Mastodawn

During the course of my 6 decades revolving around the sun, there have been a lot of changes to the way autism is understood and recognised. But, as welcome as the advances that have been made are, even though there is still far to go, the way things were, go a long way to explain how I, and I suspect so may of us, were able to fly under the radar and not even consider the possibility that we were autistic for as long as we did.

For example, as a kid in the late sixties I turned up at school waving so many red flags for, this kid is autistic, it would be considered impossible for it not to be picked up on now. Chiefly, I couldn't make eye contact, I was speech delayed and had poor social skills, or apparently any desire to become social or make friends. But back then, everyone knew that autistics had to have even more extreme behavioural issues than just this and were, well back then they used a horrendous word beginning with R, so learning disabled. Which I clearly wasn't.

So call high functioning, or Asperger's, didn't really appear on the horizon until the early eighties, at least here in the UK, and even then it was often misread as a certain type of person only, the gifted, highly intelligent outsider and introvert. So, not a great help for a lot of us, and even less for me, given that I was already in university by then and masking like a good one.

Of course, it was even less helpful if you were female presenting. The myth that autism was only something that affected males and far too often that actually meant, white middle class males at least, still has its roots in far too many places. So that, even today, if you are a POC, or female presenting, or, god forbid, poor, it is far harder to get a correct diagnosis. Not when there are so many other diagnoses that they can throw at you. Despite the fact that they aren't accurate and don't help. And in fact, all too often, come with horribly negative consequences for being diagnosed with them.

That, I realise now, has been the common thread through all my years, that it has always been about how autism was considered to present, at least to the outsider. And all too often that meant how negatively we presented. What we couldn't do, how far we fell short of their standards, our deficits, at least to their minds, and rarely, if ever, our strengths. In fact these, if they were recognised at all, were all too often seen as mysterious savant like skills emerging from an otherwise empty or damaged facade. Think rain man. All the stereotypes that grew from the various attempts to define us and which still plague us today. In fact, these are often our biggest hurdles to realising that we could be autistic. All the, well I can't be autistic because, I can make eye contact, make friends, have a good job, marry and perhaps the most corrosive of all, are capable of empathy.

It is the stereotypes that mean that all too often we are used to seeing our autistic traits presented on TV and film, by the unfeeling robot, or android, the flawed, socially blind, genius. Or the hero who has to be shepherded through the social world by their allistic partner, whilst they solve the crimes, or save the day. The truth is that we are all different. Some of us struggle with something's, but not others. And how we struggle, or present those things can also differ. Above all, of course, they differ from how the world thinks we should be.

So, just because we are not reacting the way we're supposed to, doesn't mean that we aren't reacting. For many of us, for example, our empathy can come out as a need to problem-solve and not, immediately anyway, just providing emotional support. That we may need to hide from the news of the world, especially as it is at the moment, or carry on with our normal posts, as if nothing was changing. Isn't because we can't see or can't, or don't, care about it, but because we've had to learn to shield ourselves from so much, from our own, often, hyper-empathic and justice driven natures. From the pain and hurt of being judged and judging ourselves, from the expectations of what we should be and how we should behave. From all the stereotypes and definitions that have never defined us, but only ever hurt us.

For there are many reasons why we behave and react the way we do and they are all autistic, because we are, and that is the one thing that I really wish the world could come to learn and to define us by.

Autism Spectrum Quotient