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People do not only make evil choices when they are abused, in emotional crisis, or lacking resources. And people also live through unimaginably hard things and still actively make choices, in accordance with their beliefs and values, about what they will and won’t do to other people.
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You realise […] that your Mom, all those years ago, was wrong.
Even if you leave aside your own experience, your own hunger for a life, and even if you accept that you represent the greatest mistake of her life,
you realise that her mistake
consisted not in failing to embrace your death, but in failing to free you from her insistence that life has to follow a specific path to be worth living, and to set you free to explore the possibility of your life.
She couldn’t have given you everything you needed or much of what you wanted. She didn’t have it to give.
But the insistence that if your life didn’t fit a certain pattern, it was not worth enduring … she could have chosen not to give you that.
Autism: Explorations 