Before I knew it was Autism, I didn’t have Autistic pride – only shame for my Autistic traits. Autistic pride is something I had to grow into. Here’s what changed.
Today, June 18th, is Autistic Pride Day.
Autistic Pride Is Complicated. Here’s What It Means to Me.
In case you’re new here, or you did not know, I am Autistic, and I’ve known this about myself for almost ten years now.
I’m thirty-nine, will be forty in March of next year, which means I’ve only known I was Autistic for about a fourth of my life (though I’ve always been this way).
There are lots of false assumptions people make about late identified or late diagnosed Autism and Autistic people – that we must not have struggled growing up, that we have ‘easy Autism‘, or that we automatically have ‘lower support needs‘ because people assume, if we were struggling growing up or if our Autistic traits were ‘noticable‘ early in life we ‘certainly would have been identified sooner’. However, these assumptions often fall far from our realities (for a multitude of reasons).
Over the years, I’ve tried to be better about speaking from my own experiences (and being clear that the experiences I share are my own), unless I’m sharing the personal experience of another Autistic person who’s permitted me (or asked me) to share something they experience.
Because I am privileged enough to be surrounded by Autistic people (since many of my friends and family members are also Autistic), I sometimes will share observations we notice about ourselves, the world, and the experiences of being Autistic in a world that often dismisses and ignores our skills, needs, and sometimes even our weaknesses.
Some of the Autistic people I know closely are early identified, some are late identified, some of us are medically diagnosed, some are self-identified.
Some can easily fit the Autism criteria, but reject the Autism label altogether (because they see it as a colonial construct, because they refuse to identify with a medical label that, they feel, is heavily stigmatized and rooted in deficits, without leaving room for strengths, or because they’ve leaned so havily into their strenghts and have been able to naturally support their weaknesses without medical labels, so they’ve never needed to view themselvs through a medical lens).
I even know a few medically diagnosed Autistic people (both early and late identified) who reject using the term ‘Autism‘ to describe themselves (which was hard for me to understand early on, since the label was so helpful to me once I received it)… but I’ve also realized I don’t have to understand someone else’s feelings, because people are entitled to feel how they feel.
Sometimes, Autistic people in Autism spaces have a bad habit of expecting all Autistic people to have the same feelings about Autism or think about the experience of being Autistic the same way they do (a behavior that can be reinforced when we surround ourselves only with Autistic people who agree with our views and dogmas about Autism).
I certainly was guilty of this when I was newly diagnosed as Autistic (which is one reason I’ve distanced myself from many of the Autism groups and spaces I inhabited early on).
As I’ve given myself space from online Autism cliques and circles, it has allowed me to better grow into my own understandings of Autism and what being Autistic really means to me.
I’ve become more and more aware that ‘Autism‘ is one word that is aiming to describe countless experiences, and how people relate to their own experiences of being Autistic is not for me to judge.
Some of the Autistic people in my life live independently, some may never live on their own.
Some have careers and well-paying jobs; some work low-paying jobs and are barely making it; some are cared for by their families or romantic partners; and some are dependent on government assistance.
Some are unhoused, many live below the poverty line, some are very well off (because they’ve been able to avoid their weaknesses, have had access to education, and/or have been able to lean into their specialized skills – like engineering).
People also often falsely assume that Autistic people who are self-identified present in ways that are less obvious to outsiders (compared to those who are medically identified) or that self-identified Autistic people don’t struggle as much as Autistic people who are early identified or who are medically diagnosed. Still, several of my closest self-identified (or unidentified) Autistic friends and family members are, in my opinion, much more obviously Autistic than I am, and definitely struggle more with how their flavors of Autism clash with the world around them.
The more I learn, and the more Autistic people I meet all over the world and from all walks of life, the more I see that ‘Autism‘ is a complex subject. Because of that, Autistic Pride is also a very complex experience… and is not something that all Autistic people have or relate to.
Some Autistic people aren’t ‘proud‘ of being Autistic.
Some people have a lot of shame around being different and want to assimilate into neuro-normativity more than anything (even if this goal is impossible or unrealistic for them).
I myself wasn’t always proud of my Autistic brain… especially when I didn’t yet know I was Autistic, and thought the key to success and happiness in life would come through comparing myself to and mimicking the people around me (whose brains and experiences were nothing like my own).
Before I knew about ‘my Autism‘, I didn’t have Autistic pride – only shame for my Autistic traits.
Autistic pride is something I had to grow into.
When I was very young, before I entered the education system, I didn’t know there was anything ‘different‘ about me, other than that my family was proud of me, viewing me as ‘a brilliant independent thinker, who stood out in the crowd‘. My grandmother still views me this way.
I taught myself to read at age one and a half, and by the time I was two or three, I was speaking like a little professor, or as one adult said at a family gathering when I was very young (about two or three years old), speaking to me “was like speaking to a real person“. To which I replied – “I AM a real person!“
A ‘gifted‘ child, who spoke like an adult to adults.
At home, it was a skill, but a few years later, in school, speaking to adults as my equals wouldn’t be as well received (it would be read as disrespectful).
I wasn’t used to ‘asking permission‘ to leave my seat, play, take breaks, or go to the bathroom, or speak.
At home, nobody expected me to ‘be quiet‘, still, or ‘stay seated‘ while I worked.
I wasn’t expected to ‘sit appropriately‘ in my chair (tall, straight, with my feet on the floor, and without bracing myself with my arms on the table).
Nobody had insisted I look them in the eyes while they gave me instructions for the projects I was working on. I also wasn’t expected to sit for hours and pay attention to things that bored me out of my mind… but school and home were very different.
I didn’t understand why my teachers were so controlling, why school had all these arbitrary rules (that made no sense to me), or why I had to prove to my teachers (or anyone) that I knew things.
The central Texas public school system, where I was ranked and encouraged to compare myself to my peers for the first time, is where I first started to notice my differences as something to be ashamed of.
My teacher would frequently say things like “nobody else is ____“, “it’s not that hard, look around you“, “everyone else is raising their hand before I call on them“, “you’re making it hard for everyone to learn“, and “if you would stop acting this way people wouldn’t be laughing at/picking on you.“
I was also frequently singled out in front of my peers, used as an example of what not to do and how not to behave.
At home, filling the role of the cherished first grandchild in the family, I’d often enjoyed being the center of attention; however, when the attention shifted from adults who were praising me and pointing out my skills to adults who saw me as a problem and were only focused on my flaws, I found myself longing to be invisible as my sense of self-worth started to plummet.
That’s when the shame started to grow, and I started sorting parts of myself into ‘acceptable‘ and ‘unacceptable‘, packing them away.
Comparing myself to my non-autistic peers, as my teachers encouraged me to do, I started to view anything I did or needed that my peers did not as ‘unacceptable‘ – things to change, and if they could not be changed, they became things to hide away and keep to myself.
The rest of this post is available on Patreon and Substack.
This post was written with the assistance of Focused Space (a sponsor of the Neurodivergent Rebel blog).
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