10:09pm October 6, 2014

➸ Existence is Wonderful: Conceptualizing Autism (autistic history: 2008)

To read the whole article (including a wonderful, wonderful graphic I have never seen the like of before or since) click the link at the top.  The following is just the introduction:

This piece of writing is an attempt to explain my current conceptualization of autism. 

I come at this subject both as someone very interested in neuroscience/cognition and as an autistic self-advocate. 

Since being diagnosed myself, and entering public discussion (initially just to find out if there really were people who shared certain experiences with me), I’ve often found myself in the midst of discussions where the question “what IS autism anyway?” goes round and round and back and forth but never seems to be satisfactorily resolved. 

Lots of theories and abstractions and oversimplifications get thrown about, and it can be quite a confounding thing indeed to even determine if the people involved are even talking about the same thing. 

And yet, those of us who live every day of our lives as atypically-brained persons somehow manage to concretely exist; we are in no way dependent on the speculations of others to actually see and feel and experience reality the way we do. 

This disconnect – that gulf between the very real experience of existing “autistically” in the world, and the various attempts to define autism from the outside – has long confounded me, and I would guess many others as well. 

This writing has been a long time coming – over the past few years I’ve read many papers and studies, communicated with other autistic adults (and a few children and adolescents), and just generally tried to hash through all the weird linguistic and cultural matter surrounding neuro-atypicality in its various manifestations.

Basically what I want this article to be – and what I hope it at least marginally succeeds at being – is something I can point people to when they want to know what I actually think autism is. 

The ultra-short version is that I think autism is best understood as a cognitive style, based on biological underpinnings pertaining to brain development, connectivity, and structure. Like any human attribute fitting these terms, autistic brain wiring can lead to both strengths and weaknesses, ability and disability, good experiences and bad ones. 

If you want to know why I think this to be the case, you’ll need to read the long version – that is, the rest of this article.

Anne C., Existence Is Wonderful.  Her blog is defunct now but it contains a rich amount of history both in terms of autism and in terms of life extension research.  Don’t forget her easily.  

(And she’s still around tumblr as feliscorvus.  She and I have both discovered tumblr to be a much lower-pressure place to blog than on our main blogs.  Something about writing on a “real” blog brings out our Inner Editors and we get nothing done.) 

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