Autism Acceptance Day 30: The Moral of the Story
TL/DR: Even though Autism Acceptance month is about understanding and accepting those on the spectrum and their strengths and challenges, the real moral is that we need to accept ourselves, too.
I’ve been writing off and on all month about Autism Acceptance and trying to give people a view of Autism from the inside. Going from an older, more severe view of people with autism as being nonverbal, having meltdowns and lacking empathy for others to our more modern view has taken decades. In that time, we have seen that Autism is much more common than we ever knew, and that it wasn’t always the disability that people saw it as. In my lifetime of 51 years, I have gone from being viewed as eccentric, and been let go from jobs because I didn’t fit in or do things in the same way as others, to being seen as an individual with a unique perspective of the world, seeing things that the average person didn’t because of the way my brain processed the world around me. I have gone from people seeing only my deficits as things that need to be corrected, to someone with unique needs.
However, the most difficult part of that 50+ year journey hasn’t been in getting other people to accept me, but learning to accept myself as I am. I spent years looking at how I was different, seeing my idiosyncrasies as negative. I tended to stick to myself because I was different, all the time thinking it was a bad thing not fitting in with everyone else. As I got to Middle School, and the natural cliques started forming, I was on the outside looking in and, other than a few friends I had in my classes, I continued staying away from getting to know many of my peers. I was always more comfortable with my teachers than with those my own age – they accepted me for who I was, and I could rely on how they would react to me and my unique ways of doing things. They would always try to help me develop as a person and not criticize me for doing things differently. But I continued to feel that separation from my peers and could not graciously accept myself as I was.
In high school, I finally learned to ignore what others thought of the way I did things, and started to be more comfortable with myself as I was. I started to realize that I had my own strengths and weaknesses and started to focus more on improving those strengths. I still had my friends that I developed in Middle School, and my little group became bigger with some of their friends that I hadn’t really known before. I didn’t really click with them, but they accepted me as part of the group. It was at this time that I started accepting my differences, and truly becoming the person I was meant to be.
Over the next 17 years, I continued to navigate my own path towards acceptance, and the mental health community started learning more about the Autism Spectrum, and how diverse it really was. Then, on that spring day in 2008, when I finally received my initial diagnosis, I finally was able to understand the first 35 years of my life. I was married to a wonderful woman who saw the kind and giving side of me, I had two wonderful kids who adored their daddy, and saw me as perfect and worthy of their love. And, these things that I always felt that were too good for someone like me, I realized that my uniqueness is why I was blessed with them in my life. I had finally gotten to that acceptance of myself. And, as a teacher of students on the spectrum, I found my purpose in life – to help others come to that same acceptance of themselves and their own superpowers.
So, I want to thank you for reading this, and hope you are a little wiser and more accepting for doing so. And I want to let you know that I will keep my writing free for everyone and anyone who might benefit from reading it. If you are getting something out of what I write, please feel free to share it with others. I would love for my experiences to help others navigate their own paths, and the more people you share it with, the more people that can benefit from it. Or, if you are not subscribed and want to get notified when I post, just hit that “Subscribe now” button above. Anyone can get a free subscription, and I will never put it behind a paywall. However, if you really like my writing, or get important information and are learning from it, you can always get a paid subscription. It’s always nice to be able to stop while I’m out for a coffee, and if you become a paid subscriber, I might even start a donut habit in your honor.
But, no matter if you’re a paid or free subscriber, or just passing through, I want to say this to you:
I hope for you to be happy, be kind, and know how much I appreciate you. - Dave