I'M SOMEWHERE ELSE

I have to admit that I'm super disingenuous in the way I write about autism. Well, super is a strong word. But sometimes I feel that I tilt stuff.

Okay, so I think this is a somewhat arguable position: autism is not especially related to social impairment. Certainly people with ASD are socially impaired, but:

1. Some of this social impairment comes from being developmentally delayed in various areas, which include but definitely aren't limited to social skills (other stuff would be self-care, and so on). Which is to refer to my previous framing of ASD as being "intellectual disability without the intellectual disability"--i.e., having all the same impairments and differences from the norm that people with ID have, but not being affected in areas that are purely intellectual. I really like this frame, because it's obvious that many people with ID have social impairments, but it's not pathologized in the same way that is for people with ASD. However, this doesn't hold up as an entire characterization of autism, especially because it erases people who have both ASD and ID, which I don't want to do.

2. Some of this "social impairment" is not really social impairment and just comes from being different, or having impairments that aren't immediately connected to socialization, but affect socialization. For example, a person with schizophrenia may have trouble making friends because their speech is very difficult to understand--loosely connected, and full of references and word choices that only make sense to the speaker. This person's problem wouldn't be characterized first and foremost as "social impairment." However, when an ASD person has trouble making friends because they talk in an unusual way, or only like to talk about certain things, this is characterized as social impairment. It might make sense to say that the person talks in an unusual way because they have language problems, or because they get stuck on talking in a certain way; and that they only talk about certain things because they dislike change and transition. But these ways of looking at the situation are ignored.

I really think that if professionals who characterize large parts of autism as being about "social impairment" would actually look at the discrepancies between the way they characterize ASD people, and the way they characterize people who have somewhat similar disabilities like ID and schizophrenia, they would either have to admit that autism isn't as much about social impairment as they claim it is, or they would have to start characterizing a lot of disabilities as being primarily about social impairment.

Oh right. But about me being disingenuous. I guess I feel like when I talk/write about stuff that is going on with me, I try really hard to avoid looking at things through the "I'm socially impaired" lens? Even though, for whatever reason, that is obviously a part of my life. But I try to call it anxiety, or disabled/non-disabled person clash, and so on, partly because I guess I am just so angry about all the time I spent ignoring all these things I had problems with because I had been fed really incorrect ideas about autism, and I thought that my impairments could only be social, this really pure kind of social impairment that I sometimes imagine doesn't even exist. So I feel like I have a tendency to ignore my part in conflicts when I explain them to myself, or something like that.

It sort of reminds me of how I don't always engage very well with people who are being like "BUT WHAT ABOUT THE PARENTS!! BUT SOME KIDS HIT THEIR HEADS!!" And I mean, I really should--not everyone should, but I enjoy that kind of baseline conversation sometimes, and I think I can be good at it. But I'm just so tired of it that I just tend to be sort of a bitch. And maybe that is bad because the person on the other side can't see that the things they're saying are really cliched, and they don't see most of what I'm reacting to, so they're just upset or confused. I feel like sometimes I frame my life, and ASD in general, in a certain way almost as a political act or a way of creating new narratives that give ASD people more room? Does that make sense?

Please don't take any of this post out of context and try to say that I'm going around lying all the time. I mean we all have frames I'm just honest about it.