❁
And the truth is that I had been injured. I had been damaged. […] And I hadn’t wanted to be more autistic.
Most autistic people don’t want to hear [that certain microbial states are causally linked to behaviors characterized as autistic].
Many view it as a threat to the notion of neurodiversity as a phenomenon that has existed with unchanging frequency since the dawn of time […] Others fear it may fuel more abuse against autistic children. […] There is a very real basis for worrying that parents of [autistic] children might badly harm them in misguided attempts to ‘treat’ or ‘cure’ [them].
I imagine that if I had been born with the degree of autism I experience today, I wouldn’t view my newly limited state negatively, because I wouldn’t have experienced a loss.
❁
It might seem like saying “we’ll do anything to help you” or “we tried everything” would make a kid feel like you really adore them, but this can actually make someone feel horrible. If you’ve always been disabled, disability doesn’t really feel like an emergency, nor does it really feel separable from who you are. So it can just feel, [if someone would be desperate enough to try everything], like you must be sort of a disaster.
✧
Doctors and researchers seem to think that curing cancer seems to be only a matter of time. My question is how we live in the meantime.
Autism: Explorations 