ableism

My whole life, I've had this sense that people think I'm autistic or something. It seems entirely plausible that between my endocrine issues, my cerebral nature, and my social anxiety, I appear autistic or something. Maybe that is autistic or something. If social anxiety represents an irrational fear that people won't like me, autism represents the reality that people have never liked me. Even my own family freaks out over the prospect of me living with them for a few months. I've faced discrimination everywhere.

Social anxiety is all about fearing what others think, but it's only pathological when it's irrational. I'm not concerned about what autism is and what it means, in terms of understanding myself. I don't find it to be a solid enough concept, but I don't lose sleep over that. What hit me so hard was the realization that other people see me as deficient. We are not peers. Some will try to be supportive and say that others don't hate me or dislike me or otherwise think terrible things about me. Some will point out that most people I encounter won't think about me much at all one way or another.

I find it so peculiar that this would ever need to be explained, as it seems so indisputable. So many near universally lauded aspects of life are built on getting a positive reaction from others. The realization that I'm what they call autistic is not about understanding myself better, but understanding why the world treats me this way. This is what they see. This is what they think. This is why they do what they do. 

They may not know or care what autism is, per se, but they see me as mentally handicapped, and it turns out to be true. I can't work or function well enough to find a place to live. Maybe I don't have an irrational fear of people, but a quite rational awareness that dealing with them never goes well. I've spent my life in this fantasy world sequestered from humanity, where it wasn't that important, not my fault, or whatever it took to dance around the reality of it. Humanity is not entirely wrong.

This is about realizing that people really do see me as deficient, even as they do all sorts of mental gymnastics to avoid framing it that way. We don't like to talk about the disabled that way, but while we may have nothing against them, we also want nothing from them. We don't want them to suffer, and we don't want them to be a problem.

Do people hate me? No. Do they enjoy my company? Do they admire me? Respect me? Want to be with me? No. The autism I'm all upset about doesn't explain to me who I am, but it explains why people react to me the way they do. It legitimizes something I'd thought wasn't real, all these years. It isn't real to me, but objectively explains what they think they see, and I know what it's like to see that in others.