When humanity has no modem

What happens when a full-duplex connection is terminated in one direction? No communication can be had, and then both parties are left with festering anxiety over what hasn’t been communicated. What if the full-duplex connections were both working as intended except the parties could only partially understand each other? There are unique horrors in this scenario. There’s a special kind of sadness, a unique poverty of compassion that happens when someone misconstrues your intentions. This is what it’s like to be autistic. We are trapped in a situation where the others misunderstand us as frequently as we misunderstand them. However, this world wasn’t built for us. And, unfortunately for us humans, we have no modems to make sense of the noise.

Imagine yourself in this position. You’re smart. You’re capable. But you’re also autistic. You’re a fucking weirdo and you know it. People expect you to either be a complete idiot or Rain Man. Anything in-between these poles garners a variety of reactions that are all colored by expectation. They’ll tell you that you should grasp coding without issue. They should know, their autistic cousin went to Purdue and now look at him; he’s working for Google. Sure, the weirdo eats cheese sticks in his boxers all day and would rather watch K-On than touch a woman’s tits, but that’s all besides the point. Their cousin’s a savant and so you should be too. Otherwise, what’s the point in keeping your ass alive?

And when you don’t feed the machine, when you prove that you’re not a gifted coder or a janitor-turned-mathematician they’ll turn around and cast expectations on you they wouldn’t place on themselves. Why couldn’t you be smarter? Look at you, all the autism and without any genius to show. What a fucking disgrace you are. Yet, notice how they never seem to add themselves to this equation. Not sure what I mean? Here, allow me to indulge in the autistic pastime of guiding you through a simple calculus.

The DSM-5, the holy bible of the psychiatric institutions throughout the United States, is a laundry list detailing what’s fucking wrong with us. In this list are dreaded diagnoses such as bipolar and autism. The Good Book details the negatives of autism. The most benign entry is essentially still negative: Great! you don’t slap yourself and you can act marginally normal. Good job, tiger, keep on keeping on with your masked autism. Notice, however, that none of our gifts are ever praised unless taken to the absolute extreme, e.g. Rain Man, Good Will Hunting, etc.

Nevermind the fact that autistics built and continue to build most of the technology (mostly) non-autistics use to pathologize us. They do so without the slightest hint of irony. Nevermind that autistic writers like Emily Dickinson have captivated audiences, or that recent genetics research has found that autistic genes have existed for millennia and are thought to have helped propel the species forward; no, nevermind any of that, because, my little autistic friend, you’ve got a weird way of talking to people.

So, despite our contributions to society, we are primarily judged on our social intuitions. Naturally, this makes sense: we’re a social animal, after all. But we're also intelligent animals when we want to be. As such, you’d think we’d move past such a reductionist duality. Especially when research has shown that non-autistics are fucking terrible at empathizing with autistics and vice versa. Researchers find that, unsurprisingly, autistics demonstrate a strong capability to understand each other and that the same follows for non-autistics interacting with their fellow non-autistics. However, communication breaks down when these two groups try to interact with each other. Why? Well, our brains are wired differently. If one’s fundamental experience of the world and their very method of cognition is different from another’s, it’s going to cause some misunderstandings. Experiencing culture shock when visiting a foreign nation is a similar albeit diluted version of this miscommunication. Except no one (save for white nationalists) would qualify the locals in this foreign land as behaving badly. Yet this is exactly how the behaviors of autistics are qualified.

Our tendencies are misunderstood by non-autistics who lack the capacity to understand why we do what we do. They don’t understand that the screaming autistic kid is screaming because the classroom he’s sitting in is filled with bright fluorescent lighting that cuts through his retina like a knife. Nor do they understand that the fire alarms cause actual fucking pain. They don’t realize that this kid’s got an encyclopedic memory and could out-research them without even trying. They don’t understand that this kid could be extremely useful at recognizing patterns because his lateral thinking abilities are significantly better than his peers’. No. They will only see the screaming child who they deem mentally deficient because he cannot articulate himself to his persecutors.

Think about it: You’re judged by everyone around you. You’re constantly measured up against peers and your actions are scrutinized with a laser focus because you’ve “acted out” before. You become both a scapegoat and a liability. You’re now in the crosshairs and this only makes you act out more because you don’t understand why you’re the target. As far as you know, you’ve only kept to yourself. You don’t like to socialize much because when you’ve tried in the past people treated you like shit. Nowadays, you find hanging with animals at the local shelter to be a much better option. Those animals display their true intentions to you. You understand them and they understand you. Naturally, a bunch of other autistics work there too.

In response, you’re labeled the oddball who’d rather hang out with dogs than people. This behavior is incomprehensible to those who’ve experienced the rejection you have. It’s one thing to be rejected by individuals. It’s a whole other case when the world rejects you. Your parents are constantly berated for having you and your existence seems like a mistake. People are always trying to change your behaviors despite them having an important cause. They don’t realize that your idiosyncratic hand movements are a means of regulating the sensory input flooding your brain. What’s worse is you’re damned if you and damned if you don’t. Non-autistics will pressure you to socialize or ostracize you outright if you refuse. In more extreme cases they may even institutionalize you. But when you socialize you’re repeatedly reminded that you’re a little irredeemable piece of shit who can’t understand the most basic social cues. To make matters worse, the autistics who can pass well enough do so at a cost. They burn out and fall into deep depression trying to force themselves to be something that they’re not.

No matter what you do or how you do it: you’re wrong. You’re wrong because you’re incomprehensible and non-autistics are terrified of those whom they cannot so easily relate to. So, they write myths about us. But we’re not deities in these myths. No, we’re the ones who ruin their lives. Ancient autism mommies would whisper of fairies who’d steal your lovely baby and live in her place. These devilish little fairies would grow as perfect replicas of your precious baby save for the fact that this kid’s hyperlexic and she’s kinda weird. I mean, she speaks in full sentences at three years old and other times she doesn’t speak at all. Also, why does she ask so many questions about the world? Surely, this little imposter is a fairy who’s stolen my good little neurotypical baby and is living in her place. Because even ancient people thought it more believable that their kids were abducted by little magical people than to face the reality that your child’s just different from you.

Ancient autism mommies aside, let’s return to the full-duplex conversation. The math follows that neither communication channel, non-autistic or autistic, can understand what the other is saying. Our software’s fundamentally different, and while the machine-level code can be deciphered, who wants reverse-engineer all that? So, it’s simpler to force normativity. Rather than to compromise and work to understand the foreign software, the communication channel with more wires, the non-autistic channel, will force the other to decode their messages while also complying with their own software. We committed the crime of having been wired differently so we’ve got to do all the work. And when you fail, they’ll say disparaging things about you in a book so that those who you thought would help you most, those who are supposed to be the arbiters of mental health will tell you that you’re the problem. You’re sick but there’s no cure.

So, they will tell you to grow a thick skin and play with some toys if you’re so uncomfortable. They will proceed to say that you’re such a little child because you play with these toys to achieve some modicum of comfort. Worst of all they will blame you for existing. They will gaslight you and swear that you’re the problem. I mean, look at you, you fucking creep. You can’t comply with our rules and we wrote this book. So stop your autistic screaming and get back to work, bitch. I’ve got a story to share and Twitter’s down, so chop-chop!