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

by Bianca Toeps

social reality is a construct, a set of rules that the players determine together.

Autistics among each other usually have far fewer communication problems. We find each other online, recognise each other’s struggles and talents and form friendships in which we don’t have to wear masks, where it’s okay not to go to someone’s birthday and where no one is shocked by blunt remarks.

Insecure because the neurotypical behaviour has been so exhaustingly pounded into me, I sometimes honestly don’t know who I am anymore.

According to the Markrams, more connections are being made in the autistic brain and brain cells respond more emphatically to each other. There’s a stronger response to stimuli, thoughts run rampant quicker. In short: the world is extremely intense for autistics.

The lack of social interaction in autism may therefore not be because of deficits in the ability to process social and emotional cues, but because a sub-set of cues are overly intense, compulsively attended to, excessively processed and remembered with frightening clarity and intensity. Typical autistic symptoms, such as averted eye gaze, social withdrawal, and lack of communication, may be explained by an initial over-awareness of sensory and social fragments of the environment, which may be so intense, that avoidance is the only refuge.”5

To all neurotypicals who like to be looked in the eye: when an autistic doesn’t look you in the eye, it’s not a sign that they’re not trustworthy or that they’re being disrespectful.

If an autistic doesn’t recognise you in the street, that doesn’t mean you haven’t made an impression. He or she probably just has difficulty connecting one context to another. You don’t expect someone who belongs in the library at a carnival. Duh.

Is not adapting to social circumstances an autistic problem? Or is it perhaps the polite, but insincere behaviour of neurotypicals that we struggle with? Isn’t it actually very strange to lie when someone asks what you think of their new shoes, or to keep acting nice to someone you really can’t stand? Although some adaptability can be a useful social lubricant, I think that if you adapt too easily, you aren’t true to yourself.

To everyone who feels they have to pretend to be something they’re not and who is constantly afraid to step on people’s toes I’d like to give this piece of advice: find better friends. You deserve it.

The notion that people with autism might experience more stress due to a day that’s been planned down to the hour (because the more that’s been planned, the more that can go wrong) is lost on them.

The issue autistic people have fought for for years has finally been added – as the very last symptom on list B of the DSM-5. The one thing which, to me and many others, is the most important aspect of our autism: hypo- and/or hypersensitivity to stimuli.

Usually the person who seems to be functioning just fine, the one who appears to be doing well in society, is fighting to just keep their head above water.

Autistics who get better at learning how to “act normal” only end up spending more and more energy doing so.

People who have recently been diagnosed with autism often don’t even know their own boundaries anymore; the uncomfortable feeling is so omnipresent, that listening to it seems like an impossible task.