Why I’m Proud to be Autistic: Finding the Beauty in Divergence

When I was diagnosed with autism, I felt relief.

When I tell that to non-autistic people, they’re confused.

It’s a developmental disorder. It negatively impacts your life. I’m sorry.

Autistic people join in my joy. We celebrate. The day I was diagnosed was the day my life began to make sense.

Looking back on my childhood, I wonder how they missed it for so long. I was isolated, monotone, obsessive, and just strange. I spent months working my way through all of the books on medicine in the children’s section of my local library. I refused to be hugged. I moved weirdly. I stimmed.

It got worse in middle school. I was never really bullied, but maybe that would have been easier. I was simply alone, and I knew it. I had acquaintances, but the nuances of adolescent socialization were lost on me. The only friend I managed to make came after weeks of coaching from my therapist. I had more failed social interactions than I can count. I thought I was doomed to be alone, and I tried to make my peace with that. I tried to convince myself that I was okay being alone, but of course, I wasn’t. Even if I sucked at it, I desperately wanted to make friends.

By this point, I was depressed. I could tell I was different, somehow, but at the time I didn’t know why. I felt alien, incapable of understanding why it was so hard for me to be like everyone else. I went to therapy, but no amount of cognitive-behavioral therapy can make a thirteen-year-old understand why she can’t make friends.

I was missing the intuitive social ability I noticed in others. So I faked it.

It’s a very common phenomenon occurring in most autistic people. We mask. We hide autistic traits.

For some people, it’s learning to make eye contact when it’s uncomfortable, even painful.

For others, especially women, it involves simply learning to be quiet and avoid socialization as much as possible.

I learned to be conscious of every aspect of my social conduct.

Is my voice loud enough? Is my voice too quiet? Am I smiling enough? Am I nodding enough? Am I catching their jokes? Am I talking too much? Are they bored? Do they like me? What am I doing wrong?

It was exhausting. I needed days to recover from a two-hour-long social event. Socializing with non-autistic people isn’t natural to me. The best way I can describe myself is like a machine learning algorithm. I have a few rough rules, and with every success and failure, I update them. It wasn’t refined in middle school, hence my social failures.

That’s a common autistic experience, at least for late-diagnosed people like me. And when you read over it, the negatives jump out. Isolation, depression, anxiety. Those were all real.

But I don’t attribute them to my autism. I attribute them to not knowing about my autism.

When I hear conversations about autism, they are overwhelmingly negative. Autistic is used as an insult. We are the butt of jokes. Parents hope and pray that their children will be normal and not afflicted with the terrible curse of autism.

Even the largest and most famous autism organization, Autism Speaks, participates in the demonization of autism. For this, and many, many other reasons, the majority of autistic people disavow and actively campaign against the organization.

In an Autism Speaks ad spot titled “I am Autism,” a deep, menacing voice identified as autism tells parents that it is “invisible…until it’s too late”, and that it “knows where you live.” While the ending of the ad has a parent responding and vowing to serve as a “warrior” against autism, the ad is very clearly trying to scare parents. From the language, one would think the ad is portraying a horrific illness killing children in masses, or a serial killer, or some supernatural entity. It’s just autism. It’s a developmental disorder, and should of course be taken seriously, but it’s not deadly. It doesn’t need a legion of warrior parents fighting against it.

What does it even mean to fight autism?

I am autistic, and it’s a core part of my life and my identity. It shapes everything I do, everything I see, and everything I am. It has its good and bad, like any part of my identity. I don’t think you can remove my autism without destroying me.

And while I recognize that there are more severe cases of autism requiring high support needs, this is not all cases. Though research is mixed due to the complexity of the issue and ongoing discoveries, we can at the very least assume that some autistic people, like me, are okay with their autism.

Why am I okay with my autism? It’s a common question. If it’s not asked outright, I can tell people are thinking it. You might be too. Until now, you have heard the bad parts of autism, and how it contributed to my mental illness. But I don’t think that’s the whole truth.

I had bad experiences because I was autistic, but they were not an inevitable result of my autism. They came from confusion and a lack of support.

If I had been diagnosed younger, I would have gotten coaching on socialization. I would have been able to find my community in other autistic people. My family, my friends, everyone would have understood why I was like that.

At the very least, I would have known why I was like that. I would have known that there was, that there is, nothing fundamentally wrong with me. I am not broken. I am not wrong for being the way I am.

My brain developed differently, so I think differently. I process the world differently.

I have different struggles than other people, but I also have different joys.

When I meet other autistic people, we click almost instantly. Studies back this up: autistic to autistic communication is as effective as non-autistic to non-autistic communication. It’s only autistic to non-autistic conversation that leads to communication breakdown.

In any case, there is almost a shared autistic culture. We have similar childhood stories of being the weird kid, and we can bond over it. There is community. Many of us move weirdly or have strange body positions. I can describe “raptor” hands to an autistic person across the country and they will know what I mean. A non-autistic person will be confused.

There is beauty in stimming. Stimming is, very broadly, repetitive behaviors that bring relief or comfort. The most stereotypical, and maybe common, one is hand-flapping. I hand-flap, curl my toes, rock back and forth, and play with my hands. I do it to show I’m happy. I do it when I’m stressed. I get made fun of for it.

It’s no different than jumping up and down when excited. That’s normal, if a little weird. But hand-flapping gets you dirty looks. Autistic children are told to suppress it.

Autistic children are, in fact, told to suppress all of their visible autistic traits. They are usually harmless, but they look “wrong” to non-autistic people. That’s not how you’re supposed to show emotion, so you have to stop it. You have to make eye contact, even if it hurts and you don’t understand why. You have to learn to be normal.

Recently, a growing movement of autistic advocacy has emerged online. People reclaim their stims and try to deprogram the shame they feel around them. People show off their stims. Proudly. Unabashedly.

That’s the reason I’m diagnosed. I knew something was off, but when I started seeing posts by autistic people online that were too relatable I realized that I might be autistic. And though my parents didn’t believe me, two months and $600 later, I had a PDF outlining my evaluation results. Autism Spectrum Disorder.

I want to be part of the autism advocacy that led me to get diagnosed in the first place. Knowing why I am the way I am has allowed me to accept myself and be okay with the struggles I have. I’ve been able to find community and learn more about myself. I’m slowly working through the process of accepting myself, a process I didn’t think I could ever even begin.

There is no end to this story. Autistic people are still finding their voice. Our voice. I am still learning to be okay with myself. I am still learning to let myself be autistic in a society that judges me for it.

But at the very least, we’ve started. We’re sharing our stories, and speaking for ourselves instead of being spoken for. We’re finding community. We’re finding pride and acceptance and understanding.

Autism, like every part of life, is messy. Sometimes I wish I wasn’t autistic. Sometimes I wish all my friends were autistic, just so they’d understand. Sometimes it’s beautiful.

Most of the time, I can’t imagine being anything else.