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

by Bianca Toeps

How do you talk to an autistic? First of all, one question at a time, please.

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.

For example, in the case of Elfriede and Margarete, two thirteen-year-old girls he was treating, he attributed their socially unacceptable behaviour to their menstruation. The fact that one of the girls wasn’t even menstruating yet didn’t bother him at all.

Hans Asperger, doing science

Alright, there I was with my autism diagnosis. All of a sudden I knew what was up with me, what kind of books I could start ordering and what I had to work on.

How autistic someone looks doesn’t say much about how autistic someone is. All it does is give an indication of how intelligent someone is and how much that person has been “trained” to show neurotypical behaviour. For that reason, most non-autistic-looking autistics tend to be the people who experience the highest psychological pressure. Their brain is running non-stop on full capacity, their self-monitoring is so internalised the system can’t actually be turned off anymore. A constant flow of information (at best) or heartless self-criticism (at worst) leaves the owner of this brain overworked, burnt-out and depressed.