Published on 12, July, 2020
Have you ever had to interact with a certain type of autistic person who believes that their autism gives them a right to your silence? As an autistic person myself I find it incredibly irritating.
like many autistic people i’m used to getting comments about ‘you’re shouting’ when I’m not shouting but I’m talking more loudly than people expect. For me Stimming can be something as simple as humming a musical under my breath. Something that is likely to indicate that I’m stressed out. In fact I’m more stressed out I am the more likely I am to be making some kind of ‘noise.’ Humming, tapping, singing etc. and of course what stresses me out more is being told I’m making ‘noise’ and I need to stop or else.
absolutely one of the most offensive things you can possibly do is to tell me I am ‘laughing too loud.’ because to enjoy humour and comedy you have to have a lack of self consciousness and it’s absolutely impossible to have a lack of self consciousness if you are worrying about ‘laughing too loud.’
so to those people who think autism gives them a right to demand quietness, to turn the whole world into a library (and I say it as someone who likes libraries) I have to say to you respectfully no it doesn’t. Here’s a set of earplugs, deal with it.
but in truth what offends me the most is them speaking on my behalf. equating autism with this supersensitivity to sound. A lot of us do not get this. A lot of us struggle with social issues; it is after all one of the defining aspects of autism, and it’s really unhelpful when Neurotypicals get the wrong end of the stick and think that autism is just somehow some sort of super sensitive hearing / touch thing. Because from my point of view the thing Neurotypicals really need to understand is how autism affects social interaction.
that is one of the two major things all autistic people share, issues with social interaction. it’s the aspect Neurotypicals tend to really struggle to get their heads around. It’s really un helpful when people paint this inaccurate picture of the autistic presentation. You know the stereotype. If you’re autistic you’ve got to be really quiet and painfully polite and a real indoors introvert that would rather deal with animals than people. Someone who can’t stand noise and hates a party and is really adverse to confrontation. A completely rubbish stereotype that is completely the opposite of people like me.
The person in the room laughing the loudest at the most inappropriate joke. The person who is always trying to stave off boredom and likes a good party and dancing to loud music. The guy looking to turn the conversation to something interesting and weird because every day life is so banal. It would be nice for me personally if we could have a bit of representation among the autistic community that represents me. It’s bad enough that the media gets it wrong, it’s intolerable when other autistic people present the quiet stereotypes as being authentic.
I understand what your saying here I think. You have your own personal way of autism presenting within you and feel that it's not very well presented widley and even within the autistic community? Please correct me if I've missed the crucial points.
I think it's perfectly valid to feel like this, you want to feel understood for the way that autism shows up for you personally.
Peter said:It’s bad enough that the media gets it wrong, it’s intolerable when other autistic people present the quiet stereotypes as being authentic.
I think we all experience the frustration of misrepresentation of the autistic experience through the media. However, I haven't personally had experience of other autistic folk claiming that the "quiet" way of being is the definitive autistic experience. Being quiet as a result of autism is authentic to autism, just as being loud as a result of autism is authentic to autism. It's all authentic to autism. Autistic people that speak of their own experience can only speak about their own triats and attributes that are authentic to them, it doesn't mean that other traits are any less authentic to autism.
What's difficult here is that autism is such a massive bubble of differences and diversities that are contradictory to each other. It's a beautiful thing, that there is so much diversity within the bubble we call autism. But it does present the challenges of representing all of it accurately, when there is so much to represent it is often impossible. But it is all authentic to autism as a whole, just not everything will be authentic to personal individual experiences of it.