When I was first diagnosed with autism and started talking about it publicly, a good friend of mine who had been struggling with his own diagnosis of schizophrenia sent me a private message, asking why in the world I wouldn’t want a cure. If there were a cure for schizophrenia, he would want it immediately. There was nothing he wanted more in his life than to go back to “before” he had schizophrenia. He remembered that time period clearly. That was who he “really” was, not this person who had hallucinations and paranoid delusions and who picked at his own scalp until he bled.
I gently pointed out to him that although I had just been diagnosed (at age 46, late as many women are now being diagnosed late), I had always been autistic. There was no me from “before.” There was only me now. And much of the difficulty of being autistic comes from the pressure to conform to rules and norms that make no sense and are actually harmful.
Other difficulties came from the not so kindly delivered information all through my childhood, from well-meaning teachers and not so well-meaning peers, that how I was naturally was not acceptable and that I had to change to be more like them. I tried desperately to do just that, especially during junior high and high school, when I became savvy enough to see that walking around the playground, holding up a book of Shakespeare so I didn’t have to make…
