Autism Awareness Post

As someone who has been diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome I want to share my experiences of what it is like to be on the spectrum.

Our biggest challenge isn't that we lack social skills, our biggest challenge is that people rarely take the time to teach us these skills and instead mock and ostracize us for not innately knowing the rules of social interaction, thereby enforcing a continuation of our problematic ignorance. So we remain ignorant of what everyone else perceives to be common-sense etiquette. Not only this but then we sometimes make even more errors. And some for berate ourselves endlessly over these errors.

Let me explain. There have been times in my life where I refrained from doing someone a favor because there had been a time in my past when people seemed to get upset by the idea of accepting help from the likes of me. The way my peers had treated me made me afraid to do the right thing as well as the wrong thing. When someone with Autism acts selfish, it's often because he/she has been taught (through mistreatment by their peers) that they are an island unto him/herself. And when one has so often felt alone, the propensity to mistakenly act selfish increases.

I, to this day, struggle with being part of a group because in most cases during my time at school, I was made to do all of the work or none of the work. They made it clear that I was only in their group because the teacher placed me there but in all other ways, I was just extra. In fourth grade, I had studied endlessly this list of factoids about a specific county in Maryland and had successfully memorized all of them in order to prepare for a Maryland themed Jeopardy game. My team refused to pick my category throughout the whole game and the nail in the coffin was that the last question fell under my county and they still refused to allow me to provide the answer. I had done everything right, but since I hadn't yet been able to prove my intellect, they dismissed me for the umpteenth time and I was devastated.

Now earlier on, I still had a pretty good connection to this part of me that said, "Don't worry. Your worth can't be diminished by others' actions. You're smart, you're worthy of love and you're extraordinary." Now I don't mean this in an egoic manner, I simply mean that I felt I had grit, determination, and resilience that outsiders couldn't see and that as sensitive as I am, I've been strong in my own way and in my own right. But after years of mediocre, chilly, and sometimes outright cruel treatment from others, these words of comfort were no longer comforting for they began to sound like lies. How can these positive things be true when almost no one else is capable of seeing it? How can these comforting words hold any truth when it feels as though 90% of the people I meet dismiss me, underestimate me, allow me to struggle on alone? One of the only positive beliefs that I was able to hold onto was that I was smart whether or not I could find a way to prove it. My issues with dyslexia and ADD caused me to make mistakes when reading single spaced directions and to stumble through text when reading aloud. That said, my parents knew I was smart which might be one of the reasons I never let anyone else convince me otherwise.

My over-reaction to various events in my life were often due to the fact that I saw ill will and bad intent behind the actions and seemingly harmless words. If the people in my group were to tell me that I could get the ingredients for the science experiment and they would do all the rest of the work I heard, "We don't trust you to do anything but gather the ingredients for us." When someone in middle school asked me if I had IM, I responded "What's that?" and then she immediately said, "Well then you don't have it" and dropped the conversation and what I heard was "I wasn't invested in this attempt to connect anyway."

And the reason I over-reacted to receiving a C on anything is because I truly felt that I had yet again failed to prove to people that I could be above average. I went from failing a math quiz in 4th grade to going up a math level part way through 5th grade. I even got a math award at the end of Middle School. I went from struggling elementary student to a high school member of the National Honors Society. I aced high school chemistry, got a full scholarship to Montgomery College, succeeded in college level physics. I've gotten 2 poems and a short story published. Now imagine, innately knowing that you had great intellectual potential but being the only person in the classroom who knew that. Wouldn't you find a C to be surprisingly discouraging?