as small as a world and as large as alone, Thanks to reading your blog I had a really nice...

11:25pm August 15, 2014

wintergrey asked: Thanks to reading your blog I had a really nice conversation with an autistic cousin the other day. He doesn't talk much verbally—though he can if he has to, I think it's just hard. I consider it a conversation. He likes to pace around the table when things are busy and I hung out with him and he would come by and touch my hands and hold them and pat my arms on the way past and I asked him about some of his favourite movies and it was really different than it would have been without knowing you.

That makes me feel really good, to know that anything I’ve done can ease communication with people who would have a harder time sticking up for their right to communicate in the ways that are the easiest for them. I know a guy who can communicate really fast and really well on an iPhone, but he chooses to leave it behind a lot in order to communicate the ways he finds more natural. (This is a personal choice and not all auties make the same choice. But it’s a common one.) People bug him about it, “where’s your iPhone?” and they don’t understand that he values his other means of communication just as much as he values his ability to use words. He’s in university FFS, he started college when he was like 12 or something, he doesn’t have to prove to anyone that his words are valid. He just finds words harder, and prefers to communicate in other ways when he is just relaxing and being social. He finds it very hard, still, to string words together in social contexts, very exhausting, and he would far rather interact ‘his way’ rather than 'the world’s way’.

I have a hard time getting this across too. Like him, I have gotten a lot of acclaim for my writing. People see me as eloquent. They don’t see the struggle. They don’t see that I would rather be interacting my own way, which involves observing pieces of my environment parallel to another person, possibly passing objects back and forth to each other, using the reactions of my body language and the reactions of their body language to spin a mutual web of comprehension between us, seeing each other for who we really are, not who words would make us into. That’s my preferred communication, always has been, and it doesn’t matter how much other kinds of communication I’ve achieved… I see myself as essentially bilingual, I’m fluent in Language (though it breaks down sometimes under stress or just because), but I’m even more fluent in Sensing and Sensory Stuff and Other Things Like That, which is my “first language” if I was ever to have one. And I want my first language respected as much as my second language.

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