Published on 12, July, 2020
I feel like the world is constantly trying to force us to be as "normal" as possible. By this I mean, being like everyone else and not being different, not being our autistic selves.
So I thought this would be a nice space for us to say some of things that make us different from NT people and to be proud of them.
I'll start
I like listening to 1970's Eastern European pop and modern German Schlager music rather than whatever is in the charts
I'm starting to develop my own fashion sense rather than trying to be cool and love wearing football shirts from around the world and vintage 1970's clothes
I have a photographic memory for cricket scores
I use a basic LG keypad phone instead of a smartphone and I avoid most modern tech ( I have a smartphone I keep in a drawer and hardly use just for booking into things etc)
I love ducks and geese and swans and see them as my friends
I have over 200 cuddly animals in a big Ikea unit
I am facinated by Eastern European history especially the former East Germany
I see the world very differently from how most people seem to and I like it that way
I have no interest in social media
I love being autistic and see it as a blessing rather than a disability
Please share your stuff below if you would like to
I feel uncomfortable with the idea that all allistics are “normal” and identical (seriously, they aren’t). And I don’t think all my abnormality is from autism (being an Orthodox Jew is pretty counter-cultural, and if autistics are the 1%, Jews are the 0.2%. And who knows where personality ends and autism begins?). However, I am slowly coming around to the idea of being OK with being what in the eighteenth century would have been termed “an original” (better than “weird,” I think). I don’t know if I’ll ever see autism as “a blessing,” but if I wasn’t this shade of unusual, my wife wouldn’t have married me, so for that, I’m grateful.
I think 'normal' is a set of expectations that are pushed onto everyone and few people naturally meet all of them.
I have a theory that no one is actually normal, its just the NT people are better at pretending to be than we are or indeed than we want to be