When labels determine how people are treated...

I've been working with mostly the same crew for over two years. As would happen with anyone, there are some people I get along with better than others. One lady who has been there a long time is frequently annoyed by me though she puts on a false face of friendliness, and I try my best to be cordial and not get in her way, but the tension is always hanging in the air. I haven't hidden the fact that I'm on the Spectrum from my coworkers, but I don't bring it up all the time or anything. I assumed it had gotten around. Yesterday I discovered it hadn't.

I was discussing the news with another coworker in the break area where several people were congregated, and Russia's president was mentioned. "They think Putin's on the Autism Spectrum like me!" I blurted out, "He has Asperger's Syndrome too!" The moment the first statement came out of my mouth, the annoyed lady whipped around, and I could see the dawn of understanding on her face, and that old tension I always feel dissipated from the air. Later, I held the door for her when she had a big load, and she called me "Honey" when she thanked me. The way she regards me totally changed.

Why does the label matter? I wasn't diagnosed until I was 27, and the only things I had to go on were the labels "weird" and "too smart." Those don't get you any sympathy, but I still had all the same challenges I had to face. Most Aspies aren't diagnosed at all. Does the world think we're weird on purpose, if we don't have a diagnosis? My fiancée always jokes that when he was young, Asperger's was called "Shut the fuck up, geek." Why is it socially acceptable to gang up on people who are highly intelligent? Every group of Neurotypicals  I encounter tends to ostracize or bully me, and I wonder why, if they can tell I'm different enough to exclude, they don't realize that I'm behaving the only was I know how and just give me the benefit of the doubt and treat me nice. Or is it that the Autism label carries a stigma to be pitied? I don't want pity. I'm the same person I was before I was slapped with the Asperger's diagnosis, and the overcompensation I sometimes encounter can be... demeaning.

 The American culture seems obsessed with labels lately- black or white, gay or straight, etc. But the world contains a million shades of grey and it leaves people trying to hold on to the most socially acceptable label available, even if it's not quite the right one, because there is no doubt that people will treat you differently based on it.

That Awkward Moment People Realize You're Autistic, or "I Like Turtles!"

A couple years ago a video known as "I Like Turtles" went viral, depicting a reporter asking a boy at a fair how he likes his zombie face paint, and his irrelevant reply sends the reporter marching swiftly away. It's an awkward moment, defined by the fact that she expected the boy to be Neurotypical, and was surprised by his classically Autistic behavior. Most people can identify with the reporter's embarrassment; there's no defined social response to discovering an individual is on a very different wavelength than oneself, but typically one doesn't stick around. The reporter from the video changes her entire demeanor when she realizes the boy isn't NT, turning away to quickly ignore the boy, almost with an air of revulsion. Her reaction is not unexpected, especially when considering she had a very brief live report to deliver and no time to take tangents. But life on the receiving end of such treatment isn't pleasant. Autistic spectrum people by definition don't pick up the subtle social cues or subliminal messages that NTs take for granted, but we're not completely oblivious to everything, and some of us are rather brilliant. All of us have our "I like turtles" moments, though, and other behaviors that elicit such reactions, so you'd be hard pressed to find many Spectrum individuals who like who they are. Rates of depression and suicide are many times higher among Autistic people than the general population.

 Our culture is not helping, and I don't just mean that we lack positive pop culture role models. In recent years, the majority of the public conversation around Autism related to vaccine paranoia. Although the studies connecting the two were manipulated and the whole theory since debunked, millions of parents made it very clear that they preferred to risk deathly illness than have a small chance their kid would be like me.

My Asperger's Syndrome is not as pronounced as many on the spectrum, and I'm lucky enough to have received a number of gifts in tandem with my AS: a near genius IQ, ambidexterity, and a 3-day attention span, to name a few. Yet my value to society is hinged on how well I blend in with the Neurotypicals, and I struggle every day to be ordinary because no one cares how many lines of verse you can memorize or instruments you can play if you can't follow the basic unwritten "rules" of society NTs take for granted. (As those unwritten rules vary from culture to culture, perhaps the flaw is in those rules rather than the people who can't follow them...) No matter their IQ, people on the spectrum have difficulty with employment, and while that's changing some, opportunities specifically for Autistic people are currently limited to a few tech companies.

So the subliminal message of American Society is that people on the Spectrum are undesirable as children, of little value as adults, and to be avoided at all times. We are completely marginalized from birth and offered no respite or path to success, all from a culture that claims we are all created equal. About 1% of our population is on the Spectrum, but we seem invisible, shunted to the side, our talents ignored. Forget that Albert Einstein and Sir Isaac Newton and every other genius in history were probably on the Spectrum, and the fact our minds work differently that we are capable of such innovation. Society wants us to fit in or hide away. What else are we supposed to do?