A Writer Looking to Change the World

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Saturday, September 3, 2022

My Experiences

     The hardest part about being autistic is trying to describe your life to non-autistic people. When you're an autistic person, you don't see yourself as autistic, you see yourself as normal. It's everybody else who's weird. Someone gets mad at you for breaking something, you don't think "Oh god, I'm so sorry," you think, "Why would you put something breakable where it could get knocked over if I wasn't focusing on not breaking it specifically." If you get yelled at for forgetting to do chores, you don't think, "Sorry, I just forgot." or even, "I don't see why the chores are my problem anyway." you think, "I just didn't feel like doing them right now." Being autistic means getting yelled at a lot for things you don't think are your fault, and god help you if you get told you have to do something right this second and you dare to complain about it. They don't see themselves as undoing all you had planned for the day, or taking away mental energy you had budgeted for something else, they see themselves as making you do your fair share. 

     This goes the other way to. Allistic people don't see themselves as being different from you. They can't see your brain working, they just see a person who's mostly normal until suddenly they aren't. I can't speak for allistic people, since I'm not allistic, but I think it boils down to them thinking that everyone thinks like they do. If something's bothering them then it must bother you, so why aren't you doing anything to fix it. 

     I also think a lot of resentment boils down to the fact that most of us aren't living in a world that was built for our needs. I don't have any hard data, but from my time online I get the impression that most people want to work fewer days a week, have a lot more money then they do, have more opportunities to go places, and have more time to spend with their friends and family. Society isn't built to give them more then the bare minimum, and most people are afraid of asking for more for fear the people around them will view them as entitled. So when a person comes along who can't get by on the bare minimum, people don't feel sympathetic, they feel resentful. They can't see what the person asking for more is struggling with, so they don't understand why they need more stuff to succeed. 

     I'm not asking for allistics/neurotypicals to be more sympathetic to people with disabilities. I'm asking them to start demanding more from the world. Think about it, we live in a world where the billionaires horde everything. Do you really think they did anything, in this life or any of their past lives, to deserve so much money? We don't have to wait for the next election to speak up about things that are bothering us, and we shouldn't shut our mouths just because people say it's better to stay quiet. The web has been around for over twenty years, why are we still debating the power of raising our voices. Don't aim to change people, aim to change the world that made them what they are. It's easier they you might think. 

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