There are people who will shout from wherever they can find to shout from that autism isn't a disability. That it should be celebrated. And I have to wonder if those people have ever found themselves so upset they couldn't talk, so frustrated that they couldn't control where their hands went, movements jerky, not even able to prepare a hot breakfast out of the knowledge that they'd burn themselves accidentally if they didn't calm down first. If that's ever happened to them five days out of seven for a month or two. Do they know that floating feeling that comes of too much rage too fast and holding back a meltdown until they're AWAY from everyone? Of having to shove a note into their partner's face to watch the kids while they go to a quiet room to be alone so they can cry undisturbed until their emotions are back to something manageable and words make sense again?
Funny thing is, even with all of that and more, I'm still "high functioning". So, tell me again how I'm not disabled. -- Anon Guest
[AN: Speaking as a "mostly functioning" Autiste, I know the cure for all of these is more education about how to help the Autiste in question.]
When you break down how people talk about a perceived affliction, you get more of an education about it. Disability - from 'dis' - a prefix implying a lack or a broken state of the latter half, 'ability'. The lack of an ability, or a broken state of ability. High or low function. Function, the capability of an item being useful in some way to intelligent beings around it.
True evil begins when you treat people like things, wrote a philosopher of Human nature. He was right, of course. When people talk of other people in terms of their 'use', their 'usefulness', how they could be of profit... those people who are talked about become like things. They are no longer people.
When you treat people like things, those people get angry. It's perfectly natural. Stresses not even given to a "normal"[1] person build up, like drops of water into a pool. Some can handle more. Many handle less. Ridicule, mockery, and other micro-aggressions build up alongside the more "normal" stresses until complete collapse becomes an inevitability.
Imagine, if you will, the worst Bad Day you have ever had. Everything that has gone wrong for you has done so in the worst possible way. Imagine the heaviest workload you've ever had to struggle through. Imagine both of those going on at once. You, too, would want to scream, right? Imagine that happening every day or simply at random at any unpredictable time during your average week.
Now imagine being mocked for your reactions to that stressful situation. Publicly. By strangers. By friends. By family. Now imagine it being called a symptom of your disability. An area in which you do not function well.
Wouldn't you be mad about that?
Now imagine the people you love knowing how to support you. How to leave you alone when you need to -say- scream into a pillow. How to bring you the comfort foods you crave on a bad day. How to calm you down when your mind is running around in ever-decreasing circles at ever-increasing speed. Imagine how nice that is, when you have a group of people who just understand, and know how to release the pressure so that you don't simply explode.
Wouldn't it be nice if that group was an entire society?
Wouldn't it be nice if none of the mockery happened because everyone around you just dismissed it or, even better, knew it as an important signal and knew how to react accordingly?
Wouldn't it be nice to be a person who has these set of reactions to certain things? Wouldn't it be lovely to not have so much stress to begin with, to be part of an overall group who just knows when the pressure is too high for you and helps you out?
Two hundred years ago, this was so. Two hundred years ago, they didn't have a name for Autism, because all people were people inside a society that understood people as individuals. It wasn't perfect[2], it never was, but imagine if society could go back to not treating people like cogs in a greater machine. Why, we could even move forward and start acknowledging "People Not Like Us" as simply "People".
Then something like Autism might stop being seen as a disability at all.
Something like Autism might even be celebrated properly. Instead of having multiple advertisements about how a seen affliction is meant to be celebrated.
Wouldn't that be lovely?
[1] "There's no such thing as normal, everybody's weird," -- a completely different philosopher of Human nature.
[2] Because of other things like slavery and deadly diseases and so forth...
[Image (c) Can Stock Photo / ibreakstock]
If you like my stories, please Check out my blog and Follow me. Or share them with your friends!
Send me a prompt [78 remaining prompts!]