Thread by @mightbeautistic

What if I told you that so many things you think are bad or distasteful or need fixing in Autistics are actually neuronormative myths?

As an #Autistic psychotherapist, I can tell you that the following pieces of how we might be are actually quite fine and healthy.
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Eye contact. Eye contact doesn’t make you a better person. It doesn’t make you honest or calm or kind. Eye contact isn’t culturally consistently polite. It doesn’t indicate mental health or connection. Ask my blind friends who do both those things just fine. Stop chasing my eyes.

Socializing with small talk, parties, vaguely, in groups of three or more, about the weather, in order to ascertain social hierarchy, w/ nonconsensual touch is not qualitatively better than connection through parallel play, infodumping, monologue, shared interests, time, or art.

Policing the normativity of another persons body movements is not psychologically healthy. Stop telling us to move less or more. I can pace, fidget, stare, quote my favorite quotes, be non-verbal, sway, stumble, move my wonderous hands and none of it measures my sanity or heart.

Human development is not a race. The Autistic child is no less human because we take longer to tie our shoes, or get to the restroom on time, or stop crying in public, or speak. We also aren’t aliens when we read at 2, hold a multiverse of numbers, or commune with animals.

Autistic people aren’t particularly awkward. We are awkward to you. Perception is not definition. There is no morality to awkwardness anyway. It never hurt anyone. How strange that it could be a defining factor in diagnosis. I’d rather an awkward person than an arsehole any day.

Vocal prosody or intonation does not communication make. A lilt here and there practiced will not make us friends. If I’m calm and my voice is flat it doesn’t take away from the content of my words and it doesn’t mean I’m angry or dead inside. It’s only my voice not my humanity.

We are blunt and often honest. We ask why, not to challenge but because we want to know. We pick apart the details because they matter to us not to criticize you, but because there is something greater than us. Truth, logic, fairness, and justice matter more than being polite.

We are sensitive. Gloriously and painfully sensitive. We hear electricity, feel weather, notice the corners of the rooms and the whispers outside. Stop telling us to get over what is an incredible way of being. Stop trying to expose us and habituate us into your decibel range.

If you think Autistic is a negative descriptor, something you wouldn’t want for yourself or your children, then that is a real bias and it’s time to ask why you have that bias. Where did you get that prejudice?
We aren’t broken neurotypicals, we are normal Autistics.