If you understand autism, you are autistic.

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To understand autism, you have to think like an autistic person, and therefore you have an autistic mind and are autistic. So anyone who wants to be part of the autistic community is autistic.


I don't want to live with anyone who isn't autistic because as nice or pleasant or fun or good as they are, they are only nice, pleasant, fun or good in a NT way. They just don't understand autism. When I feel bad and they try to correct the problem, they just make it worse and give me more problems to be upset about, because they don't understand the way I operate. I don't want to live with any of them. Many of them are otherwise very good people, but they're bad for people on the spectrum. It's bad matches and stuff.


I left my parents (I thought my dad was autistic but since he isn't part of the community, he's not) because they didn't understand me. Now I'm scared about living with Adverb/Jack's NT mother like we will be soon. (It was just me and Adverb before and then me and him and our new son, and now the 4 of us lived together for about 2 weeks and his mother is getting a new house soon and we'll all live there, but if we're there we'll have family obligations and all that. Social obligations. Things that might involve faking/saying stuff we don't mean at his mother's insistence, and will destroy my soul. But where else will we live?


I don't know what to do.


Am I a Nazi?

You slaughter jews???
Sorry had to.
No good advice for you.

That could be my signal to leave, but I'm tenacious, so I'll stay.

Anyway, Ana, no, you're not a Nazi. I understand your predicament. You are thinking in very black-and-white, all-or-nothing terms. I can understand the feeling that having to fake stuff will destroy your soul, but it won't. Sometimes, everyone has to put on a face. It's the human condition. The main thing is not to make it a way of life.

I am autistic and married to an NT man who is the love of my life. Somehow, he gets what's going on with me, even though he is not on the spectrum. This is because he loves me and wants me to be myself. Whenever I think I'm screwing things up, he reminds me that the only way I can screw things up is if I stop being myself. If I'm not myself, he doesn't have a partner. Makes sense to me.

There are many sensitive NT people who can be supportive if you let them. I have wonderful NT friends--not lots of them, but what I lack in quantity I make up for in quality.

Yeaahh I think that way too. It just seems so wrong. You're of course right in saying that it won't actually kill us to 'fake it'. I had to write myself a paper a few months ago about why working on my flaws wasn't a bad thing because I was afraid it was going to make me someone that I am not.

Of course auties and aspies can understand their own diagnoses, takes one to know one.

Conversely, if you're not autistic, you can't really understand autism. You can only understand it intellectually, the way I can only really understand social behavior in an intellectual way.

Otherversely, if you don't understand NTs, you obviously are not one.

I am wondering how it's even possible to "fake it" by saying things you don't mean at someone else's insistence at a family gathering?

Perhaps it's possible to be diplomatic somehow without faking it?

I don't agree with this. We can make general, blanket statements about what NT traits are, and what they are like generally. But you can't make specific statements about what any individual NT is or isn't. Individuals can be very sensitive and supportive.

The NTs that have loved me and done things for me have been better in the relationship than I was. They can love unconditionally, and accept a lot of difficulty to be with you. Their ability to love generously and live through their relationships makes them very positive forces to have in your life. I think that I would rather work with an Asperger individual but live with an NT, any day.

My NT partners were much better to me in the relationships than I was to them. I never had anywhere near the flexibility and patience and ability to put up with distractions and disturbances, that they do/did.

I have found this too be true as well. My husband gets me most of the time. Even though he's NT (although I suspect sometimes that he's more AS than me). My boss gets me. Although I'm sure one day that coping with my social issues will get old, he never seems to mind fixing stuff for me. I have a few NT friends, but they have some AS qualities, so maybe that's why we get along.

My husband reminds me all the time that he doesn't think of me as autistic, but it's always there. I think he doesn't realise how autistic he's become living with me. He's reminded when I have a meltdown over an issue that I can't think through. He remembers when I take an awesome photo. He's reminded when I "waste" a whole day doing something that he doesn't really get. He's still supportive, just extra tolerant, too.

It's hard for people to understand thinking in pictures. It's hard for them to understand that you have to have the pictures in order to know how to act/behave/function/live. It's hard for them to understand a brain that thinks in spiderwebs where every thing is ultimately connected to something else. I'm constantly reminded of my strange spider web thinking patterns. I'm constantly evaluating whether it's really connected or just connected in some weird way in my brain only.

Does it take one to know one? Definitely. No one else can understand how we think. How we feel. They can't begin to understand how we over feel or under feel every sensory input we have. Only someone else on the spectrum can get that.

Ephemerella, those people understand autism and while they may also understand NTs, they're still autistic. They're just also NT.


YNesh said: "I am autistic and married to an NT man who is the love of my life. Somehow, he gets what's going on with me, even though he is not on the spectrum. This is because he loves me and wants me to be myself. Whenever I think I'm screwing things up, he reminds me that the only way I can screw things up is if I stop being myself." Neshamaruach, the same goes for your husband. And also, neshamaruach, I don't undrstand how you can value being yourself but also value the ability to fake things. Also, I AM thinking about leaving.

I agree with that part. People that try to make me feel better just make things worse.

to the OP:

Yeah I pretty much agree with the basic premise: if you understand autism, you're on the spectrum. We would understand it from an insider's point of view. Non-ASD folks who are very understanding can understand autism in an intellectual way, from an outsider's point of view. We can learn a lot from those understanding non-ASD folks, just as they can learn a lot from us. That way, if we can somehow combine the insider and outsider point of view, we'll have a better overall picture of what the whole deal is about.

As for the bit about accepting yourself vs. faking the social skills to get by in life, I kinda think of it more like this: say we're at home, no faking, in our comfort zone and doing our routines and being content... but then we also have to go out and work, and part of working is interacting with people who aren't like us. So the faking of social skills is a major tool, but at the same time just one of the many tools we have to use to get our job done. Then we go home, depressurize and lick our wounds, so to speak, in the safety of our burrows. It's important to know when we have to work, but also when it's time to give it a rest.

As a consequence I think it's neither possible and nor healthy for an ASD person to keep up the social skills 100% of the time. Not only would we lose the benefits from having ASD (and there are numerous), we'd be so angry and upset with the world all the time and be exhausted and irritable it just wouldn't be good at all. I mean, why do you think we have meltdowns in the first place?? Too much work and not enough burrowtime.

I value it because it allows me to fulfill some of my purposes in this world. For instance, one of my "special interests" is helping people. I absolutely love it. It makes me feel wonderful. To do this, I have to go into my community and sometimes, I have to put aside how I'm feeling and thinking and just be there for someone else. So when someone I'm serving asks "How are you?" I don't give them the whole song and dance. I say, "I'm doing pretty well, and how are you?" I may not be doing pretty well at that moment, but they don't have to hear it. They need to feel seen and heard and cared for. Sometimes, oftentimes, it's not about me.

Sometimes, the face you put on allows you to do something that comes from a deepr and wiser place inside yourself. That's what I've found.

The main thing is to be in control of it--to know when you're doing it, and why.

I dont see this, you're seeing it from a very aspie point of view (which is entirely understandable) I have no dobt that very few aspies/auties could adequately understand how I go through my life as an ADHD person. You guys just cant epathise with my occasioonl need to just do things, to talk to everyone, to make up wild stories. I, however, being closer to NT in the empathy stakes, can uderstand why you guys hate small talk, don't like to lie, struggle with social situations.

In short I dont think you have to be autistic to understand Autism. I do, however think you ahve to be at least close to NT to understand NT's.

Or Gypsies, Homosexuals, Slavic People (EWWW Eastern Front of WW2 between USSR and Axis powers..)

I don't think either of you understand _my_ autism. I don't think I understand most of the members' autism either. I think you're making extreme overstatements if you think "the community" understands you. We see posts all the time from members here who think no one understands them (including other members) and we see confused posts from members who don't understand what they're responding to.

It's called a spectrum for a reason. If you know one person on the spectrum (yourself), you know _one_ person on the spectrum. Maybe two or three if you're lucky.