When autistic people are not accused of being emotionless and “robotic” due to mistaking our quiet or unusual body language as lack of emotional capacity, we are often blamed as being “too much” in some way. Too intense. Too absorbed in our special interests. Too thorough in our exploration. Too passionate for the causes we […]
To be human is to struggle with troubling emotions. To be autistic is to sometimes struggle with strange emotions that are difficult to understand or put into words. Many people still seem to believe that autists do not experience emotions, or at least deep emotions. I believe this prejudice also explains in part dehumanization of […]
Eye contact -or its absence- is sometimes perplexingly big deal in neurotypical world. Apparently, it is perfectly right and decent to discriminate against people who do not take eye contact and threaten people who struggle with it with harsh social sanctions. Why is that even necessary, if eye contact is so incredibly natural and positive? […]
Takiwatanga*, the reality of autistic people, is a gentle world. In fact, it is so gentle that even time has a softness to it. Arrow of time exists there just like it does in neurotypical reality, as it originates from entropy. However, as far as current physics allows variations in experience of time, there appear […]
Time before holidays and holidays themselves can be stressful time even for neurotypical people. Autistic people feel this stress many times over. Autistic mother Riina Vallin compiled a list of good tips for autist friendly holidays. Each person and family are unique, but if something seems to cause trouble, the root cause is likely to […]
Finnish media has picked up an unfortunate habit of avoiding A-words by using terms such as “neuropsychiatric challenge/difficulty/issue”. Apparently, people believe that this sounds more friendly than talking about disorder. That, however, was a thought that was put to use before thinking was finished. Autism, for instance, is not a challenge, problem or difficulty any […]
Alongside drama going on around Elon Musk’s Twitter purchase, some autism related questions have surfaced. People ask, how much autism explains a person’s bad or incomprehensible behavior. Short answer: no more than a neurotypical person’s neurotypicality explains and justfies their behaviors. Claiming otherwise is nentism. The nentistic prejudics I discuss today are particularly disgusting, because […]
I received as reader feedback the following question I thought for a great topic for a blog post: ”My friend/colleague/this person I’ve met appears to be autistic. Because learning about my autism has helped me a lot, I’m wondering if N could also benefit from such knowledge. How could I bring the matter up respectfully, […]
Inspired by a Twitter mutual, I asked DALL’E’s idea of what does an autistic consultant look like. This was the answer: Here we have, quite neatly, summed up all stereotypical, outdated, misinformed prejudices and clichés associated with autistic people. But where is the consultant? I ran DALL-E with just the word ”consultant”, and it looks […]
Recently, there has been interesting discussion about autistic socializing and friendships in online autistic community. Myths about autistic people being hermits by nature or difficult and trying people nobody in their right mind would want to be friends with are both old and persistent. Empathy gap between neurotypes (Milton 2012), on the other hand, is […]