Autistic Hedgehog

[“But you seem so normal!”

Give it time.]

I’m not denying that this is a really insulting, ableist thing to say, because it is. But it’s also almost always said to me by people who’ve spent hours, or even only minutes, around me.

Like, you haven’t seen me curled up on in a sobbing puddle because public transportation. You haven’t seen me home alone with only my iPod and my horrible white girl dance moves to keep me company. You haven’t seen me that time I was ranting to my husband and kept stopping mid-sentence to gleefully squish my Hello Kitty squishy things. You haven’t seen me running the satin ribbon on the edge of my blanket through my hands over and over again. You haven’t heard even a tiny fraction of the sorts of things that come out of my mouth. And most importantly, you sure as hell didn’t see my fucked up childhood and everything I went through, being an autistic girl in a public school during a time when people were only just beginning to even acknowledge that girls could be autistic. 

So to the people who tell me I seem so normal, I say to you: Sadly, so do you.