Generally, these are people who haven’t seen me in an overloading environment. Nor have they seen, heard about, or read about the notion of drastically varying skill levels and inconsistency in terms of how often someone can perform a particular task. Most people still don’t have much of an impression of autism beyond the “low functioning / high functioning” stereotype.

Because I have a job and live independently (though with a housemate — he and I have “complementary” abilities that help us maintain the living quarters, etc.) I am considered one of the “high functioning lucky ones”.

But nobody who just looks at “has a job, lives independently” has any idea what it took to get to that point, or the details of my employment (such as the fact that I bypassed the interview process), or about the fact that many aspects of how I live “successfully” are quite precarious. If I had a boss with a slightly different personality, if workplace policies were just a fraction different, I would be unemployed. As it is, there are very, very few places I can work due to sensory issues, cognitive inconsistency, and a flat-out inability to do certain things at all unless I am permitted to do them in particular ways.

I did have relatives who wanted me institutionalized as a child. I had teachers drag me out into the hallway and demand an explanation for how I could possibly be the age I was considering my “behavior”. There are people that I used to communicate with, that I thought maybe were friends, but that I haven’t seen or talked to in several years after they saw me in nonverbal overload in public.

Basically, there is no one thing about me that someone could look at and use as a valid basis for an assumption that something else must also be true about me. When I look at or hear about someone else, I can’t very well start making assumptions about them based on surface things like speech fluency, movement patterns, etc. It wouldn’t make any sense for me to go around making assumptions about other people if I don’t want assumptions made about me. That seems simple, and I’d feel like a huge hypocrite if I insisted that I didn’t need “curing” but other people did.

Yeah. I’ve known (mostly of) some people who thought a lot like that; I remember I once spoke to someone who explained why they wished (or thought they wished) they’d been aborted. I was sort of vaguely wondering if curebie parents of “HFA” kids might buy into it. If they did, you (general you, possibly you) could show the HFA curebies vs. the LFA curebies and maybe get it into their heads that it’s all a matter of perspective. OTOH, curebies seem to have a tendency not to grasp this sort of stuff regardless of how it’s presented to them.

That’s what I’ve always tried, and often failed, to describe to people.

The fact that people look at me and go “LFA/HFA/LFA/HFA/LFA/HFA” faster than the average metronome, doesn’t say a thing about who I am. It doesn’t mean there’s two of me, one “high functioning” and one “low functioning”. It means the classification systems are not accurate.

But knowing he is autistic and railing against the unfairness of it all when he measures his life against that of his NT friends is a source of depression and despair. We get, “Why was I born? I hate you for having me. I should have been an abortion then you would all be happy. Why don’t I kill myself?” Usually when he is angry and wants to hurt us, which he does with unerring accuracy.

This is easy compared to when he hurts himself. “I’ve lost/wasted my childhood. I wish I was really autistic then I would not know.”

Once he set his alarm for midnight and decided when the the alarm went he would be Kanner autistic instead of Asperger. He would be like the boy he looked after on a Riding for the Disabled Holiday, who was autistic and happy because he was learning disabled and did not know he was autistic. [if you know the song ‘How Sweet to be an Idiot’ by Neil Innes you’ll know exactly where Matthew was coming from] Anyway, the alarm goes and Matthew sits up in bed, tongue lolling, eyes distant and starts flapping. I just happened to be in the room at the time and I went head to head and shocked him out of it, put the lid on that one in a big way. The best thing I’ve ever done. If that had become an obsessive compulsion…?!

That’s from this Usenet post and I just realized, to my alarm, that it was Mike Stanton’s (same one who posts here from time to time) son who did that.

I think that some autistic people, don’t realize that other autistic people do probably know they’re different in some way, or that they’re treated wrong, and are not as unaware as they look, so can almost kind of romanticize what they view as “low-functioning” autism as somewhere where you don’t have to be aware you’re different and don’t have to suffer. I saw that in… what was it, Jessica Peers’s book too. When she was a teenager she was very jealous of another girl at the institution they lived at, because she viewed the girl as pure and unaware of her difference, and herself as tarnished and ugly and miserable. Seems to be a common, if mistaken, reaction.

Put me in a room with a group of little kids and some mats and there whoever’s watching would assume between REALLY odd NT and HFA, depending on what they know about autism.

Put me in a grocery store and suddenly I’m LFA, even if I’ve been to that store 10000 times and know where everything is. Especially if they’re out of what I need.

But I’m the same person in both those settings. So it’s just people’s perceptions that shift.

I also agree about not believing in noncommunicative people. I realize there are people who communicate in ways society/their parents/whoever doesn’t LIKE, but they’re still getting their wants & needs out there.

I talk. I don’t always talk. I don’t always open my ears up for listening. That doesn’t mean I’m purposely ignoring anyone, I just haven’t “turned the mic on” if that makes any sense. I feel bad but then it requires effort for me to do something they tend to do effortlessly nonstop. This never seems to get understood well at all. They won’t fathom it…not that they can’t. All “differences” must be “lies” to them because of their constant consistency monitoring.

I feel like I’m venturing into the absurd here. :-/

It’s just too difficult to bother with unless there’s something like an immediate and huge threat (if someone were looking for someone they wanted to kill, I wouldn’t hesitate to say “I haven’t seen that person” even if they’re hiding in my house).

The biggest source of remaining inaccuracies (besides the usual “nobody has total self-knowledge” one, and the language one) is actually what happens that I wrote about in the post, Let’s Play Assumption Ping-Pong!.

And when people assume wrongly on those things, I do try to clarify. (Although when people are doing so in a threatening/mocking way, I reserve the right to clam up and ignore them because that isn’t worth my time.)

Another autism I know whose daughter was said to be “HFA” at 2 1/2 and now is “classic” noted that she’d like to do away with all those distinctions and just say “autism.”