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Limits and Being

Autism puts us behind walls.  Some we can move beyond.  Others form the permanent boundaries of our capability.  The territories of specifially allistic neurotypy, while they may not extend in the same directions, are larger than those of autistic people.  Autistic people face challenges that allistic people do not.

There are many and diverse ways to be challenged.  I continually discover nuances to my disability.  I learn every day more about what I cannot do.  I search my boundaries to find the ones I can redraw.  I see from different perspectives that my boundaries are more fixed than an allistic person's are likely to be.  It's easy to become frustrated.

But there are many in the autistic community who are displeased with descriptions of autism as a disability.  They focus on the places within their smaller territories which aren't accessible to most allistic people.  That is: they look at what they can do well that allistic people do less well.  And then they reconceptualize autism as a kind of superability.  

This is a way to deal with the frustration that comes with our limits.  But it isn't my way.  I don't feel like a superpowered person.  The number of things that I may be able to do more easily, if not necessarily better, than a neurotypical person is far smaller than the number of essential, prosocial things that I can't do.  I could feel depressed, and if I did I might be more likely to accept unrealistic descriptions of autism as a superpower.  But, though I am frustrated when I can't comprehend some simple aspect of social interaction, I try to stay emotionally neutral in my self assessment.

It is possible to live one's life preoccupied with concerns of value: good/bad, happy/sad.  And many do, consumed with a desire to avoid bad things and to pursue good things.  Living thus, it might be more conducive to acceptance of self to ignore the special challenges of life on the autism spectrum.  But insofar as one is invested in happiness and self acceptance, which I assert apropos of nothing are not as crucial as many believe, I should point out that our limits make us as much as our freedom may.  And to refuse out of fear to evaluate dispassionately the struggles of our otherness is to deny, for what it's worth, who we are.

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