I don't think when people categorize autism as a disorder, that they mean that people with autism are "wrong" for having it, but rather they're acknowledging that they have obstacles that others don't have, and that people should be aware and empathetic of that. I think of it in line with affective disorders- obviously, having anxiety or depression massively influences your personality and life experiences, but that doesn't mean that people with these disorders shouldn't get relief for symptoms that lessen their quality of life, which is one of my misgivings about the whole neurodiversity thing (i.e. the idea that the only obstacle for neurodiverse people is public stigma).
I hesitate to step into this, but... Hmm.
I'm
probably somewhere on the spectrum of autism. It's not something I spend a lot of time thinking about, because, in short, that's not how I was raised to think about things. Society, and by extension most people, like to think of traits of things, be it people, or objects, or experiences, like this;
- Pro A
- Pro B
- Pro C
- Con A
- Con B
- Con C
- etc
Where you (or your shirt, or your screwdriver, or...) are a collection of completely unrelated Good Features and equally completely unrelated Bad Features. Moreover, there is assumed to be a sort of neutral baseline, and it's assumed that people can
easily be entirely better, or worse, than the baseline.
I was raised with the notion that things have traits, or characteristics, that
can be pros or cons, depending on context. Physical objects are easier to speak of; light, fragile materials are relatively well suited to, for example, airplane construction, and not battle tank armor. Heavy metals are relatively the reverse.
But this also applies to people. A person who can't sleep soundly if they can't recall if the door is locked is gonna have a miserable time in a lot of contexts. But that same paranoia can be life saving if they're going to war and the door being not secured could get them and everyone with them killed.
Or take two people, one who is inclined to smile and get along, and one who is quick to confront people over their actions. The latter could be a confrontational dick in a lot of situations... but that same tendency could make them quick to fight injustice, to confront bullies, to stop negligence, to try to break broken rules. The person inclined to smile and get along may avert their eyes from real problems, not wanting to disturb the peace, letting things get worse and worse, maybe even get killed for their inaction. Whether it's better to be the Nice Friendly type or the Blunt Confrontational type depends on a lot of things. The rest of your temperament, how these behaviors are shaped by other aspects of your personality, and your morality, and so on, and the situation itself.
Not every trait has significant upsides, of course. Being injured is usually a bad thing, there's diseases that are awful and genetic condition that
are basically all bad... but even a lot that get identified that way by people simply aren't.
Sickle cell disease is legitimately
awful. In fact, it's pretty much all bad... But the 'carrier' version of the genetic trait,
Sickle cell trait, is... Well, I'll quote the Wikipedia page;
wikipedia said:
The sickle cell trait was found to be 50% protective against mild clinical malaria, 75% protective against admission to the hospital for malaria, and almost 90% protective against severe or complicated malaria.
It's
significantly protective against Malaria. Which is horrific. Having Sickle cell trait can cause your kids to have the full blown Sickle cell disease. But in areas where Malaria is common, this same trait helps keep
you from dying long enough to
have kids.
Often, people want to identify the Bad Parts of some trait as some special, separate thing, that you could cut away and have the good parts. But so very often, the person who is vibrant and energetic is unable to, for example, sit still in class... because they
are energetic and physical and yadda. The same trait that makes them 'good' in one context is 'bad' in another. But treated as completely unrelated.
Furthermore, there's what I think of as the 'myth of the normal'. The idea that most people are boring, uninteresting, healthy people with no specific traits or problems. But when you actually go digging
at all, the vast, overwhelming majority of people have something. They have respiratory problems, or bad eyes, or they're hot tempered and get into too many fights, or
something. They're weird and different, not at all 'average', not really.
More than that, people tend to treat problems that
aren't having impact as
not existing. The whole y2k thing back when the year 2000 was looming that had everyone freaking out gets treated by people like they were freaking out over nothing... but it was a whole lot of nothing
because all kinds of people worked hard, and looked at the code for computers and
fixed things, made the transition, kept it from
being a problem.
So on the one hand, you have people who are getting prescribed treatments and medicines for their Very Serious Conditions. On the other, you have Bob. Bob is an ordinary successful man. He eats what he wants, drinks what he wants, sleeps as much as he wants. He doesn't wear shirts of a certain fabric because they're uncomfortable. He eats his weird favorite food every day, because hey, he's successful, so he can eat what he wants.
… Bob is the exact same as those people being prescribed treatments, and would be an unhealthy wreck if he didn't have so much control over his life. His favorite foods are covering vital nutrients, they have health effects that keep him going. Maybe he has three coffees every morning and alcohol before bed, helping him get up and get to sleep- oh, but he just likes the taste, you know. He doesn't have any health problems. The fact that he's taking stimulants and downers? it's drink, not
medicine. He just
likes the taste of mints, the fact they help his breathing is totally irrelevant.
People don't get diagnosed with health problems they're covering very often, either physical or mental. The guy who has his room just the way he likes it, and has a rigid routine for his day that never gets interrupted, why, he's an ordinary healthy man. The guy who has his routine interrupted regularly and has freakouts is a
freak, because... Not because he's actually different, but rather because his issues aren't being dredged up, and put to the fore.
Even if they're the exact same issues.
You see this with sexism, where a man screaming is 'commanding' and a woman screaming is 'too emotional'. You see this with racism, where 'them blacks just need to speak right', and yet George W 'nuculear weapons' Bush
totally speaks right, am I right?
You see this with all kinds of labels. Of course, some people
are worse off than others, genuinely, but a lot of social perception stuff around this is just
off. A rich successful person is 'eccentric'. A poor person with the same traits is 'crazy' or 'unreasonable' or 'stupid'. Even if the primary difference was how much money they were born into.
People's judgements on these things often have very little to do with underlying realities. Traits that aren't
actively causing problems are treated as all up-shot, or non-existent. Society accommodates certain kinds of routines, and social groups, and behaviors, without thinking about it at all, and then calls the ones it is refusing to accommodate broken, and says their problems are their fault for
being different and broken. The fact that the one person has all their issues accommodated and the other gets scorn for having issues is core to the issue.
Like, lemme zero in on one particular line;
but rather they're acknowledging that they have obstacles that others don't have, and that people should be aware and empathetic of that.
Who, exactly, does
not have obstacles not all people do? It's good to be aware of
what your issues are. Which strengths and which weaknesses you have.
The fact that modern (Not making any statements either way on historical) society
wants to believe some people are just better and worse is a core problem.
My earliest school days, and did well at
nearly every school subject. But there was one area I did poorly in- writing. I was below grade level at writing. I was
above grade level in everything else, some subjects by
several years.
Do you know how my teachers perceived me? Why, I was smart, I was better than everyone else in my class... and
lazy about writing. I could pour a hundred times the effort into my writing assignments, and still be told I was
obviously lazy. I was a bright lad, of
course me having a
weak area could only be explained through laziness. The fact that
everything else was
all but effortless to me, and
this was an area that I
was sinking almost
all my effort into? Nono, I was just
lazy. Smart People don't have weaknesses. That's impossible. A Genius is just the
better of the common man, uniformly superior in all skills, so that I could be
worse in any area than my classmates while being
mostly ahead of my peers? Laziness. That's the only explanation.
That's the only explanation
all my teachers had, for several years, even as I repeatedly changed school districts as the family moved. They told me I was lazy, and if I would just
try I'd
obviously do better than my peers there, too!
It was, and still is, a broken model.
And this extends to all kinds of topics. If old people have trouble with loud noises, they're just old. If young people do, they're
noise sensitive. Ignore the fact that my grandfather literally grew up on a farm in what is to a very large degree a bygone age, where things where just
quieter, nono, he's just old, and kids these days are
noise sensitive.
The change in conditions can't possibly matter.
… I suspect I've rambled rather more than I intended. The point is that people look at things like a person with strong attention to detail and OCD and conclude
those are completely unrelated, when in fact they may well be the same trait, just the positive and negative parts of the package. Equally, people look at those with
different issues, and then don't consider if there's any areas a 'normal' person
would need accommodation that they don't. You get the equivalent of people looking at some kind of merfolk who can't breath air and saying he has 'suffocation disorder', completely ignoring that
he can breathe underwater unlike you. If he was the normal and you the weird one,
you'd be called defective.
While there are differences that
are one-sided, where one is just better off, people like to see them as far more common than they are. The 'normal' people, be it psychologically, or physically, race or gender (nevermind that 50%~ of the population is male and 50%~ female), religiously or whatever other category, the ones in the Normal Box are assumed to be without disadvantage by and large, while those classed as Abnormal are default assumed to be without advantage unless, and possibly even if, the advantage is
really glaringly obvious.
I'm not, all told, well read about autism in particular. It's not something I have actually sought out information on. More than that, I can't say how disadvantaged any given person might be by their traits, how much of an
inherently raw deal they have vs how much is social, or nutritional, or other
non intrinsic drawbacks, that in a different time or with a different life would not exact while the same underlying trait does.
But the idea that people possess Purely Good and Purely Bad traits as
the primary kinds of traits people possess, and that Normal People are basically without traits
at all, is just... It's frankly absurd, and far too widespread.
It's in our fiction, and our social expectations, and so much more. Humans in fantasy tend to be 'well rounded' or 'generic' or 'average'.
Humans in real life do things like walk lions to death. We're endurance walkers in a way very few animals are- it's actually easier on your heart to be walking than about any other form of activity. Sitting is much harder on it as I recall. Likewise, we have the ability to throw objects in quite the way we do, our shoulders can move that way
at all largely because our ancestors were tree dwelling.
If we
actually ran into Dwarves, The Fantasy Race, they probably wouldn't have shoulders like us. Most species would probably have
dramatically less endurance for just marching around. These are things that are fairly distinct and unique to humans, advantages not likely to be found on other species unless they were
broadly very much alike to us.
By the same token as people ignore the advantages found in our species, simply assuming any other intelligent being would of course have all those basic capacities and more, people ignore things like when being weird means not having Some Problem that 'normal' people are simply
already being accommodated for.
… I'm not sure I've made the points I wanted, but this is also only gonna get more rambly if I continue, I think, so posting as is.
