So I didn’t see Noah’s ark get built or Leo Kanner be born or anything.

Following my posts back to 1998 is not a good way of getting at how I see the world today. In 1998 I was overdrugged, brainwashed, and only occasionally capable of putting words to my thoughts as opposed to things other people said. I have spent more than a decade crawling out from under that and finding more and more words to explain how I perceived the world. I was also learning more and more things about the history of autism, about myself, and about the world around me. I have been describing bits of this in my other replies to this post.

The problem remains that I only have shorthand. If I say something is not my belief then it is not, no matter how many quotes you can come up with that you think point to that belief. What those quotes are, are clumsy attempts at describing one aspect of something. I can’t blame you for misunderstanding but seriously if I say I didn’t mean something then I didn’t. Every set of words I ever use, carry connotations of things I don’t mean. Because the way I think is fundamentally untranslatable and I have to make do with crappy approximationa.

I don’t think we necessarily agree on everything either. I just think you are drawing inaccurate conclusions from my statements. You often do. It is probably partly the fault of how I engage in language. But in order to avoid creating misunderstandings of that type I would have to stay silent. I don’t know what it is about you and me that means that many of our interactions involve you saying I think things I don’t think and me trying to explain I really don’t think that but never being able to explain satisfactorily why language and I don’t mix in this way. But it is incredibly frustrating to say “I don’t mean this” and hear “oh yes you do because you said such and such”. But I am not capable of writing this post while simultaneously describing the history if the social construction of autism and why I don’t even believe in autism. I tried my best in fact to allude to that several times but apparently that isn’t good enough. I had to use the words I used but it doesn’t mean that I believe in “the forest of autism” or any other such thing just because I used the phrase as a shorthand for “we have all been designated as autistic by professionals and we all seem to have something major in common, unlike some other people who have been designated as autistic by professionals”.

Aside from that rant (and please next time just take me at my word if I said I didn’t mean something like that even if it doesn’t make sense to you) I am glad you have found a niche. Thanks for explaining that you meant you have trouble understanding these internal features that I and some people I know have in common. That makes much more sense to me now. I am very sorry that I cannot communicate clearly to you but I don’t know how to fix that, we may even have completely incompatible ways of communicating and understanding for all I know. I hope my next post clears things up but I’m not holding my breath considering our long history of utter and total miscommunication.

I’m not generalising based on one post. I’ve been reading your internet posts since 1998 and had many exchanges with you (as tinted) and tried very hard to try and understand where you’re coming from, and why we differ.

OK, I accept your point that shared experiences may be just as important, you just weren’t writing about them here. I think we have shared many experiences of institutions and reached similar conclusions about them. That is the level I can relate to you on.

But what I don’t really understand is some connection based on how minds work. I have a lot of trouble with the very concept of a “mind”. I also have no idea how other minds work,or how I would access them to find out, so I wouldn’t be able to connect to someone on the basis that we had the same mental processes.

Obviously, from the other comments, many other people do know what you are talking about, but I just don’t “get” this. I seem to have a blank in that area. I just find it very abstract and confusing. But it might also be a cultural or language thing. My background is in biochemistry, not psychology or therapy.

Another thing that stuck out was when you said “And it wasn’t that we all had identical characteristics, just that within the forest of autism we were all different varieties of oak trees, or else trees closely related to oaks.”

I don’t believe in any forest of autism or types like oaks or that humans are like different types of trees. To me autism is a social construct, not a biological one.

To me autism is about not fitting in for a variety of superficially similar reasons, in a time and place where that diagnosis is given, and that’s about all there is to it. There’s no underlying neurology or cognitive outlook. And there wouldn’t be, whatever classification you used.

It seems to me that you believe that people have intrinsic essences that are neurologically or cognitively based, independently of what they have experienced, not necessarily attached to particular labels (which, as you say, can change), but there all the same, and that there is such a thing as an “essence” of autism. Please correct if if I have got that wrong, because I think it is the fundamental difference between us.

This is the mainstream view, and gives rise to arguments about who has real autism or severe autism etc as well as attempts to locate autism with brain scans, genetics, cognitive tests etc, which I think is nonsense, because it’s all arbitrary and there’s nothing to find.

My view is that while we do have intrinsic neurologically based ways of experiencing the world, they don’t map onto any condition like autism/forest of autism and aren’t a basis of connecting to others.

I think our brains are like kaleidoscopes of a fairly small number of proteins combined in an immense variety of configurations, subject to intricate control switches.

Neuroscience has a very, very long way to go before we can say anything meaningful about whether brains relate to personalities and minds, let alone constructs like autism. (I admit I could be proved wrong, but I don’t believe I will be).

Otherwise, I thought you were basically saying that you had found a niche even if it wasn’t within a popular stereotype of people, and i wanted to say that I have now found that too.

Your description in this post and in the excellent DSQ article sound very much like what zen masters spend years trying to achieve — a different was of perceiving the Universe more directly than through words.

Thank you for your writing.