Other Autistics

I've only known a handful of other autistics in my life. There's only three I can think of, in fact. Of course, I've interacted with other autistics online before, but that didn't go well, to the point where the largest autistic website, which is wrongplanet.com, actually banned me not long after my initial diagnosis. It was for posting about my romantic difficulties, if you're wondering. You'd think a section called Love & Dating would be appropriate for such context, but apparently recounting my sexual difficulties offended some of the moms, resulting in banning, despite profuse apologies from myself. Apparently, the whole world is for children. Anyway, I've read other autistic message boards since, but never again posted. As a result, most of my interactions with other autistics have been in person. While I completely failed to get along with other autistics on the Internet, my relationships with the three I've known personally have been mostly positive. Here, I will recount how I got to know each of them and how autism has affected them in varying ways throughout their lives. Determining if they are higher or lower-functioning than myself is difficult, so draw your own conclusions.

Brad is a few years younger than myself and I got to know him through my ex-fiancé Marie. Marie, as I've said many times, was a sociopath and treated me with the according evil. As a form of psychological torture, she cowed me into driving over to Brad's once so she could have a sexual encounter with him. Although this did, in fact, occur, I find that I didn't then and don't now have any ill will towards him over it. A woman who he'd had a crush on for years, according to her, seduced him and he had all the emotional wherewithal to resist that comes with autism. Fact is, if the equivalent woman in my life ever decided to pull that, I'd probably do as he did. Since then, we've gotten to know one another on Facebook and his journey has been similar to mine. He's dated his share of women, some of them kind and some of them crazy, but has had no more success at managing relationships than myself. His professional life has been similarly bleak, despite going through training, as I did, to develop various specialized skills. Lately, he's battled several of the same problems I have and I've recommended my therapist and trainer to him so he can hopefully make at least as much progress as myself.

Amy is the only female autistic I've ever known. I first got to know her when she was dating a friend of mine and I liked her immediately. A very compassionate person, she is highly interested in zoology, particular primates, with lemurs being her favorite. Years after I originally got to know her, I asked her out. She was no longer dating the friend of mine she was when we first met, and had had another boyfriend in the interim, so this wasn't like what happened when I admittedly stole Marie from her then-boyfriend. Although she said yes, she didn't really want to and we were in a four-month long-distance relationship before I realized she didn't actually want to be with me. Of my exes, she is the only one with whom I remain on good terms, although I am not permitted to speak with her often, even on Facebook, due to her fiancé disliking the idea of her speaking with exes. Obviously, an entire relationship where one is not aware the other person isn't into it is quite an experience and, in retrospect, it was probably my first time seriously questioning my ability to manage one. Previous exes had cheated on me, been evil, or backstabbed me over a religious group, but this one's demise, as well as formation, was based upon an inability to intuit what is going on in my own relationship. Subsequent relationships further revealed this flaw to an even greater extent, with Randi dating me ten months before she broke up with me for reasons that I suspect are more complex than she let on and April breaking up with me because I was unable to keep the relationship pacing as slow as she wanted. Nowadays, she seems very happy and I'm glad I can still be on good, if limited, terms with her.

Dave is the other autistic with whom I most frequently associate, mostly because we met at Just For Him, where we both smoke pipes and cigars on a daily basis. He's a musician and has successfully held jobs before, although each one was ultimately sabotaged by autism. Successfully getting on disability due to autism is probably the most interesting feature he has relating to the subject and his resultant limited finances give me a useful, if frightening, glimpse into what my circumstances could possibly be one day if I ever, for any reason, lose the family money on which I subsist. Although Dave has had three failed marriages and is one of the very few people who've been abused by women in ways that can hold a candle to my own experiences, he's managed to retain hope into his late forties and fully intends to keep putting himself out there. Of the ones I mention in this article, Dave is also the one with whom I most frequently discuss autism. Diagnosed at the onset of his forties, he had to wait far longer than myself to find out why his life had always been so damned difficult. Many of our conversations have involved me educating Dave about autism and comparing and contrasting our respective cases of it. For instance, Dave has light and touch sensitivity, but no dexterity or coordination issues, whereas I have dexterity and coordination issues, but no light or touch sensitivity. Differences in autism aside, Dave has been a nice source of someone who actually understands autism from the inside and conversations between us tend to go more smoothly than most interactions either of us have with others.

Autistic adults today grew up in the infancy of science's understanding of the condition. Ones lucky enough to live in major cities, like Brad and Amy, had access to sufficient resources and diligent professionals to get diagnosed in childhood. Less fortunate ones, like Dave and myself, were either misdiagnosed with something else or were never given a diagnosis in the first place. Nonetheless, all of us grew up in a time when public understanding of autism was basically limited to, "Oh, you mean retarded kids?" Clearly, autistic kids growing up now have a it a lot better than we did. They'll have a lot better chance ending up like Amy and Dave, meaning happy and hopeful adults, as opposed to like Brad and myself, meaning burned and burned out adults whose autism has come to define them and the sort of life they must lead. In any event, it's nice to have known all of them. Us autistics have to deal with a lot of crap in life. People still believe everything from vaccines, to diet soda, to freaking power lines cause autism and this is just insane pseudoscience. Worse yet, some refuse to believe you even have autism in the first place if you're high -functioning enough to appear relatively normal. So we must all be ready to be communicators and advocates for our condition. Despite alarmist claims that autism is an epidemic, there are still plenty of walks of life wherein one might be the only autistic a given person has ever met. Some are better suited to be the pointman on this than others, of course, and I think I'm particularly well-suited to this task. To that end, I maintain this blog and its archives will hopefully serve as an explanation for how autistics see the world around them.

-Frank