An extremely interesting column providing insight into how an event that seems fun to non-autistic people is a minefield for an autistic person. Terra Vance writes in NeuroClastic:
Key points:
- Autistic people and our accomplices regularly repeat the mantra, “This world is not made for us.”
- This article walks you through a specific experience in the life of an autistic parent of an autistic child to illustrate how the world is not made for us.
- Enjoyable, fun events we want to participate in can cause distress, trauma, and social exclusion even if they have no obvious catastrophes.
- The circumstances in this specific article can be generalized to therapeutic, educational, social, athletic, professional, and home settings.
- All autistic people are different, so the circumstances in this article may not apply the same way to every autistic person.
Recently, my husband signed our child up for a local group wherein girls learn outdoor skills and engage in community and charitable service. She had only attended one meeting and had loved it. The group leaders are elementary teachers, and there were fewer than ten girls in this particular group.
The second meeting was a regional event and did not go so well. What happened was I watched helplessly while my child:
• tried over and over to adapt to something not designed for her,
• hid and fell behind until she became invisible to her peers,
• mustered a superhuman amount of optimism,
• masked away her autistic nature,
• then had the last flicker of optimism snuffed out when she felt like she had failed at being a good, normal child.And no one else noticed a thing.
This is long, but it’s far shorter than it needs to be for you to know what an everyday experience is like for an autistic child. Or an autistic adult.
I shortened this as much as I could, but if you really want to know what it’s like to be us, you need to put in a shred of the effort we have to invest to exist a day in your everyday life.
Every person mentioned in this story was a kind, well-intentioned person who has not done the work to prevent my child from having her heart broken in perpetuity. You have to learn to get beyond “loving someone with autism.”
Inclusion requires nuanced knowledge.
When autistics say this world isn’t made for them, here’s what they mean
Autistic people often have profound deficits in executive functioning, which means that they do so much work, internally, to prepare for any new situation before they even arrive. Autistic children and adults need enough information to be able to go into an event mentally and emotionally prepared. . .
Continue reading. This is worth reading in full and then thinking about.
Later On 