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? […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]