(or, An Autism Story By J. Murray)
Imagine that youâre a sparrow, living in a family of sparrows in a town of sparrows in a world of sparrows.
But youâre kind of a shitty sparrow. Kind of the worst sparrow, actually.
You canât fly. Youâve been to doctors who have prescribed medicine to help with flying. But you still canât. You try every day, and every day you fail and this thing which all the other sparrows tell you is critical.
For a while, you stop trying. Failing every day just wore you down and you couldnât do it anymore, so you stopped trying to fly. It was nice in some ways, but you felt guilty because you werenât raised to give up. It made a rift with your family. Flying is an important activity that sparrow families do together. Isnât your family important to you? Donât they deserve for you to at least make the effort?
So since itâs nothing medically wrong with you, you go to a therapist, who diagnoses you with a phobia of flying. You work on overcoming your fear. Youâre lucky, your family is very accepting of mental illness (other sparrows are not so lucky, and it hurts your heart to think about that). They appreciate and admire how hard youâre working. They try to include you, so instead of getting together and flying, sometimes they get together and all sit in their nests. That sort of sucks too, but itâs a definite improvement.
You continue to try, and fail, to fly. You try harder. You try as hard as you can. Sometimes you canât even make yourself flap your wings, itâs just such pointless bullshit and you feel like youâll never succeed. Sometimes you go up on a chair and jump off and flap real hard and go splat anyway.
Sometimes mean birds make fun of you because youâre a terrible screw-up.
For 26 years, this is what your life is.
One day, almost out of nowhere, as an afterthought, an aside, something barely worth mentioning because it is so obvious, a doctor says, âby the way, youâre a penguin.â
Holy shit. Youâre not a failure. Youâre a penguin. Youâre not lazy or stupid or weak. You donât have messed up values. Youâre a penguin. You have always been a penguin.
Thereâs nothing wrong with you, youâre a beautiful penguin. The most perfect penguin. But itâs just a fact, penguins canât fly.
Now when youâre with youâre sparrow friends and theyâre all sitting in nests, you sit in a bucket of ice. Mostly you bring your own. Some bird restaurants are really accommodating and will bring you a bucket of ice to sit in. Sometimes mean birds give you shit about your bucket, but it doesnât hurt as much as it did before, because you know youâre a penguin and youâre just exactly what a penguin is meant to be.
You give yourself permission to stop trying to fly. Not failing all the time improves your mood and overall function. You finally feel confident declining when invited to flying outings. You donât waste the energy feeling guilty about it.
You love your family of sparrows, but you also find a whole community of penguins to love too. Things you thought were just you, like preferring fish to bird seed, things you thought you were totally alone in and wrong for, are common and accepted. Some are even admired. Your new penguin friends think your flippers and chubby penguin belly are lovely. You bond over how and when you discovered you loved swimming.
Knowing youâre a penguin means knowing where you fit in a world you never felt like you fit into. It means all the things penguins canât do, itâs not a personal failing when you canât do them. Youâre not supposed to be able to. You can do other things instead. Sparrows are actually quite poor swimmers. You feel good about the things you excel at.
This is why I think labels are important. This is why I think âweâre all birds, letâs focus on our similarities instead of our differencesâ is harmful. This is how my autism diagnosis was like breathing, after holding my breath for 26 years.
Sparrows and Penguins by J. Murray is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
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