Anthea to ‘I Wish I Didn’t Have Aspergers’ : #AutismPositivity2012

I’m tempted to start this post talking about some of the awesome things that have happened in my life, and reassure you that they will happen to you too. It’s tempting to talk about my job and how I saved up to put a deposit down on this house which I’m so slowly renovating and how fantastic it is that I got a wall of bookshelves up this weekend. I could tell you about how I enrolled in an MA this month, about the fiction I’ve had published, the political activism I’m involved in, my partner of six years and counting, the friends I’ve made. I could say that awesome things have happened for me, and they will happen for you too.

I’m pretty confident awesome things will happen for you, though they may bear little or no resemblance to those that have happened for me. But I remember being a kid and reading these stories of Outsider Isolated Children and every time I started to identify with them they would suddenly become popular or beautiful, or they would discover a secret sporting talent. I never did, and it just made me feel even more alone.

It’s not politically sound, either, to rely on such achievements as indicators of human worth. The fact that it has taken me a fuckload of hard work to get where I am today does not negate the fact that I’ve had a fair bit of luck as well. Growing up in a book-filled household, having the ability to access a university education and my racial background and the passport I hold, amongst other things, have made these a lot easier than they would otherwise have been. But even that’s not really the point. You’ll do what you can. You’re a person irrespective.

You’ll do what you can, and there’ll be some things that will come easily, some you’ll never manage, and many that will be harder or take longer than they do for other people. Many times you’ll find alternative ways of reaching the same place, or that the place you thought you needed to be is actually not where you want to go at all. And there’s one important thing you have:

You know there’s something wrong.

Perhaps those weren’t the comforting words you expected. Perhaps that’s because you think the thing wrong is you, or rather you’ve mentally sectioned off part of yourself to be some bouncy fuzzy monster called Aspergers that claws at your head and chases away people who come near you. And you wish it would just leave you the fuck alone.

But there’s no monster. There’s just you, you and the world you live in.

In Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials Trilogy, there’s an alien race called the Mulefa. They live in a world covered with smooth volcanic tracks, and they have spurs on two of their legs onto which they fit seedpods from trees they cultivate. Propelling themselves with their other two legs, they can whiz along the tracks at high speed. It’s all pretty awesome.

But imagine if one is taken to a world where there are no volcanic tracks, only muddy fields. They move slowly and keep sinking in them, and their spurs catch on tree roots, injuring them. There are no seedpods to be found.

Well that’s you, about now. You’re hacking away at your spurs, trying to make them go away, trying to make yourself normal. You’d like to go looking for seedpods, but you’ve been told that’s a stupid thing, a childish thing, that you’ll be using them as an excuse, that they’ll make you even more abnormal.

There are some crucial differences, of course. First, the problem is our world is more social and political structures, rather than the landscape. That may seem harder to change, but I promise you, volcanos are pretty scary things to mess with. Second, the way people like you and I are excluded is no accident. It’s systematic. And there are lots more of us, excluded and oppressed under different pretexts, purely to sustain the fucked up economic system that benefits not very many people at all.

It’s okay to feel shitty. We all do sometimes. But when you do, you can fight yourself, or you can find the problem. The former may seem easier, but the latter will have prettier results in the long run. And there’ll be lots of us on your side.

And keep cultivating those seedpod trees.