"But Why Would You Want To Label Yourself Like That?"

It was one of those moments in which I knew I had to choose between either disclosing (and accepting whatever consequences that entailed) or letting a communication breakdown degrade into something potentially much worse.

Given that I'd been down the ugly road of mounting mutual misconceptions numerous times, with no good ever coming of it, I went for disclosure on that occasion.

The result was...interesting. Not wonderful, not totally horrible, but not particularly good either. And definitely symptomatic of the tremendous amount of ignorance that persists regarding autistic persons, particularly when we happen to no longer be children.

My guess is that autistic persons find ourselves in this situation frequently, whether it be at work, at school, or in any other context entailing non-superficial interaction with others. Sometimes it's a matter of us being faced with the question of whether to disclose for ourselves; other times it's a matter of a parent or partner or someone else who is with us having to make that decision.

But in any case, it is definitely not an easy situation to navigate. And in fact, sometimes our experiences with disclosure can be so awful that we're left back where we were before we even had the information and insight necessary to even attempt disclosure in the first place.

One thing that would help make disclosure more of a useful exercise than an exercise in frustration would be for people to make fewer assumptions about what it means for someone to disclose something like autism. In these situations, the logical thing to do would be to avoid making assumptions and perhaps try to learn a little more about the person you are dealing with -- but unfortunately this is not the most common default response.

When I made the aforementioned disclosure, the response I initially got was something along the lines of, "Oh, why do you want to put a label on yourself?" This was followed by a series of attempts at "reassuring" me of my abilities in various areas (which baffled me as I never once claimed to have no abilities).

And...whatever the intention of these "reassurances", their effect and ultimate implication was anything but reassuring.

Put simply, their effect was dismissive and their implication was that the other person already knew everything he needed to know about me in order to make his judgment -- that judgment being, of course, that I just needed to try harder to do something in the standard way. Even though for that particular task, the standard way was totally inaccessible to me.

And it wasn't as if I hadn't completed the task per its requirements -- I had in fact done this, and I'd done it thoroughly.

So, what was the problem?

Well, essentially the problem had to do with the fact that writing and speech are two different things. My assignment had been, "Provide information about X to Person Y, and copy Person Q when you send the information". I'd done this via e-mail and Person Y had not complained.

Person Q, on the other hand, decided that he wanted a verbal summary of what I'd written. He did not seem to be able to grok that providing him with a verbal summary would require me to find some way to quickly make the material I'd written about accessible to my "speech circuits". And so when I balked at giving him a verbal summary (and he did not seem to even like my suggestion that I come and read him what I'd written verbatim), he got very exasperated. As far as I could tell, he thought I was just being lazy or stubborn or otherwise unreasonable.

So, we're back at the beginning now: at that point, my choice was either to let Person Q go on figuring I was some sort of bizarre prima-donna, or tell him the truth, which was that what he was asking of me literally wouldn't accomplish anything useful.

Very often I can write about something long before I can talk about it aloud; much of the stuff I say aloud (especially if I sound "articulate" in doing so) is stuff I've written about. I've got gigantic text files on my home computer that nobody ever sees, which I just use for processing thoughts into words.

Put simply, my spoken communication -- at least my spoken coherent communication -- sometimes greatly lags what I can do in writing at any given time. And trying to force speech when it isn't ready to come out never leads to anything good -- at best it leads to rambling associative tangents, and at worst (and I have plenty of experience with "at worst") it leads to full-on crying meltdowns, and exits that look a lot more dramatic than I'd like them to, considering by the point that happens I'm generally wishing very much to be invisible.

And...the only thing I've ever, ever found to work in permitting me to use speech communicatively, especially in cases when it really matters that the information I'm meant to convey is accurate, is a combination of writing and time. Which of course means that if someone wants something out of me fast, they're better off just letting me type it.

This isn't 100% true for all autistic people, all the time. But it's true for me, and it was true for me before I'd even heard of autism, let alone been diagnosed on the spectrum. All diagnosis did was put things into context. And that contextualization can be a useful and valuable tool -- so long as it isn't dismissed as merely a matter of my "using a label to limit myself" or something similarly disparaging.

Mind you, I don't think Person Q meant any harm. More likely, he was genuinely baffled by the fact that someone he knew could do this and that thing just fine was "refusing" to do something else which to him seemed totally trivial. And I'm also sure he meant well when he tried to (as he saw it) "encourage [me] to step out of [my] comfort zone". But regardless of what he meant, his comments didn't help me, nor did they get the task accomplished the way he would have preferred.

Now, I know disclosure doesn't have to go badly.

I was in another situation, another time, wherein again I found myself having to either disclose or experience Serious Badness. And that time, the person's response was more along the lines of, "Oh, wow, thanks for telling me, that makes [Anne's seemingly strange reactions to 'mundane' thing] a lot less confusing."

Later I found out that this person actually had an autistic child, and so at the very least she had some experience with the territory. There definitely seems to be a correlation between information (and a willingness to learn and accept new information) and how well someone reacts to a disclosure.

And...all that said, this isn't all just about disclosure.

Disclosure is only an example of a particular issue that can come up for autistic people, regardless of whether we choose to use the word "autism" specifically, or refer generically to "disability", or even just describe our particular individual quirks and processing differences in more precise terms.

What issue is this?

Well, essentially it is the idea that by refusing to acknowledge something (whether in the form of a "label" or even just a description), you can somehow make it go away.

(Side note: I tried for years to avoid acknowledging anything "different" about my configuration; this simply and utterly did not work, and many things in my life consistently went wrong and undone until I got over myself and acknowledged certain things were true.)

This is closely related to (and often goes along with) the idea that anyone who attempts to describe a non-standard configuration or processing feature they happen to have is either Just Trying To Be Special And Different, or Just Trying To Be Lazy And Make Excuses, or some variation on those themes.

(This is not to say that autistic people are categorically immune to excuse-making -- we definitely aren't -- but it is inappropriate and patronizing to just assume someone is making an excuse because they are trying to explain something about themselves indicating an atypical configuration.)

Whether this is because behaviorism had too much influence on common thought a few decades ago, or whether people just find difference terribly inconvenient to work into their worldview, it's hard to say, but regardless, I can think of few things more confounding than the insistence made by some that only two types of people -- typical and "broken" -- exist.

This forces people to either try their best to act in typical ways even when doing so is unhealthy (and often ultimately unsustainable), or to accept a self-concept that often entails a tremendous amount of woe-is-me thinking regarding their configuration.

In truth, this is a false dichotomy.

In truth, there ought to be a general acknowledgment that everyone benefits when educational, social, occupational, and other opportunities are made more flexible and inclusive.

But in order for that acknowledgment to proliferate, individual people need to work toward checking their knee-jerk assumptions upon encountering atypical configurations and the people who live with them all the time regardless of whether or not they are named.