"But what do I have to lose?"
For once, I'll get to the point:
I'm autistic.
I'm not very open about this. Folks who discover they're on the spectrum later in life often have this doubt, and it's been no different for me. It was known I was on the spectrum as a child (then called Asperger's), but I never actually learned this till I was older; even then, I doubted it for more than 10 years. It took the complete shutting down of the world for me to really understand how much of my life had been spent, ironically, masking (acting neurotypical…or as close as I could), or spent judging and hating myself for my quirks, both big and small. In the vacuum of conditioned normalcy, I flourished: quiet, space, and a world with ever changing confusing rules was just normal for me.
So why am I being open about this? Why label who I am? Why now? I'm not: the name, the label was given, not chosen, descriptive, not prescriptive. To accept or deny the title changes nothing about what makes me happy, what challenges me, so why deny it? I heard accounts from autistics saying they regretted every time they came out as autistic; every success or mistake was attributed to being autistic, their humanity ignored. The pathologizing was external, not internal. They knew what their world was like, but articulating it could be costly.
But what do I have to lose?
I think when people ask why I'd choose to identify with it, it's reflective of their own discomfort rather than mine. Perception changes once we've put a name and face with a label; what once was an abstract concept dissolves when we know someone--beautiful, flawed, and richly complex--who has that label, and we see that it's just one dot in the constellation of who they are.
So, I'm Chris: Archer, writer, athlete, adventurer, husband, tradesperson, autistic.
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