Today is Autism Acceptance Day, and being the day that it is, I thought it might be appropriate to write a post reflecting on the fact that I have known that I am autistic for in or around two years. I was actually diagnosed with autism over a decade ago, but I went into extreme denial, so have only known myself to be autistic for the past two years. I’m 37 years old, so that age where the years seem to just pass in the blink of an eye, and it seems like only yesterday that I became aware of my true self. So, how have I developed as a person since then?
I’m much less emotionally repressed than before I realized I was autistic. 35 years of my life were spent constantly repressing my emotions. This was a “skill” learned in school, because the slightest display of behaviour that was natural to me would result in me being bullied. It got to the point where I would repress my emotions when nobody was around. So, 24/7, I was repressing who I truly am. But for the last two years, it’s been different. If it’s a sunny day by the ocean, I will flap my hands and make exuberant sounds. If I learn something really interesting, about music or about space exploration or about anything else that I find fascinating, then I will often start rocking back and forth and mumbling happy sounds to myself. For 35 years I was afraid and ashamed to do these things, even when nobody was around. But I think I’ve lived more as my true self in the last two years than in the previous 35.
Realizing I’m autistic got me started in blogging. Because it was during Autism Acceptance Month last year that I decided to start blogging about autism. And that led me to also blog about other subjects I’m interested in, such as music, cycling and astronomy. So, I don’t know if I’d have started the blog or not without the realization that I’m autistic.
I’ve always loved playing musical instruments, but what I was never able to do was sing. The prospect of doing so always seemed very frightening. When I was a teenager I wrote a load of songs (a lot of which were quite bad, but anyway), and I would record the guitar and bass parts (I couldn’t play the drums), and I would write down the lyrics, but I would never record myself singing the vocals. Not even to listen back to it myself. The prospect of hearing myself singing was just unbelievably terrifying for reasons that I couldn’t understand at the time.
But when I realized I was autistic, and more importantly, became happy with the way I am, I became comfortable with singing, and now it’s hard to stop me from doing it! If you are so emotionally repressed that you are every hour of every day repressing your emotions, then you are too emotionally repressed to sing. That’s how it was for me anyway. And I’ve a blogpost going over this in detail here:
And, realizing I’m autistic has led me to work on my first album where I have written lyrics and where I sing. It’s very much tied to my experience of being autistic, so I wouldn’t have come up with it if I was still in denial about my autism status. It’s a sci-fi concept album involving time travel and the multiverse, and autistic people. And pretty much by definition, I wouldn’t have come up with it if I hadn’t realized I’m autistic.
But, the sadder realization I’ve come to is that, I’m one of the lucky ones, extremely lucky in fact. I’ve talked to many autistic people who repress who they are to an extreme degree. I have even met autistic people who are so conditioned to hate the fact that they are autistic that they will side against the autism acceptance movement every time. I went into denial about the fact that I’m autistic for eleven years, which is a horrible thing to experience, but I’m extremely fortunate, there are people out there who might well be in denial about their autism status, or even if they are aware of it, hate their autism status, for decades longer than I did, maybe until the day they die. I hope some day we can live in a world where what happened to me is the absolute worst that can happen, not where I need to count myself as extremely fortunate.
But realizing I’m autistic has given me a new sense of purpose in life. I hope in some small way, just by writing about the subject or through conversing with people, I can in some small respect contribute to the next generation of autistic people not having to go through what I did.
I was born in 1985, and one of the earliest experiences I can recall is being five years old and screamed at repeatedly by a teacher because I was unable to hold my pencil or put on my coat unassisted (for reasons that aren’t well understood autism can cause differences in physical dexterity). And knowing I had to go back to that class again, the day after that, and the day after that, and the day after that. And not understanding that I hadn’t done anything wrong. At five years old, I was already being conditioned to think that I was bad for being different. If I’m relatively young and this happened to me, what of autistic people who are forty, fifty, sixty, seventy, what have they been through? Have we reached the point yet where an autistic baby born today will never go through what those of us born many decades ago went through? If not how do we get there?
Things have gotten better for autistic people since the late nineties, when the fraudulent claims that vaccines cause autism were at their peak. During this time we learned that if given a choice between their children “getting” autism (which is impossible but that’s what the parents believed) and getting the measles, a deadly disease, many parents would choose the measles. That was the level of autism acceptance at the time.
But, more than twenty years later, things have gotten better. In 2021, Sia released her film Music, which was not only a box office failure, but was critically panned, in a large part because of its horrifically offensive depiction of an autistic person. A film like that released 20 or even 10 years ago that showed autistic people in this way probably wouldn’t have batted an eyelid. But the fact that things have gotten better doesn’t mean they don’t need to improve further. And the fact that things have gotten better certainly doesn’t mean things couldn’t slide back. As we have seen the internet and social media have proved a double edge sword, for spreading useful information and horrific misinformation. It has never been easier for someone to spread horrible ideas about vaccines causing autism, or bleach curing autism, or that autistic people need to be brainwashed into repressing behaviour that is completely natural to them. The internet has been a godsend to autistic people, but it is also a ticking timebomb ready to send out an explosion of misinformation.
But there are people who’s “enlightened” attitudes about autism mean absolutely nothing to me. I don’t typically get into the question of “which minority is treated worse” because ultimately it is unanswerable, but something that definitely hasn’t escaped my notice is that there are people who seem to be okay with the fact that I am autistic who have horrific attitudes towards transgender people. So I will say this, if somebody is okay with me being autistic, but expresses bigotry or hatred towards trans people, or gay people, or other types of disabled people, then their “enlightened” attitudes, their “tolerance”, their “open mindedness”, means absolutely nothing to me.
It’s not just because bigotry against any human being on Earth is horrific, though that’s a huge part of it. It’s that I know that if they’ve embraced transphobia or homophobia, or any other type of hatred, then is their really any barrier to them embracing bigotry against me? I think not. I would have no time for these people even if they never formed horrible attitudes against me, but also, I know it might be a very short time before the next group they decide they have a problem with is autistic people. So when I see some autistic people who seem quite comfortable with the fact that the focus of bigots is more towards trans people than autistic people these days, my attitude is, if they’re after you next try not to be too surprised!
So that’s somewhat of a summary of what I’ve been thinking about for the last two years, after the realization that not only am I autistic, but that there is absolutely nothing wrong with the fact that I am. And while this is Autism Acceptance Day, let’s hope that some day this day is no more than a historical curiosity, no longer necessary because autism has finally been accepted.
Ponderings Of An Autist 