11:03pm July 28, 2014

People like me.

I realized recently that when I describe ‘people like me’ in terms of the way I process information, being highly sensing, and other things like that, people might assume I’m only talking about some subgroup of other autistic people. But that wouldn’t be true.

There are autistic people I relate to very strongly. And they come from every diagnostic category and every functioning label, because nobody has come up with an official category that defines my sort of autism.

But there’s other people I relate to very strongly as well.

There’s some people with intellectual disabilities, who are not autistic, but have similar processing issues to me. They often are labeled as having a severe or profound intellectual disability, but some are labeled as having a mild or moderate one too.

There’s some people with epilepsy that is severe enough that they seize every few seconds. This interrupts their sensory processing and cognitive abilities in a way that can resemble my sensory and cognitive processing issues.

There are people whose only diagnosis is various sensory processing disorders, whose experiences can resemble mine, although this seems to be a bit rarer.

There are people who have had strokes or brain injuries or dementia who have very similar processing styles to my own, even if they didn’t before the onset of their condition.

So basically, when I talk about 'people like me’ in terms of sensory and cognitive processing, I’m not just describing a group of other autistic people. I’m describing a wide and diverse group of people with disabilities, that have somehow led their brain to process things in a manner extremely familiar to me.

When we meet, we often click instantly. I have had conversations across the room with strangers who were 'like me’, while staff looked on and saw no communication at all, because they didn’t know how to recognize non-standard communication. And those moments of communication with total strangers, undetected by staff, sustained me for a long time when I was quite lonely. The strangers were not always autistic, but they did always have a cognitive disability of some kind. Some of them could speak and others couldn’t, but all of us could converse without speech, in ways that were instinctive rather than learned.