Is it a part of YOU?

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That doesn't make any sense about autism not being part of you. Brown hair is part of me, blue eyes is part of me, large breasts are part of me, being a mother is part of me, having freckles is part of me, liking video games is part of me, writing is part of me, anxiety is part of me and so is OCD and autism and my learning style.

If I was 30 lbs overweight, that excess fat would be a part of me too.
Wouldn't make it any kind of attribute though.

TL;DR: I do indeed consider autism to be a part of me, the question is rather open ended though and it gets quite existential.

This does lead to the quite existential question of what "you" are. Some disorders are present since birth (like autism) and some are developed from life experiences (like PTSD) so they can be a product of nature and/or nurture, and those are also the two factors which determine who you are by any objective measure. If you were born with a different genetic code and raised in different circumstances then you would be a different person, and in order to not have any of your disorders then that would require different nature and/or different nurture. Identical twin statistical studies show that autism is strongly linked to DNA but it's not a 100% correlation (it's closer to 70%) so clearly environmental factors play a role too, this means that autism is a product of both nature and nurture.

What is defined as you anyway?
Is it your personality? If that's the case then my neurological disorders have effects on my personality and if I didn't have them then I would act so differently that I may seem like a different person.
Is it your DNA? All of my disorders are genetic and also that's pretty absurd because it would mean that identical twins are the same person.
Is it the atoms that make you up? The collection of atoms that created this post is currently in the form of an autistic person, those will almost all be replaced with new ones in the next decade or so though and everyone will still consider me the same person when that happens.
Is it the way your brain is wired? Autistic brains are wired differently then neurotipical ones.

One could also argue that the things that make up "you" are the aspects about yourself that you can change. My interests, the things I wear, the things I say, the kind of person I am, my values, and all that kind of stuff makes up me while things I can't change like my disorders and my looks are not me. At this point it really becomes a debate about free will.

This is an open question, but the way I see it these disorders are in the brain which is the organ that people can agree is where the things that make up "you" are. Since neurological disorders exist in the brain then to me it seems that they are pretty inseparable for you. In order to get rid of them a change would have to be made to the brain and since the brain is "you" in a very objective sense then it would be changing you. It's possible to change someone's personality by making physical changes to the brain too, like people who go from violent to peaceful or visa versa after a brain injury. I see no objective way to put your disorders and "you" in different categories. This whole issue gets a lot more complicated when you introduce the idea of a soul but that's a conversation for another day.

This is not to say that a cure for autism would be some horrible thing, it has the potential to help a lot of severely disabled people and unless the proposed solution is to abort potentially autistic embryos and as long as it's not using resources collected via dehumanizing "awareness campaigns" (I'm looking at you Autism $peaks) then I think that it's at least worth looking into. I am a centrist on the cure vs acceptance issue, autism is a disability but at the same time it's not entirely tragic and getting rid of the negative stigma around it would help a lot of people.

If you don't want to consider your disorders as a part of you, then I have no quarrel with that. It really comes down to if you want to include a description of how you are different from the majority of people in the way you describe yourself. If it makes you feel worse about yourself to think of yourself in those terms then there is really no reason to do it. This debate is a very open ended one given the amount of existential and rhetorical questions surrounding it, so there really is no right or wrong answer.

That's just my take on the topic.

It is an interesting philosophical discussion, mikeman. I'm more interested in personality and identity than purely mechanical aspects. The "ghost in the machine", so to speak (not that I subscribe to that theory, just a useful analogy).

The big difference here does seem to be how I relate it to autism.

Yes. It's one of the cogs on how I 'operate', and one of references I have which I choose to take advantage on.

As I choose "master" myself: I master my whole body, my senses, my emotional reactions, my own neurology. Then those around me. THAT is me, my choice, and may or may not be something to do with being autistic.
Just because I'm sensitive that doesn't mean delicate -- that's my choice.
If someone isn't pleased, do they have a hold on me on my current position? And would I ignore or listen? Would I justify myself or agree to anything? My wisdom and skills could only answer to that.

I don't just overcome things, I choose to surpass them.
I'm still an aspie as much as I'm still a female, but what truly defines me is how I deal with it -- I'm a cry-now-laugh-later person.

In each and passing time, my 'past self' die only to be reborn in each present. Those past selves merge into the one present, then the present becomes past, and merge into the current present.
And there is no use on "What could have been if you were born an NT", whether you project them as superior or inferior or neither.

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Autism describes how I interact with other people. It also describes how I interact with my environment and my own body and even the way I think. It is not a thing in and of itself. Rather, it is an umbrella term for all those various attributes I have for which I happen to be at one extreme compared to people whose neural anatomy and function is typical. Because they are a part of me and "Autism" is the label given them, that label is in some way a part of me in the same way as the name of my hair color, the numerical description of my height, the prescription of my corrective lenses, and so on.

Autism affects how i interact with the world, with people; often times when i decide to do or not do something, my autism influences my decision.

AS is a part of my personality; a decent part, a noticeable part even, but not most of it, let alone all.

I believe that my personality will change if (that's indeed if) my autism gets removed (i wont use "cured" as it isn't a disease to be cured).
It will not, however, make me an entirely different person

A lisHere, I understand what you are saying. For me personally, Autism is part of my identity. It is a huge contributing factor in every area of my life including my personality. I was also diagnosed a year and a half ago at the age of 47. I am curious about something. I wonder if being diagnosed as an adult makes a difference in how one feels about his or her Autism. I wonder if those of us who tend to see it as a big part of our identity, if it is more common that we were diagnosed older and if those who don't see it as their identity tend to have been diagnosed much younger. I wonder if that is a contributing factor to each way of thinking.

You make a good point Rebel. I feel similar to you. I knew who I was for 45 years and my quirks and issues were just part of who I was. I had no reason to believe that anything "abnormal" had caused them. I knew I was different but did not understand that I had an actual differently created physiology. At times I I wondered and guessed that maybe I did, because I was so odd, but I did not actually know. So I was just me with no words attached to why I was me. It was just who I was and my identity was that. So at 45 when I learned what Autism Spectrum and Misophonia were and at 47 when I was given the diagnosis, my identity as to who I was as a person was already well ingrained and all of my Autistic and Misophonic issues were a deep rooted part of that.

I wonder if I had been diagnosed as a toddler and spent my entire life in therapies and programs being taught that Autism is something that I have and that the issues I have are because of something that I have, rather than just understanding that the issues that I have are part of who I am as a person and finding out much later in adulthood that they happen to be caused by brain development differences called Autism and Misophonia, I might have a different view on this topic. Even though I respect any Autist to refer to himself or herself as s/he chooses, I call myself an Autistic person rather than a person with Autism because Autism is a main part of my identity. I much prefer identity first language to person first language in this case for myself and I get very upset if people insist that I call myself a person with Autism. I will never do that.

When I was disgnosed at age 55 and looked back on my life I noticed that autism played a role in pretty much all the key decisions and turning points in my life. I am different then most of the older diagnosed here in that my diagnosis did not come after intense self reflection and self diagnosis. It came after a sibling intervention. In recent years I did have an inkling I might have Aspergers but it was nothing more than a mild curiosity. I had looked down on psychology most of my life, thought self reflection was unmanly. I only agreed to the assesment because I was flailing and failing and stuck. I felt in no position to refuse the judgment of people who were having normal success in life job and families etc. The looking back over my life and the aspie/autistic identity were things that just kind of naturally happened.

As a cancer patient I am in the position to make the Autism/cancer comparison. Cancer has greatly affected my life so in that sense it is a big part of me now. But it is like a foriegn invador and it came recently so I do not identify as cancerous. Autism has always been there and will be there until I die if not longer.

ASPartofMe, I just noticed how appropriate your screen name is in this thread!

You make good points in your last post. It made me think about how many decisions I have made that have formed me as a person that were directly related to my issues with Autism. It is astounding when you sit back and think of it. If I did not have the sensitivities that I have, if I did not have have the social impairments that I have, if I understood and perceived things differently than an Autistic person does, some of the decisions I would have made would have been completely different than the ones I did make. They would have put me in different social circles and my personality and who I am as a person would have developed much differently. Even some of my choices of sports, interests and activities were rooted in many ways by how much social interaction or sensory stimuli I would have to face or endure or by how I understood and processed the concepts presented.

The way that I related to and communicated with people since infancy had a huge impact on decisions I made and how I developed as a person. All this ties in as well with the thread that we are talking about what personality is and how that affects us and whether ASD is significant in creating or developing our identities. We could even combine these two threads together. But the more I review my life, the more I see how big a part ASD played in me being the unique person that I am. If I did not have ASD, I would most likely have been a very different person.

For one, I would not have been excluded from the social circles that I tried to be a part of. I would not have been bullied the same way that I was and my self esteem would have been very different enabling me to make different decisions. I would have probably chosen to participate in events that had much more sensory stimulation which would have shaped my view of things differently and given me experiences that might have made me a different person. So I think that ASD plays a huge part in all of this. And like I mentioned before, if I had been diagnosed as a small child, I would have probably been taught that ASD is not part of my actual identity but something that I have that is more of an entity outside of myself as a person. That way of thinking would have made me develop very differently than I did as well. Personally I prefer believing that ASD is part of my identity because it is not something that will go away and it affects everything about me.

@skibum, from my perspective you hit the bulls-eye with that answer. My life now is nothing like it was when I was in my 20's & early 30's. Back then I was only aware of maybe one or two very narrow diagnoses I had then, such as the audio processing delay I was diagnosed with when I was 22. Because I didn't know, I made what now appear to be poor decisions; to put it bluntly I set myself up for failure over and over again. Now my life is largely structured around my symptoms and that of my children. That's not necessarily to say that these are *shortcomings* though - who is to say that a loud, always social, scratchy, distracting, intuitive-communication environment or life is the "correct" one? Only the majority, who happen to be NT. And what I've found is that by shaping my world to fit me better (rather than everyone else's expectations) I don't have to expend so much energy on surviving. This leaves me free to enjoy life from one moment to the next. There are two negatives, but I feel they are worth the balance. One is that despite being an introvert I sometimes *need* more social contact than I can handle or enjoy. The other is that I have to stay aware and try to push myself just a little on a regular basis. It's far too easy for me to start shrinking my world to avoid discomfort until it's about the size of my side of the bed or maybe my desk chair. I think that just like with muscles & tendons, it's important to stretch all our abilities often.