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?
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