Atmosphere – Streaks (Part 2)

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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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Next

Acceptance

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Major concept: Neurodiversity

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Kindness without respect is worthless

Erin Human

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Just like you shouldn’t force people to be proud of their autism, you shouldn’t force people to be ashamed of it either.

2Pacula_Was_Taken

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Now if we could only get the rest of the world to calm down and not stereotype [my son], we might get some serious quality of life improvements and more stress-free community inclusion going forward.

Mrs. Kerima Çevik

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Acceptance is not
giving up […]
doing nothing […]
what happens after you’ve fixed someone to your liking
[or] throwing away all rules, manners, education, skills and coping strategies.

Cynthia Kim

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Neurodiversity isn’t about pretending that autism, other developmental disabilities and psychiatric disabilities are all sunshine and rainbows. It’s about believing that we should be able to live our lives on our own terms and that our community should continue to exist, and doing whatever we can to make sure that happens.

Shain M. Neumeier

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Most parents are scared, insecure, unsupported and exhausted. […]

As autistic adults, we say that we are the real experts on autism by virtue of our lived experience. By the same logic, you can’t claim to be an expert on parenting if you’re not a parent. […]

Parents, in turn, don’t always listen to autistic adults as much as they should and thereby miss out on some very valuable insights.

Maura Campbell

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Growing up autistic in a world made for non-autistic minds is difficult. Then again, so is growing up lefty in a world made for righties.

It’s not better or worse – just different. Families with lefties, women, people of color, LGBQT, and kids with disabilities love each other exactly as they are and wouldn’t trade them for a child who has an easier path ahead. Raising a child on the autism spectrum has its challenges, but so does raising any child. All of us will have our obstacles.

Ashia Ray

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I come down, on the whole, firmly on the side of the self-advocates; I think it is critical to listen carefully to what any marginalized community says about their own experiences.

At the same time, I think they sometimes forget that many parents do not have the tools or the ability to build a fully autism-friendly life for their children, and that some compromises simply have to be made (as much as I hate them) at this point, in order for an autistic child to be integrated into our terribly narrow-minded society. […]

Restless Hands

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When parents like me talk about our kids with disabilities and intense support needs, we have to be thoughtful. We need to make it quite clear that our kids are much-loved and very awesome human beings. We should never, ever state or imply that any challenges we face as a parent are our children’s fault. We need to handle their privacy with delicacy. And we shouldn’t accidentally enable disrespect towards children who are already too-frequent magnets for morbid fascination, and pity.

But we do need to talk, because our parenting gig is not like other parenting gigs. It just isn’t. We, our kids, and our families need different supports than families whose kids don’t have disabilities, and we often need a lot of them. Sometimes we’re not always sure where to find those supports, or even aware of available supports; sometimes we’re ashamed to pursue the supports we and our kids need. And not having the supports we need for the best quality of life possible can lead to unnecessary hardship for everyone involved.

So, let’s talk about what parents like us need, and especially how to get what we need. But first, I need to be forthright on one matter: In no way does lack of services excuse harming our children. Ever. […]

Shannon Des Roches Rosa

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You are right; we cannot make your autistic loved one non-disabled. But we can help make a future that has room for people like your child in it, complete with the rights, the access, and the supports they need to live their fullest life. We think that that is doable. We think that that is right.

Yes, autistic lives are different. Yes, they are often hard. No, they will not look like the lives of non-disabled people.

We just don’t think that that makes disabled lives wrong.

Emily Paige Ballou 

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For seven years, we’ve been drowning. And since autism is synonymous with all things good, acceptable, and neurodiverse in this world, and since all kids with autism are simply wired differently, and since doctors who say otherwise are quacks, and since parents who think otherwise are in denial or worse, we’ve been forced to remain silent about our pain and our reality.

For seven years, the autism label slapped on my son’s medical condition has given doctors a reason to dismiss his suffering, friends a reason to be angered by our failure to show up at important events, and family members a reason to question our sanity and criticize our parenting skills.

My son’s autism label gave us a reason to just shut up. Even in our darkest moments, we reported our family was ‘fine, thanks.’ We trudged forward, shamed into silence. To say we did not accept our son’s assignment to autism as his destiny, that we were searching for a Get Out of Autism Jail Free card, would have been perceived in the same manner as if we were to say we did not love our son. That he was intrinsically bad, and wrong, and not what we had hoped for.

Ashlyn Washington

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