I Overcame My Autism and All I Got Was This Lousy Anxiety Disorder

it’s amazing how much you can accomplish when you’re young, overly intense and have no silly distractions like friends or a life to get in your way.

I’ve also discovered that listening to each other info dump about our favourite things is a legitimate—and amazing—form of autistic communication. It doesn’t matter if we know or care about the subject or not, we just love the enthusiasm. After lifetimes of being told that we don’t know how to share properly, some of us are beginning to realize that maybe other people could learn a thing or two about listening. And that they’re missing out.

The less that society tolerates characteristics like rugged individuality, oddness, bluntness and behaviour that could be interpreted as aggression from someone of your race, gender, sexuality, abilities or economic situation, the more you’ll need to hide any sign of them just to stay alive.

I have at least four different tracks running through my brain while we’re talking. One is trying to make sure my fake eye contact makes me look attentive but not creepy. [Omitting the track dedicated to the teeth thing.] One is following our conversation, and trying to process what you’re saying and come up with thematically relevant responses in return. One is making sure that I’m not monopolizing the conversation and that I’m asking you an appropriate number of appropriate questions in return. One is trying to keep me from saying something weird. It’s probably failing. On top of all that, I’m trying to tune out all of the background noise—including, but not limited to: cars, other conversations, breathing, chewing, possible music being pumped out of a speaker somewhere and buzzing lights—in order to hear what you’re saying.
There’s a lot I’m probably leaving out. I’ll probably realize this at around four a.m. when I’m not sleeping and kick myself, and then not sleep some more because I’m worried that I have failed to successfully illustrate how autistic I am and how hard I have worked to now get to the point where I have to prove that I am all of the things I am trying to spare you from.

we are significantly queerer than non-autistic people. We are 7.59 times more likely to express gender variance, according to a 2014 study from the Archives of Sexual Behavior.4 Further studies have reported similarly disproportionate rates. Seventy percent of us identify as non-heterosexual,5 which is almost three times as un-straight as non-autistic people are. (Whether we are actually queerer than the normals or whether we’re just more open to admitting it for a number of reasons is a topic of much speculation among my fellow LGBTQ autistics, but that’s a whole other dialogue.) It’s also important to note that this 70 percent includes asexual people, and it’s absolutely vital to stress that asexuality is valid. I fear that, in some of our efforts to push back against the old stereotype that all autistic people are sexless beings, allosexual autistic people ended up erasing and hurting our asexual counterparts. We come in every gender. Some of us have no gender. Our interests in sex and who we might be interested in having it with—or not—are as individual as we are.

This book isn’t called I Interned at a Nerd-Riddled Workplace Geared to My Intense Interests and Everything’s Been Great Since Then. But something doesn’t need to fix your life to transform it.

I’ve only become slightly less prickly with age, and the cynic in me is leery of overstating the importance of finding your people in life. A true sense of community doesn’t entirely fix anything. It can’t cure everything. No autistic person, not even a so-called “mild” one, will see all of their needs magically disappear if they’re lucky enough to stumble into the right subculture. Making meaningful connections can’t eradicate sensory issues and repetitive behaviours, nor can such bonds completely heal whatever wounds you accrued while still searching for them.
I have also become far more earnest—or perhaps more comfortable with how earnest I secretly was all along—with age, though, and I refuse to sell the power of belonging short. Being around supportive, like-minded people can drastically improve your life. In addition to helping you survive, it can make you want to. If you’ve lived without that feeling for any period of time, if you’ve had to fight to find it, the sense of no longer being alone in the world can be transformative.

Removed from the constant psychological warfare and ongoing misery that I’d faced in the traditional school system, I had a little bit of space to start figuring out who I was, as opposed to who I thought I had to be. She really wasn’t that terrible: weird as shit, but increasingly okay with that.

I am not a normal person. In addition to being autistic, I am also a writer.

In a perfect world, no child would ever hear another person question their worth as a human. In a survivable world, though, the least we can give them is the reassurance that those people are the bad guys. And the knowledge that they’re wrong.