Shaylabell -- 22 Things I Wish People Understood About Our Autistic Population's Nature
Fact 1: We are not diagnosed with autism.
Fact 2: I am autistic, as are many, though not all, of the others who know themselves as CommunityBelonging.
Fact 3: this is my, and their, reality.
As the spokesperson, if you will, of the autistic population of CommunityBelonging, I feel, as do we all, that it is time for our story to be heard.
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When the body was that of a child, we were scolded for echolalia. They called it copying, and would yell at us for doing it.
When we were body age 9 years old, the echolalia vanished. When we were body age 9 years old, Amy came away as herself. Amy is echolalic.
A few of us who identify as autistic have taken on that echolalia when others have tried to “fix” her. For us, echolalia is an indication of our nature, an indication that the scolding we were subjected to failed to extinguish.
For as long as we can remember, we have walked on our toes. They tried to stop us by telling us it would leave us with physical problems. That behavior never vanished.
We expressed happiness by walking on our toes. To this day, those of us who have difficulties with verbal communication still do.
For every insider who does not walk on their toes, there is at least one who does. Dissociation and splitting rendered extinction of that behavior impossible.
Walking on our toes is a characteristic of those of us who identify as autistic, especially if we also struggle to use the English language in speech.
When we were in elementary school, they had us working in a room with kids who had other disabilities. They would often come there when having hard times. As dissociative as we were, we took notice, and we cared.
When Rozaya was at front, she would often try to help them, the only way she could. She took on their experiences as though they were her own.
To those working with us, we were just blind. There was no room to show what we had done. We had already been repressed enough.
Many of those of us who identify as autistic come from the empathetic reactions of not only Rozaya, but others who also saw what was happening in the outside world, in that room, in real-time.
In those same years, we would have meltdowns, and underwent behavioral therapy which treated them as nothing more than willful fits. The real cause of our meltdowns was communication difficulties.
We learned early on to repress our difficulties and compensate by emulating our peers. Repression leads to suppression. Suppression leads to dissociation.
Those of us who identify as autistic do so primarily because of those communication difficulties, coupled with things which we will now continue to outline.
In 2016, our dissociation began to vanish, at least in regards to our body and our sensory needs. We began to stim again.
Earlier in life, they would punish us for jumping or bouncing. This too, was dissociated to other insiders, who we eventually found.
Every blow produces a chip. For us, every so-called correction produces repression. Repression produces suppression. Suppression produces dissociation.
As we worked with ourselves and the body we called our own, we discovered that our own fear was what held us back from these other stims, the same fear we felt when we were told to stop bouncing, or to refrain from walking on our toes, or to draw our meltdown as something wrong that we had chosen to do.
All of us within CommunityBelonging who identify as autistic engage in some type of stimming. Is it any wonder why?
We’ve learned to cut back on this now, but in childhood, our passions were all-consuming, and people would call us obsessed.
Many of us who identify as autistic share in this kind of passion for various subjects, and prevent it from being shared with the outside world, since it’s clear to many of us that this, and our other ways of acting and experiencing the world, are not welcome.
We as a whole are not diagnosed with autism. We, the group who I am speaking on behalf of, which is only a fraction of the community, are autistic. This is our reality.