Everything Good In My Life Comes From Autism

One of the autistic things I love most about myself is my lists. I love lists, especially lists of ten. So I’m going to tell you the ten best things in my life that I wouldn’t have if it weren’t for autism. I’ve listed each of them first with the “deficit” language of comparing autists to neurotypical people and the second word is another way of looking at the same trait in a more positive light.

1. Overly Precise Language/ Writing Skills

I decided I wanted to be a writer when I was five years old and every time someone asked me what I wanted to be after that, I doggedly told them I was going to be a writer. My parents tried very hard to talk me out of this, but I’m convinced that part of my stubbornness is because of my autism. Everyone told me how unlikely it was that I was ever going to be a published author. It is due to autism that I remained focused on this supposedly unachievable goal. It is autism that made me return again and again to stories that I couldn’t give up on, characters I loved. It is autism that made me love language and enjoy playing with words, and that gave me the focus and intensity necessary not only to write a first draft, but to keep rewriting and rewriting and rewriting, until I got every comma right and every word spelled correctly.

2. Hyper-focus/Memory