When I have trouble understanding people, many often reply by saying, “Well, people don’t come with an instruction manual.” Every time, my first thought is “I could easily come with one.” Much like most neurodivergent people, I’ve spent my life trying to understand my brain. I even went so far as to get a degree in Psychology, partially for that reason. When I was a kid, I was diagnosed with ADHD but it wasn’t until last year, when I was 22, that I got diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). The fact that I was diagnosed at an early age with ADHD made it more difficult to realize I was autistic because I just saw that as the source of all my symptoms for a long time. However, it also helped because, when I finally was diagnosed, I already understood all of my symptoms and simply needed to recategorize them into mental boxes for ADHD, ASD, or both. I’ve heard some people describe autism as a special superpower whereas others describe it as a curse they just want gone. For me, it is neither. It is something that does cause me to need help in some areas but not a cure, even if I may encounter days of such pain where I would accept a cure if offered. Instead, I believe that the most effective “cure” for the distress I, and many others, feel is a greater understanding of what autism is and what ableism against the autistic community can look like through my experience. In the past, I’ve found that the art of storytelling is important for understanding, especially for autistic people. It allows us to hear emotions detailed in direct language right alongside the main action instead of being some secret message that we need to decipher. It also employs the “mere exposure effect” which has shown that exposure to something (or someone) that one might not accept or understand can actually decrease bias. Storytelling can normalize exposure to experiences many might not understand and bridge the gaps between one another. Through these stories, I don’t want to create any kind of instruction manual for autistic people because every experience is different. I do, however, want to create an “autistic dictionary” to focus on different phrases in society to show you how they can be seen differently through my autistic eyes. That’s what this is.
Some of these words, defined in the dictionary itself, can coexist in an identity and mainly are used for specificity. For example, a neurotypical person is typically-developing and a typically-developing person is allistic but that doesn’t work in the reverse order. This would mean that someone with only ADHD is not neurotypical or typically-developing but is allistic and someone with only OCD, for example, is not neurotypical but is typically-developing and allistic. Someone can be neurodivergent and still benefit and partake in a neurotypical culture. Someone who is neurodivergent and allistic can still benefit from and partake in ableism against autistic people and autistic people can still benefit from and partake in ableism against other neurodivergent individuals and can even hold internal bias against autistic people. Just because someone has one or multiple neurological disorders doesn’t mean they suddenly understand the experience and ableism of every other neurodivergent person.
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