I am not sick. Autism is not a sickness, or a disease. It is not something that I will recover from; I will not one day “be better”. I do NOT want to be treated as if I am sick and I do not like being referred to as being sick.
I am not intellectually retarded. My entire life has been spent trying to overcome, or even hide the difficulties I face because of Autism. It is a huge challenge to expend so much energy doing that while also trying to live what you probably consider to be a “normal” life. The emotional and physical toll of using that energy can be high, especially when it can so often seem to be such a vain effort. If I were intellectually retarded I would have never been able to make the many creative attempts I have made in an effort to reach beyond my limitations.
There are some very big challenges that I face everyday of my life. One is trying to communicate with people who seem to have no compassion for how hard it is for me to try to communicate with them to begin with. They seem to believe that because I can speak so fluently that I actually process information the same way that they do. What's worse is when trying to communicate with someone who doesn't seem to listen, or acknowledge that they heard me. This often means that I have to repeat myself several times to get a point across and each time I have to do that my frustration and stress levels rise, pushing me closer to not even wanting to try to communicate and simply resigning to my silent world alone. I try very hard to give everyone my undivided attention. For someone who can stay so focused on a single task for a very long time, to the point of not even being aware of the world around him, communication can be a personal sacrifice. Think about how you would feel if you dropped everything, setting every other thought aside for a moment to communicate with someone only to have that effort ignored and not even remotely reciprocated. Would this go unnoticed? If not, then how would you feel if you experienced this several times a day, every day? At what point would you simply give up trying to communicate in such a situation?
If I am comfortable in a situation I can be very talkative, even to the point of feeling like I am a fool and embarrassing myself. As a lifelong musician with experience in the entertainment industry, I am expected to be entertaining. However, I do not consider myself to be here to entertain anyone. It matters little to me if someone finds me entertaining, or not. I know that I can be funny at times, but my humor is not aimed at satisfying anyone's lust to be entertained, it's mostly my way of expressing honesty in a manner in which you may be more willing to listen. This is a skill that has taken a long time to refine and I usually don't care whether, or not you get the point right away. I know that the message was heard if I got some sort of response. I have learned that people who are usually only interested in their own satisfaction don't get the point of anything for quite some time.
I always try to do unto others as I would have them do unto me, yet not many people are willing to do that. The worst offenders seem to be the people who believe they are Christians. Here's an example. I caught up with a fellow musician that I knew back in high school, who I had not seen in a very long time. I knew that at some point he “became a Christian”. I also knew that he gave up playing secular music, to only play contemporary “Christian” music. Shortly after we started talking he told me in a message on Facebook that he was reading my bio. I asked him to let me know what he thought about it and my site, but despite the fact that he did not delete me from his friends list, without explanation he never responded to any of my attempts to communicate with him again. I ended up deleting him. He should be ashamed of himself, but more than likely his twisted idea of what is Christian and what is not probably convinced him that he was doing the right thing. I have experienced this behavior from many others, so even though I was saddened for a time, I was not permanently damaged and most of these people aren't even missed after a while. These people seem to ignore the fact that the Bible says that God is “well pleased” with the sacrifice of communication and their Christianity seems to be a matter of what's in their personal interest and not the interest of others. Because I am autistic, does that make me any less capable of being a good Christian, or any less godly than anyone else? NO! I expect people who claim to be agnostic to not be as caring as those who claim to be Christian, but in reality I have found that the opposite is often true.
So, with me working so hard to get around my difficulties in an effort to connect with you, why are you so unwilling to expend any sort of effort towards me? Do you really think that you are better than me, or anyone else? Whether Christian or not, do you truly believe that you are simply justified in being so disrespectful to others?
Prejudice is a human trait. Perhaps I am really not human, as I don't care if you are black, white, yellow, brown, Christian, Jew, Muslim, agnostic, young, old, blind, or deaf, I will always try to treat you the same way I want you to treat me (though I do not expect anyone to go to the same extremes that I sometimes do). The problem is, that because society on a whole no longer finds it acceptable to be prejudice towards people who don't seem to fit the status quo, that these prejudice tendencies have shifted towards us autistics. Some want me and others like me to be cured. If I were black would you want me to have my skin color changed also? In reality, we autistics are no different than someone who has a different skin, eye, or hair color from you, it's just that the difference is hidden inside of us and not always as obvious.
Neurotypical, or autistic, we all need compassion. You expect to be understood and accepted for who you are. Why is it so hard to accept me for who I am? Why do you read my bio and then just never talk to me again? Why do you just suddenly stop answering messages, or emails that I send you? Do you think that you know me because of what you read in my bio, or even because you thought you knew me long ago? Until now you have only seen what I wanted you to see. I wish I could say that I stopped caring about whether you accept me, or not once I understood that I was hurting myself by trying to make myself acceptable to you, but I do care. I want to be acceptable to you, but I will not be someone that I am not for the sake of your acceptance. If you want to know me, then try to get to know me. Look beyond what you see written on my website, or anywhere else. If you have such a problem accepting people who are different than you, then stop wasting your time and mine and go back to seeking entertainment for your own isolated little mind.
Even though I share similar experiences and view points to others on the autism spectrum, we also have our differences. No two of us are the same. No two of us are affected by it in the same way. I am autism simply because I am autistic, but I alone am not autism. If you are autistic, then you also are autism. Together we define what it means to be autistic. Together we determine how autism is perceived. Together we are stronger and more capable than any neurotypically influenced organization who would wish to cure us, or even speak on our behalf. We can speak and though we have our differences, together we can speak with one voice, if only we can break away from our self imposed isolation and put the truth about who we are, what we are, into the faces of those who have no idea, nor seem to really care about what it is like to be us.
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