Check out my photograph, Erqi, in GUD Issue 6.

I don’t want my autism cured. I want the disability from which I suffer cured.

Autism is the structure of my mind, the deep structure of all my poetics, and the attention to detail of my best photographs. It is who I am.

What I want cured are the things that prevent me from living the life I want. Autism does not make me less socially connected than I want to be; associated overstimulus sometimes leads me to retreat into my own space for a time, but, in those cases, I actually want to be on my own. I enjoy pursuing my own interests alone. However, the fact that many people refuse to see such retreats as anything but a snub limits my ability to make social contacts (and professional ones, too). That unwillingness to understand is part of the disability from which I suffer.

Autism has not been an obstacle to career or academic success (unless you count associated lack of coordination preventing me from becoming a professional baseball player, but my gender probably would have been a major issue there anyway). My tendency to explore a subject of interest deeply and systematically has been a great asset in both. It allows me to present material in an organized nuance way when I am teaching EFL, and in school, it helped me to uncover aspects of literary texts others could not.

What holds me back in both areas is the impression I tend to make. It is incredibly difficult for me to maintain standard eye contact and avoid fidgeting in interviews; fidgeting usually works as a socially acceptable method of stimming for me. The disability from which I suffer lies in the assumption that someone who does not hold their face and body in a certain way is somehow less qualified. It is in the way that interpretations of my atypical self-presentation as wrong make networking nearly impossible for me. This is what I want cured.

I am not saying that I am unwilling to meet neurotypicals halfway. I already put forth that much effort if not more. What I am saying is that those who about curing autism need to realize that if they want to improve the lives of autistics, the way to cure the disability involves social and internal work, not lab work. It means learning to interact with autistic people in a way that is different from what neurotypicals are used to. Scientific “solutions” involve fundamentally changing people like myself or preventing more of us from being born.

So is autism a disability? Right now, in this society, yes– but it is not the disability from which I suffer. That disability is social and inside other people and also in the corners of my mind social prejudices have poisoned.

written for the 37th Edition of the Disability Blog Carnival

Related posts:

1. I Am Autism
2. Helping Whom?

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