Autists Can’t See What We Can’t See

One of the realities of growing up autistic, in a largely autistic family, was how impossible it was for me to see the skills that I lacked. I lacked social skills that meant I got bullied, I got the impression from my largely autistic family environment that this was normal and impossible to change, and that my skills academically were all that would matter for the rest of my life. It pains me sometimes to look back and realize that the family members who had social skills were often mocked for these skills because those things were “stupid” and “unimportant.”

For most of my early life, I was utterly unaware of the entire social world. I sort of knew it was there, but because I couldn’t interact on that level, a lot of what went on there was invisible to me. And it would have been incredibly difficult, perhaps impossible, as well as painful, to convince me that I needed help to see my own deficits. I’m aware, looking back, that people tried to tell me what they could see about my deficits, but I partly refused to listen and mostly couldn’t hear them because those things weren’t real. It would be like trying to explain a religious experience to someone whose internal compass is atheistic. People said that social interaction, social hierarchies, social rules, social communication was real, but I had no way of verifying this except by my exclusion from it.