My First Ever Autism Post

This post I initially put on Facebook on April 2nd (Autism Acceptance Day) This was my first time ever writing about my experience as an autistic person.

So today is Autism Acceptance Day (more commonly known as Autism Awareness Day, but that term is terrible because who the hell isn’t aware of the term autism?), and as many of you know already, I am autistic. And this month is also World Autism month, so I’m going to spend a lot of this month posting up things I have written about autism, as well as posting up videos or articles by other autistic people.

I was diagnosed with autism in the year 2010, but as soon as I was, I went into a very deep denial. It seemed like very few things could be worse than being autistic. But in 2021, when the pandemic had been going on for a year, I developed a strong anxiety about things going “back to normal”. And that’s how I finally realised that I was really autistic, autism often involves what is called a need for sameness, and the lockdown made every day pretty much the same, and I found the unchanging nature of my life almost addictive. I was very frightened of things going back the way they were. (Incidentally now that lockdown’s over I’ve adjusted pretty well, and can now see that the good side of coming out of the lockdown outweighs the bad, and like most of you, I hope I never see another lockdown!)

So when I came out of denial of my autism diagnosis, lasting over ten years, my first question was why the denial? Why did I percieve autism as being so bad? I thought I was fully accepting of who I am and would never go into such denial. But it all started to make sense when I began learning more about an utterly horrible human being called Andrew Wakefield.

Andrew Wakefield is a con artist who propagated the idea that the MMR vaccine causes autism. The reason he did this is because he had a patent on a vaccine specifically for measles, not mumps or rubella, and if he could convince people that the MMR vaccine was bad he hoped people would want his vaccine instead. Because of this the rate of vaccines went down and measles infections went up (his lies had the effect of convincing parents not to get any type of measles vaccine for their children, not just the MMR).

So this is a horrible truth I have been carrying around in my head for years. If many (by no means all) parents are given a choice between their child being autistic, and their child having the measles, a disease which kills people, they will choose measles. So for years I have known that autism is supposedly so bad that a potentially fatal illness is better. It wasn’t a mystery any more then, it’s no wonder I went into denial.

But accepting who I am made me a much happier person. I was very emotionally repressed when I was in denial, ashamed of the ways my brain was different from other people’s, but now I love my differences. The world would be a horrible, cold and lifeless place if we were all the same, it’s about time people stopped wishing to eliminate the differences that make humanity so interesting.