There are no ends, it’s not a lovely colourful rainbow with one label at one end and another label…

There are no ends, it’s not a lovely colourful rainbow with one label at one end and another label at the other.

There’s another round of an article going around the social media channels where an attempt is made by a non autistic parent to effectively place autistics in conflict with one another. It’s completely unhelpful and is woven through a fabric of tragedy and self pity.

Liberally salted with the language of deficit and lost dreams of parents for the child they wished they had, that never existed and a an absence of any condiment of the language of strengths or skills or genuine appreciation for the actual child they have.

It attempts to place what she calls severe or classic autistic people against the rest of the autistic community. Our very real struggles are dismissed as simple quirks, as though these struggles are virtually a figment of imagination.

They aren’t, that’s the reality of it.

Tiresome is the language of despair, loss, and deficit of non autistic parents about their autistic children. Just plain wrong is the application of the so-called autism spectrum as if it is a line with those fitting one criteria at one end and those fitting another at the other.

When challenged about the fact that the spectrum is not a simple line with two ends, a parent said well it’s a colourful rainbow then. This kind of language is so unhelpful and it makes attempts to place autistic people at a particular point on an imaginary line and imagines that is where they are forever and will never change.

Humans change and develop, this is no less true for autistic humans than non autistic human. What exactly the spectrum is and how to define it is always problematic, it’s difficult, it is hard to conceptualise a visual concept for it. I’ve seen and heard a range of explanations, some quite good but none really conceptualise it in a way that is really clear and really able to be grasped and visualised.

What is true, absolutely for me, an autistic woman, and for many fellow autistics I know, is that, the idea that we occupy a space at one end or the other, indeed any one point along some arbitrary line is a complete fiction. The space on the spectrum we occupy fluctuates and changes from moment to moment, day to day and year to year. It just does.

Functioning labels always seem to be the culprit in positioning us arbitrarily on this imaginary line, but just like every human ever to exist, autistic humans have fluctuating functioning in different areas of life, and they change all the time. Sometimes we are able to function extremely well, negotiate much, navigate sensory input and apply social and executive functions to such a level of prowess that we have levelled at us the statement – ‘but you don’t look very autistic’

And then there are the days we lose our words.

The days we can’t manage to work the washing machine.

The days where answering a phone is like an act of impending doom.

And that’s the thing, functioning for anyone is always transient and never constant. For autistics perhaps the variance or fluctuations are just more severe but, they fluctuate just like everyone else’s functioning.

Please stop, pitting us against each other, characterising us as occupying some imaginary point on a line, and please, for the love of all that is good, please stop imagining that your autistic child is destined to always be at the place they are now, they will grow up, they will learn things, they will find strengths. Please, I implore you to be their best advocate by standing with them, discovering with them, journeying with them to grow and mature and learn and become the best, most authentic, most wonderful human persons they can be.

Just don’t place anyone on an imaginary line. The line doesn’t exist, there is no ends of the spectrum, there’s just humans, with a somewhat different neurological wiring than the non autistic humans have. And you know what, that’s Ok, we’re just different not less, just different.

Support us. Learn with us, from us, and support us. We want to be the best we can be, we don’t want to be a list of deficits or the ghost of some imaginary person you dreamed would be your child.

In the end, we want what all humans want, love and acceptance for who we are. The potential of what we can become is impacted greatly by this.

Acceptance, not awareness, not deficits. Just acceptance.