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5:55pm August 15, 2014

xczt:

Please, please don’t prove that you’re actually autistic only by listing skills you don’t have. Of course, it’s important for people to understand that you can’t tell what kind of skills someone has just by looking at them. Or that just because you have a skill in one situation, it doesn’t mean it’s always there.

I’m not talking about that right now. (Or about a situation when you don’t have a choice on how you’re proving yourself, for example because of power structures.) I’m talking about proving someone’s authenticity as an autistic person by saying that they don’t have certain skills. And those skills are usually related to living skills, not something like “trouble with understanding the tone of voice”.

The lack of those skills may be a part of what makes someone autistic. But not every autistic person lacks those skills.

Don’t try to prove you’re autistic because you lack the skills that an allistic person thinks an autistic person should lack. There’s another autistic person who has all, or the majority, or some of those skills you don’t have. Both of you are actually autistic.

I can see why it’d be a problem.

But the reason I do talk about the specific skills I lack (and leave out the ones about tone of voice etc.) is because it feels like everyone wants autism to be all about social skills and nothing but social skills social skills social skills all the time.  

And while I have just as many social skills problems as the next autistic person, they don’t feel like the core of what makes me autistic, nor are they the skills I lack that affect me the most strongly in my everyday life.  So when I do try to talk about “Yes, I’m autistic, and this is what I can’t actually do, here…” I tend to talk about the things that impact my life the most.  Which tend to be sensory processing issues, cognitive processing issues, language issues, and daily living skills.  

I honestly think anyone trying to say “Yes I’m autistic because I lack _______ skills” should be able to list whatever skills they feel like listing, whether it’s those skills or other ones.  Because autism doesn’t affect people just one way.  If my brother were to talk about how autism affected him in order to say “Yes I’m autistic and…” he’d probably talk primarily about social skills and rigidity and trouble with change.  And that’d be fine for him, but it’s not what I’d talk about for me.