this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2025
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As the years go by and I approach my {redacted}'s, I am frequently reminded of and learning of ways in which my parents were both smarter and stupider than I ever could have known.
My mom can accurately describe a dozen different behaviors that I expressed throughout my childhood that indicated add or autism or something, yet still she was (and still is) adamant that I am a perfectly normal human being. I can't tell if she's just trying to be supportive in her own dysfunctional way, or if she can't accept that she produced a defective offspring. She is responsible for the quote "I don't need a doctor's permission to be weird", and I fucking love that.
It's an inheritable condition. It's very common for parents of autistic/ADHD kids to think they're 'normal', because their idea of 'normal' is themselves or their own parents, who also have them.
From someone who's on the spectrum to another: To classify a difference in focus or a difference in processing as a defect is inaccurate. "If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will go through life believing it is stupid". There are things that come naturally to neurodivergent brains of which neurotypical brains are utterly incapable. "Hyperfixation" is just a way of saying that we become subject matter experts faster than other people. Even the reviled "attention deficit" is just our mind getting bored of things we've seen before. You are an explorer of the cosmos. If someone else says you are less, just because you find it difficult to care about the meaningless monotony of social constructs, that is a limitation not of you, but of them. Fuck 'em. Find your superpower, and follow it.
I figured out that I am preternaturally talented at classifying bits of knowledge and drawing them together to form syllogisms and comparisons. This has made me find my life's work in teaching chemistry. I get go be paid to be an alchemist, teaching the arcane secrets of the universe to students, showing them how we have learned to bend the very fundaments of reality to our will. I think that's pretty neat.
Traditionally, some autistic people passed as being within the range of normal.
And while you could call your autism a straight up defect, you should then be fair to yourself and recognize how many defects non autistic people can have.
I wouldn't say aggressive assholes, unrelenting blackout drunks, and gamblers who put their family in poverty are less defective even though they frequently pass as normal intermittently through life. There's the nature vs. nurture argument, but as far as I've heard there's a big factor of predisposition to these things. Someone more educated might know.
Either way, if you manage to live with your autism even remotely well, I'd say there are much more debilitating defects you could have started with. Could also mention conditions often suspected of normal-presenting people, like narcissism and psychopathy, and also things like suceptibility to religious delusion, willingness to oppress, and finding cruel political strongmen appealing. Those last two are terrible defects.
I feel very much that the gap of what is normal have narrowed a LOT in my 50 years. Especialy in school. While there are laws that say everyone should have adapted teaching, it is just more and more classrom and less and less practical work. With a lot more burocracy for teachers. (Norway)