I don't want to keep burdening my wife with this stuff - to be honest, she already knows about how I feel about my family. My family constantly reassure me that they aren't ashamed despite what I put them through growing up with undiagnosed Autism but I have to say, I don't believe them. How can I believe them when all around me programmes like The A Word and Atypical and numerous middle grade fiction books (I teach Year Six at a primary school) are painting us as complete burdens and embarrassments? I just feel like the public narrative of us is that we're perfect-family-ruiners as I call it (not the most innovative name, maybe, but the only one I can seem to come up with!). Everything in popular culture paints the poor non-Autistic people around us (our parents, our siblings) as the ones suffering because they have to endure us in their lives. Either that or we're a zoo exhibit - for example, I hate The Undateables with a passion and did even before I was diagnosed; sometimes it feels like I'm the only one who sees through that ableism. To me it's the same premise as a modern freak show, for able people to sit and watch at home and go, 'Awww, so sweet, so lovely, so inspirational'. Sometimes it feels like society don't seem to remember we're people and it really gets me down. It makes me not want to interact with my own family because I start projecting and convincing myself that they see me as nothing more than a burden. I start feeling sorry for them when I'm the one with the disability! I feel like a monster, a terrible older sister and daughter. Sometimes, when I was growing up, I'd look at the four of them and know they'd be better off without me. I still think that a lot of the time. I know this is really self-pitying but it would be nice to be accepted in the eyes of the world as a human being who didn't choose to be like this!
