Autism Awareness Month
Hi, tomorrow is going to be Autism Awareness Month and there are a few things I want to say as someone on the Autism Spectrum Disorder:
Whenever I look up songs about being on the spectrum they’re usually these sad ballads about how sorry we are that we are inconveniencing other people. What I don’t see are songs where we are mad about our experience and we should be mad, not about our condition but because of how we’re treated because of it.
We should be mad that we get treated like props in movies instead of as actual people, we should be mad that so many portrayals of autistic people are savants, we should be mad that our anger is often dismissed as a tantrum, we should be mad that instead of teachers trying to understand us they just hover over us and scold us for stimming or for being overwhelmed by the noise, we should be mad when people mock us for being excited over our special interests and when people mock our special interests, we should be mad when we get scolded for something we see a neurotypical person did who wasn’t punished for it, we should be mad when people treat us like children. We should be angry that a charity that claims to help autistic people is actually abusing us and justifying neurotypical’s dismissal of us.
When I was in public school they put me in the same study hall with the kids who had behavioral issues. I got high honors every semester in middle school but when we toured the high school my study hall was shown the remedial classrooms.
When I was in college “The Good Doctor” came out and it made me depressed because I wasn’t a savant like media kept making me feel like I had to be in order to have worth especially since I wasn’t doing very well in my classes. I also tried watching “Atypical” but couldn’t do it because it didn’t feel like it was about the autistic boy, it felt like it was about everyone else having to endure being near him. No one even addressed how emotionally abusive his first girlfriend was.
When we get angry we deserve to have our feelings acknowledged and respected.
