Autistic Hedgehog

*deep breath*

I’m going to try to answer this without exploding. Try. Because if you’ve actually been reading my posts and, you know, absorbing them, I shouldn’t need to answer this at all.

I think I’ve said on here about a thousand times that autistics are all different and that functioning labels are meaningless. But let’s examine why I might be so different from the small handful of autistic children you know. Since clearly “I am not them” is not a satisfactory answer for you, let’s try some sordid details instead.

(For my Hedgehogs: Trigger warning for ableism, bullying, abuse, suicide and rape.)

Oh, I suppose not all of it is sordid, as such. I wasn’t diagnosed until I was nine. Although I’ve had an ADHD diagnosis practically since I was in the womb, and my mom always felt the doctors missed something about me, no one acted like I was a useless shell of a person who would never amount to anything (that came later). It wasn’t assumed or expected that I couldn’t learn to read, couldn’t learn to write, couldn’t be a well educated individual. Hell, my mom started teaching me to read when I was about three (though admittedly this could be so she wouldn’t have to suffer through Kittens Are Like That again). When I developed my first special interest and started reading books on horses all the time, no one tried to stop me or scold me, because reading was good.

Perhaps these kids you’ve worked with never had those benefits. Perhaps people always treated them like they would never be worthwhile people, like they couldn’t learn to read or write anyway so why bother teaching them? Or perhaps it’s just not their strength. You see, it is mine.

I’m a writer and I’ve been writing for fifteen years, but I’ve always had a particular knack with words. When I was tested in sixth grade, I was found to be four years ahead of my reading level (which was probably not even fully accurate since I was already reading novels for adults at that age). For my entire life I’ve known words—known the meanings to words—that I’d never even heard before. “The world is made up of the greatest composition of numbers and letters.” I said it when I was…four? Five? I couldn’t have been more than six when I once described myself as “feeling like a pile of used up rags.” 

You see? When people talk about autistics with special talents, they think of doing large sums in their head like Rain Man or being able to play a song on the piano after hearing it only once. But my gift, my talent, is words, communication. I don’t communicate well in spite of my autism, but because of it. 

But I mentioned sordid details, didn’t I? And really, the good is nice, but I’m not me without the bad.

It’s funny you should call me “very well educated” because I’m not; not in the typical sense. My world started going to hell after my father committed suicide. By the time I was twelve, I was being viciously bullied in school. I was cornered and hit in the locker room, I was surrounded and harassed at my desk, I got rocks thrown at me on the way home from the bus stop. I didn’t know it for some time, but the other students ganged up to tell lies about me, accusing me of being the bully, telling teachers I called them names and swore at them (I never even swore when I stubbed my toe, back then). I can remember sitting and listening to the lies, opening my mouth to defend myself and being shushed, viciously, by my so-called guidance counselor. 

No one believed me. Even I didn’t believe me. I have one of the sharpest, longest memories you’ll ever encounter, and I spent years thinking I was going out of my mind, because I couldn’t remember any of these things I supposedly did. And I hate talking about it, because people don’t like to believe that children can be that horrible. But they can and they were, and I was surrounded by adults who saw my difficulties expressing “proper” allistic emotions as proof I was lying. Adults I couldn’t look in the face because I could never trust them.

I was home-schooled part of the year in both 6th and 7th grade, and for all of 8th grade. Despite that, I tried going back to school for high school. My education was never steady or stable again. I couldn’t stay full days—by the end of the day I couldn’t breathe from the panic—and I missed a lot of classes. Much of my “very well educated” comes from educating myself. And while all this was happening, when I was only fifteen, I was lying still while my boyfriend raped me, because I’d been so lonely for so long that I was terrified of losing him and the friends he’d brought into my life. I spent years feeling like a stupid little girl who should have known better than to let him do that.

But like I said, I educated myself. And not just in terms of writing or reading or anything else. I educated myself in you. In allistics. I learned to read you better than you can read each other—but even so, I rarely trust my own judgment. I ought to, but my instincts have been so battered by the years of abuse that I can’t. Give me time and I can learn people, learn how they’ll react in a given situation better than they know themselves. And I know me. I spent hours upon hours in introspection, being far more brutally honest with myself than most people will ever be. I know how I act, why I react, why things hurt me…and I’ve put it all together to decode the world. To survive the world.

Do you know how exhausting it is to never be able to let your guard down, ever? To always have to study people, to actively read their non-verbal language, to vet every single thought that comes through your head to make sure it’s not offensive, and to have to do it all at the speed of thought? To smile and look people in the eyes—or fake it—even when you don’t want to? Because that’s my life. I communicate well now verbally too, but I didn’t always. It was only when I was writing that things always fell into place, that I got it right, that I was on the same wavelength as other people. Only when I’m writing that it’s not another long, drawn-out battle to appear just like everyone else. 

That is how it works. How it works it that we’re all different people, but we are people. We’re not empty husks who live our lives unaffected and unchanged by the world around us. Oh, it affects us, all right. It changes us. For many of us, it stuffs us into a box and then praises us while we huddle there, cramped and in pain but doing what society thinks is “right” and “acceptable.” Others are dubbed such worthless lost causes that there’s little point in trying to shove them into the box, because they’ll never go in anyway. Very few people ever care to see what happens if they try to adapt to us instead. 

I actually had a very similar experience with my psychologist a year or so ago. He liked to talk about how I was “hardly autistic at all anymore” and, when I talked about things like being overstimulated by a crowd, he would insist that all people experience such things.

It frustrated me so much. I know he thought he was saying something positive, but for me, he was dismissing the realities of my life. He was dismissing all the hard work I’d done and the bullying and ableism I’d suffered to seem “hardly autistic at all anymore” when they’re so relevant to who I am. He was dismissing the pain—real physical pain—I feel from the presence and noise of large crowds of people and the panic I feel when I have to get on a crowded bus. He was dismissing the sense of hyperawareness I developed from those years of bullying and ableism, that makes me freak out when I trip in public, that makes me assume a crowd of people laughing nearby is laughing at me, that terrifies me when I get something on my shirt because I’m positive that people will notice and think I’m a slob.

It sounds like this neurologist evoked similar feelings in you, and you do have a reason to be upset. No matter how “high-functioning” you might appear, that will never erase the problems you had and do have.

But when she talked to you like that, I’m guessing it made you feel like she was erasing and dismissing those things. To people like neurologists and psychologists it might seem like being called “normal” is a reassuring thing, but it’s very easy to hear as “There’s nothing wrong with you, so what are you even complaining about?” It’s easy to feel like someone is telling you that you should be fine and perfect and any troubles you have are overreactions. That would make anyone feel uneasy and insulted. 

There’s no such thing as pointless whining over ableism, and in the end, that’s what it was, regardless of her intentions. 

But you are ignorant. Far be it from me to avoid calling a spade a spade. You’re ignorant, and many people like you are ignorant.

I do NOT have to take the high road. If people are such ignorant, self-absorbed douchecanoes that they can’t handle being called out for their ignorance, intolerance and hatred, that is not MY fault. Why don’t THEY take the high road instead? Why don’t THEY stop the name-calling, the misinformation, the lies? Why don’t THEY stop calling for our elimination? It’s my responsibility to wag my tail like a puppy and barf rainbows for the people who oppress me? NO.

You tell ME to stop making fun of people? Hello, have you paid attention to a damn word that’s been said? No, of course you haven’t, you’re convinced you’re right and you think you have some sort of right to go around telling people how to feel and act when people oppress them. YOU DON’T. Am I making myself clear?

This is not about people not sharing my views. This is about people whose views are WRONG. And anyone who invalidates my opinion because I was “mean” (waaaaaaah, cry harder, losers) is a worthless sack of shit anyway.

P.S. Get the fuck out of my inbox, you’re not welcome here.

We spew hate? We spew hate? I don’t think you know what hate is. 

Hate is being burned to death on your 18th birthday because you’re autistic. 

Hate is being drowned at the age of four because you’re autistic.

Hate is a long list of people like you who were killed for that same thing that makes them like you.

Hate is the way we’re taught that everything about us is wrong, abnormal, broken, dangerous. 

Hate is the way therapies like ABA are used on us, forcing us to do things we don’t want to do, things that are painful and even traumatizing, so we can behave in a way deemed “acceptable.”

Hate is parents who hold us down or hit us when we have meltdowns, who punish us and allow us to be punished for behavior that is perfectly normal to us. 

Hate is people who spread lies about what causes autism, hate is anti-vaccers who would rather see children dead than autistic. 

Hate is people who want to “fix” us, to “cure” us, to wipe us off the face of the planet without ever asking us how we feel about it first. Hate is dismissing us, silencing us when we say “No, we’re not ashamed of who we are.”

Hate is whining incessantly about your autistic brother/sister/cousin/whatever without ever trying to understand them. Hate is ignoring people who are actually autistic and who know what they’re talking about, because somehow being the sibling of an autistic child makes you a bigger expert on the subject. 

Hate is using autism as a slur, calling people who like My Little Pony or Pokemon or any number of things autistic as an insult. 

Hate is you having the fucking gall to come here and try to tell me how to act, think, and feel about the way people treat me every day of my life.

I’ll tell you what hate isn’t, though. Hate isn’t oppressed people being unwilling to coddle your poor widdle feelings. Hate isn’t oppressed people refusing to let you stomp all over them and silence them. Hate isn’t oppressed people refusing to let you stigmatize them, stereotype them, or support the idea of wiping them off the face of the earth.

No, that’s just you getting what was coming to you for your intolerance. For your hate. Piss off. 

I actually watched that season, and I did like Heather (the model in question).

But that sort of situation is always such a double-edged sword for us. It would be nice if allistics saw that and took from it that autistic people are people, we’re all different, we have different strengths and weaknesses, different goals and dreams. 

Instead the majority of them seem to have one of two reactions. Either they do what your friends and relatives did, because for some reason they have to compare autistic people to other autistics like Rain Man (who was based on an actual autistic) or Temple Grandin or Heather herself.

Or they’re all “She can do that, why can’t you?” 

It’s great when autistic people make inroads in careers that aren’t the acceptable, stereotyped ones, but that sort of reaction to it really bites.