instance, they call our routines and rituals nonfunctional because they can’t understand the function.  They call our body language and nonverbal communication lacking because they can’t see most of it.  And on, and on, and on.

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