Vanesa was, indeed, extremely perceptive and quite politically as well as socially astute. She was the first person in one of those places I bonded much with and the last person they wanted me to bond with.

I occasionally wonder what happened to her but most of the time I don’t want to think about it — I’m afraid in the end somewhere down the road they might have convinced her they were right, and the idea of her being warped by the system like that really scares me.

In institutions of various sorts (including just plain ordinary schools), people find ways of talking to each other that whoever’s in charge can’t see. It’s like a higher-stakes version of whispering in class and doing things behind the teacher’s back.

And yes, meeting autistic people is much like that. Even when there’s not total understanding, there are at least a few, often many, shared systems that non-autistic people don’t share. I think non-autistic people are so used to sharing those systems with each other, that it’s easier to see the fact that misunderstandings still occur, and that shared relating is background knowledge. With autistic people, very few of us grow up around enough of each other that we are used to reading other people or being read by other people. So it is often a bit of a shock, to find oneself in detailed two-way nonverbal communication with someone.

(Although I notice it’s not just autistic people — I seem to have picked up an ‘institutional language’ that’s fairly universal, as well, and a number of people with similar neurologies to autism can also do the two-way communication thing with me. The categories of course being very imprecise.)

And “The existence of autistic people did not create these places” is a good message. I don’t know quite when I realized that those places weren’t inevitable results of my existence, but it was important.

Your piece about how you yourself learnt about autism kicked me in the guts. It was good to know that you learnt to deal with a wide variety of people, including people we never expect to know (I mean, people who we don’t meet outside of state institutions).

LOVED the way the staff treated cookie-cutters. Vanesa seems like a perceptive and sharp person.

When you talked about autistic people as those who you most easily understand/speak your language, it made me think of Donna Williams and how she felt at home with Shaun and Perry towards the end of Nobody Nowhere. How she understood them and they understood her.

My take away message will be something like “The existence of autistic people did not create these places”.