Read my latest flash, Venison, at 52|250.

As an aspie, I prefer the phrasing “I am disabled” to “I have a disability“. This is because I regard disability not as some passively present force but as something that is actively done to me. It is done not by my neurological distinctiveness but, rather, by social expectations. In other words, I am disabled by society. I am disabled by the expectation that I will learn to recognize how other people use facial expressions to indicate their emotions and what sort of responses (to them or to environmental stimuli) will make neurotypicals comfortable. They are not, however, expected to learn how I express myself or to anticipate what I need to be comfortable in an environment. Children diagnosed with Aspergers may be given lessons in how to read smiles and frowns, but rare is the neurotypical who seeks lessons in what the Aspergers children’s gestures mean. I have had to learn how to fake eye contact in order to give a favorable impression at work and in job interviews; no one has had to learn to reduce eye contact in order to make me comfortable (note that when I was teaching English in Japan this wasn’t a problem, and I suspect that my natural tendency to make minimal eye contact actually made a lot of my students more comfortable with me). 

Really, this asymmetry is similar to what every oppressed group experiences. The less powerful must understand the powerful to survive. That said, whereas I have always known that I am a woman, it took a long time, even after I learned that I fit the criteria for Aspergers, for me to realize that I was disabled. This is because we are encouraged to think of a disability as something that inherently makes one less functional. I certainly couldn’t regard Aspergers that way, despite the difficulties I faced socially and professionally, since my Aspergian traits have had a positive impact on my art and on my ability to systemically analyze literature.

Then I learned about the social model of disability and the affirmation model. While I doubt that any specific model will ever be sufficient to fully describe disability and the experience(s) thereof (partly because the line between a disability and a weakness is arbitrary and partly because disabled people, like everyone else, have different desires), these have helped me to understand where I locate my own experience.

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