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. 

That last one sounds about right.

“Mild” autism, like “high-functioning” autism is an expression of ignorance and at times straight up hatred. It’s an allistic classification of us based on what they assume we’re capable of, and has nothing to do with the realities we face in our day-to-day lives. And sadly, it’s used against us by many of our so-called “allies,” by people like Autism Moms (*gag*) and just assholes who want to dismiss us. 

Some people may come across more high-functioning in your average social situation, but have other struggles. Some may function fairly highly across the board. Some may be able to make their own phone calls but be pretty much unable to speak to someone face-to-face. We’re all different, and we all have our areas where we’re strong, areas where we’re weak, and areas where we succeed sometimes but not all times. “Mild autism” is a completely meaningless term.

It may be that some of these people are trying to compliment you (I don’t know the exact circumstances you’re hearing this in). But even so, that’s patronizing, ignorant and offensive. And worse, these distinctions have been divisive for autistics in general. It pits us against each other, both by encouraging some of us to believe that we’re better than others, and by telling us we should shut up because we don’t have it as bad as others. No matter someone’s intentions, using the term “mild autism” is just wrong.

tl;dr version: If someone uses the term “mild autism,” this can be translated as “I don’t actually know the first thing about how autism really works.”