Autistic Pride Day.

It’s June 18 and right in the middle of LGBTQQIA+ month we have another special day. It’s autistic pride day. It’s important. We autistic people use this day to proclaim Pride. Pride not in that we have what is deemed a condition outlined in the bible of mental health conditions the DSM, but, in who we are as human persons.

Autistic Pride day, is a day we reclaim the word Autistic from being something that has negative connotations, we reclaim it is an identity. This is of course, extremely wrapped up in our belief we are in fact not broken, not sick, not wrong, not disordered but simply we are different not less.

Autistic Pride day, stands out in contrast to the pathology bound negative campaigns of Autism Awareness campaigns of April. Where people light up blue to raise awareness about us, because in their view there is something inherently wrong and broken about us. We are such a broken and terrible representation of humanity that people must be aware.

April is for many autistic people a month of horror. Due to our differences in social communication many of us maintain a lot of our connections via social media connections, and we are throughout April confronted continuously with ads and posts about being aware of us, Bewareness campaigns abound.

Thanks to the algorithms social media sites run our feeds are full of this type of post, we simply can’t escape it. Well, we can, by essentially cutting ourselves of of social media for the month, yet, even then, the print media, the television media, are rampant with stories about autism and how terrible it is.

April is a fresh level of hell for many a proud autistic person, and it feels like it lasts for a year. I couldn’t count the number of times I saw a post from an autistic friend asking ‘is April over yet?’

Autistic Pride day, stands in contrast to all of this. It’s where we declare ourselves just as complete and fully human as a allistic person is. It’s when we declare no we don’t have something, autistic is who and what we are.

We are proud, because yes we are different, but we are proud, because we understand why we are different, and that it is perfectly ok. This is not to pretend that we don’t have our own struggles, we do. It’s not to say our life is perfect, it isn’t. But that doesn’t detract from the reality that we are proud to be fully human autistic people just like others are proud to be fully allistic human people.

We claim the autistic moniker with pride, it provides us with answers, insight and understanding about ourselves, our relationships and interactions with others, and how and why life has often been something of an incomprehensible maze to negotiate, particularly prior to receiving a diagnosis.

Autistic Pride Day, it reminds us of all those ah ha moments we have been able to have since diagnosis. It’s a day we can reflect back and realise and understand why some things went wrong, or why we responded to situations in ways we did.

Throughout the year, we are autistic people are bombarded with a narrative around autism that is inherently negative. It is focused on causes and cures. It is impregnated with a sense of parents as martyrs just for parenting us. It is a narrative that is spoken, mostly, by non autistic voices talking about autism, as experts and consultants, and diagnosticians, and therapists and so on. They speak like they know what it is actually like when they in fact have, in most situations, zero lived experience of being autistic.

Throughout the year, a community of parents, who label themselves Autismmom and AutismDad post relentlessly to social media about how terrible it is to have an autistic child, they video their kids in distress and post it to facebook and YouTube and hope it goes viral.

The light relief to the horror of these autism parent communities is that whilst they claim their autismmommy title with claim they react with horror if you call their child autistic. No they’re not autistic they have autism, autism doesn’t define them, they are more than their autism.

Well duh. In a sense this is right, I’m left handed, but I am more than my left-handedness, I am a transgender lesbian woman, and I am more than my transness and lesbianness. I’m a runner, but I am more than just a runner.

And yet, autism does define us. It does so, because everything about me, my relationships, my work, my writing, my communication, my thoughts, my feelings, my everything is through a filter of being autistic.

I suppose it is like a filter that permeates everything I do, think, say and feel. It is not something I can put down. I don’t carry it around in a bag with me and so in a very real sense, yes I am defined by my autism.

It’s Autistic Pride Day, and it is with Pride that I proclaim myself Autistic. It is with Pride that I say I am different not less. It is pride that I say nothing about us without us. It’s autistic pride day and yes I am proud.

Because, for something like 40 years of my life I did believe I was broken, I walked this journey of life in a state of believing I was somehow wrong, broken, a failure and never able to amount to anything. I spent my time never understanding why it was that I always said the wrong thing, was the last one to pick up on the social cues in a situation, why it was I always got the social interaction so wrong that I ruined relationships.

Autistic Pride day, it allows me to say, no to all of that and to reclaim my life, all of it, my past, my present and my future as an autistic person and not a broken wrecked and doomed to fail person.

Autistic Pride Day, it exists, because we are proud.

Autistic Pride Day, we are proud because we are human just like you.

Autistic Pride Day, because:

We are Different Not Less!