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Language was built mostly by non-autistic people […] and my biggest frustration is this: the most important things about the way I perceive and interact with the world around me can only be expressed in terms that describe them as the absence of something important.
The absence of speech. The absence of language. The absence of thought. The absence of movement. The absence of comprehension. The absence of feeling. The absence of perception.
Focusing on absence is the easiest way to describe the presence of something much more important to me than what is absent. Many autistic people have even applied these words to themselves. Some of us do this knowing full well that there is so much more that we cannot say. Others are fooled by the language itself into a state of “Nothing to see here; move along now.”
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giving everything
Jim Sinclair (1987) […] wrote [in an] essay on xyr personal definition of sexuality,
Sexuality is when someone tells me that I’m not whole, that my personhood is incomplete, that a relationship in which I give everything I have is not “full.” It is hearing that because I have no sexual feelings, I have no feelings; that because I do not feel love in my groin, I cannot feel love at all. It is when someone who has not even bothered to look at my world dismisses it as a barren rock. It is being called inferior to “someone who is human.” It is the denigration of my experiences, my feelings, and my self. It is when my unique faculties are thrown back at me as hopeless inadequacies. Sexuality is reproach.
Substitute language for sexuality and you get closer than any other author I have read to how I feel when my deepest and most profound experiences are described purely as the lack of language, the lack of thought, even the lack of a soul.
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nowhere but the sky
[…]
Not all of [my forms of communication] communicate everything that typical languages communicate, but I don’t see any reason they should have to.
They are rich and varied forms of communication in their own right, not inadequate substitutes for the more standard forms of communication,
and like all forms of communication, some parts of them came naturally to me and other parts I had to learn. Having to learn them doesn’t make them any less real or significant than someone’s native language, which they had to learn in childhood.
To me, typical language takes place in the clouds,
and I have to climb or fly up there just to use and understand it. This is exhausting no matter how fluent I sound or how easy I make it look.
The sky will always be a foreign country to me.
Sometimes it feels more like I am throwing words up into the clouds but am too wiped out to fly up or even look up with a telescope to figure out what is going on there.
To use my more natural means of communication, I don’t have to leave the ground at all.
What has come as a surprise to me
is that no matter how consistent I am on the ground, many people measure me by my ability to hurl myself into the sky, whether with respect to language or some other fleeting and insubstantial thing that my body does.
So, if I have a certain level of expressive language, then I am expected to comprehend things even if I don’t,
and if I lack a certain expressive language, then my entire world is supposed to be empty and meaningless.
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about what is
I am telling you these things not to instruct you on the particulars of the mind of an autistic person, but rather to sketch out an image of how I perceive the world, and the richness and worthiness inherent in those ways of perceiving. It is anything but empty,
and it is so much more than a simple lack of something that other people have.
When I do scale the cliffs of language, people react to me strangely. They have lived on a mountain so long that they’ve forgotten the valley I come from even exists. They call
that valley
“not mountain”
and proclaim it dry, barren, and colorless, because that’s how it looks from a distance. The place I come from is envisioned as the world of real, valid people minus something. I know, of course, that the valley I live in is anything but desolate,
anything but a mountain minus the mountain itself. […]
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richness and rhythm
Someone once saw a photograph of me and said that he felt sorry because I would never know the richness of life that he knows. But I wonder if he is capable of looking around and […] understanding my kind of beauty […]
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Amanda Baggs
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Autism: Explorations 