I want to print out this piece of writing and take along with me and just hand out to everyone. The only thing that I would want to change is the title, to something like: ‘Life outside the autism box’. Or something like that. I read a lot of blogs. The reason I read yours is not so much the fact that it has an autistic link. I read it because it sees the world through a set of eyes that I truly relate to. Whether I have borderline Asperger’s or not (still a big, amusing but largely irrelevant debate between me and my psychologist). It was really just a reason to start reading your blog. Now I read it because it is highly intelligent, amusing, emotional, serious, honest and, well, a true reflection of life and the world around us. Your eyes as windows to life are deeply human in the first place. They are compassionate and understanding. If it is autism that gave you that gift, I am grateful that someone as patient and forgiving as yourself landed in that position. What can I say: lots of warm affection from this side and, no, you are in no box for me, perhaps just maybe a deeply humane box, if you could accept that.

In school, I used to sit in silence while the boys in the classroom pretended to level shotguns at me. They made pretended to pull the trigger, made exploding noises. Daily. My nickname was “Critter.” I actually hope the teachers didn’t notice this unlovely little hunt; the alternative is thinking that they did see it, did nothing, and condoned it through inaction.

It has taken me decades to stop internalizing that treatment, to live at peace in my own “box.” Back then, without an autistic label, I was just weird, different, ugly, strange. Also gifted in math, science, english. What is the social use of academically outscoring one’s classmates? It increased their hatred of me.

The misery of ongoing social ostracism motivated me to try to end the pain by fitting in. Which, being very bright (but not nearly as bright as Amanda) I figured out how to do.

You know what? It’s just as empty outside the box as in it. Just as lonely, just as chaotic and scary. Those outside the box, I’ve learned, aren’t nearly as strong and brave and smart as I am. And worse, they think the box is REAL.

Kathy Grant

The bit about cramming oneself into “mental disorder”boxes so at least one fits somewhere, is a way of coping with weirdness-judgements from others that I’ve heard about from other autistic people. I am so glad to have grown up among approved eccentrics!

Amanda, you have again clearly defined an issue I’ve wrestled with for a long time.

If you’re thinking you should be writing the “what box” post for the carnival, I suggest you declare this post it.

And thank you, professor Zero @ 11, for explaining one of the reasons I enjoy reading this blog so much. I am one of those Question Authority! people, and Amanda does such a good job of discussing the implications of actually doing it.

Does this make any sense at all? I can’t write much more because I am starting to lose track of what the original point I was making was………through this flow of words.

Ivan

In my experience of knowing other autistic people, it is those who have been considered the least competent, given the worst prognoses, labeled the lowest-functioning, considered the least communicative, and considered the most stereotypically autistic… they tend to be the ones who protest against these boxes the loudest, because they’re the ones the most damaged by them.

Note that I’m not talking about them as if they’re a different category intrinsically, I’m talking about the way people have been treated. The more heavily and totally people have been pathologized and considered completely incompetent, the more they tend to react against that characterization, regardless of what their actual intrinsic configuration is.

So what Harold is saying seems weird to me. It seems that if someone is in more danger at any given moment of being put into the worst of the boxes, the more necessary it is to avoid putting them in these boxes.