But You Don’t Look Autistic at All (Bianca Toeps’ Books)

by Bianca Toeps

Autism, that’s what I have.1 You can’t tell from the outside. So when I tell people about it, that’s what I hear all the time: “But… you don’t look autistic at all!”

“Autism – that’s being able to count matches really fast and knowing that 7 August 1984 was a Tuesday, right?”

All autistics I know recognise this. We close ourselves off to stimuli, and then get blamed for not having any empathy.

Children with autism are often taught not to trust their own feelings, so I’m not surprised they say what the researcher appears to want to hear.