If You’ve Met One Autistic Person . . . | by Mette Harrison | Aug, 2022 | Medium

If You’ve Met One Autistic Person . . .

If You’ve Met One Autistic Person . . .

You’ve met one autistic person.

(The quote is a variation of Stephen Shore’s, but I’m allowing myself to write my own expansion of this.)

A lot of people tell me, when I reveal my recent diagnosis with autism, “You can’t be autistic.” They tell me I’m too smart, too capable, too successful, too empathetic, to be autistic. Some of them even say, “I know an autistic person and you’re definitely not like him, so you can’t be autistic.”

Please reconsider the ignorance you’re revealing here. Autism is not a personality diagnosis. It doesn’t tell you anything about what areas of interest a given person has. Autism is also not a skills diagnosis. It’s not an intelligence test. Yes, there are autistic people who also have profound intellectual disabilities. There are autistic people who are unable to speak. There are autistic people who memorize “useless” trivia. They are all humans who deserve to be seen as fully human.

There are also autistic artists and writers. There are autists who are brilliant activists. There are autists who have high IQ’s and low IQ’s. There are autists who are fascinated by trains, calendars, sports minutia, and the order of the American Presidents. There are also autists who are fascinated by social rules, languages, knitting and crocheting, triathlon, nutrition, environmental policy, and anything you yourself are interested in. They are all fully human.

Yes, autistic people are often seen as social awkward or rude, as overly blunt, and as unempathetic. But I put it to you that autistic people simply require more blunt communication. It isn’t that we refuse to ever listen to other people (though that trait can be seen in non-autistic people, as well as autistic people — being selfish or unempathetic isn’t really a trait that can be located solely in one group of humanity). Most autistic people (in my experience) want to be kind, and are simply bewildered by a world in which they are expected to guess what other people want. Why can’t you just say it outright? Why is social interaction some kind of arcane game of hinting indirectly at everything?

There are similarities in autistic styles of communication. There are sometimes similarities in styles of humor. There are often similarities in the lack of wanting things to change, though that can be alleviated with some literal explanation of what the change is and how to get through it step by step. Also, many autistic people have a high level of social anxiety because they’ve spent their entire lives being told that they are doing everything wrong. A lot of autistic people apologize for everything they do because they assume they must have done something wrong if anyone is talking to them. That’s what happens when you only receive negative feedback all your life.

But as I said before, autistic people are widely varying in many other ways. If you’ve met an autistic person who is obsessed with prime numbers, do not assume other autistic people are obsessed with numbers. Some are, most aren’t. If you’ve met an autistic person who is rude, you needn’t assume all autistic people are rude. And I further recommend that you reconsider your own prejudices about what is polite social interaction, because many autistic people enjoy conversations with other autistic people in which social rules are suspended and we are allowed to speak openly and honestly with each other without being told we are “wrong.”

Some autists do not speak verbally, but have found the internet to be a wonderful way to communicate by typing onto computers. Some autists may have little interest in communicating. Some are exceptional visual artists. Some are scientists. Some are musicians. Some are actually so empathetic that it overwhelms their own emotions and makes it hard for them to separate self from other. Some struggle to identify their own emotions or to understand that their body is signaling emotion to them. Others are awash in feelings and struggle to find logic and words within them.

My point here is that we are different, we autists. We are beautiful and complicated and wounded and well, human. Maybe we don’t seem human, but I beg that you stretch your definition of humanity a little further than it is right now. I tense whenever I hear someone define humanity in a way that excludes autistic people: All humans crave social interaction. All humans crave touch. All humans want eye contact to feel understood.

We are human. We are who we are. Please see us. Don’t turn away from us. Don’t lump us all together. We are who we are, and we live in a world that hates us. Please don’t add to that hatred. Please let us all help to undo the stigma. It will help us all live better lives. And perhaps the real definition of humanity is learning how others are human differently than we are.