The Autists Quotes

“But deficits and disabilities only exist in relation to an environment where some other way of functioning has been chosen as the yardstick. An autistic person - or one with any form of otherness - only becomes an anomaly when she tries to fit in. Beyond any and all contexts, she is complete in herself.”
― Clara Tornvall, Autisterna: om kvinnor på spektrat

“If I hadn’t been so smart, they might have noticed something sooner. Intelligence can compensate for so much. When others perceive you as intellectually clever, they struggle to understand that you can have all these problems. It doesn’t add up that someone who is good at thinking can fail so utterly at things that are easy for others.”
― Clara Törnvall, The Autists: women on the spectrum

“Habit leaves us numb and robs us of our capacity for awe.”
― Clara Törnvall, The Autists: women on the spectrum

“Yet the autistic woman is not masking with the intention of being deceitful. Her true self is invisible even to her own person. She is masking to fit in, and doing so unconsciously. Often, she doesn't even understand that she has been camouflaging herself until she gets her diagnosis. Before that, she thinks her struggle is everyone else's, too. At least, that's what it was like for me.”
― Clara Tornvall, Autisterna: om kvinnor på spektrat

“Some doubt the power of fiction to touch us to the core and influence our feelings and behaviours. They have never seen an autistic girl watch the same episode of a tween show on repeat, memorising each line so she can speak to her friends in the schoolyard.”
― Clara Törnvall, The Autists: women on the spectrum

“Without knowing it, I was studying social interaction through the books, TV shows, plays, and films that I devoured. They were my study materials. I would often borrow lines and exchanges from them, not because I wanted to put on an act but because the words went straight into my mind and lodged themselves there, helping me understand some nuance better. For me, cultural consumption was never an escape from reality. It was a way of getting closer to reality, of better understanding it, conquering it.”
― Clara Törnvall, The Autists: women on the spectrum

“Empathy researchers differentiate between cognitive and emotional empathy, where autists may have a lack of cognitive empathy — that is, they don’t immediately understand how to react in a certain situation, what the different roles are, or what is expected of them. An outsider may mistake this for coldness. But autists have no lack of emotional empathy — the ability to feel compassion, or affective empathy, which is to feel what the other person feels. On the contrary, autists feel very strongly for others, and many show great civil courage. Often, those feelings can become so overwhelming that the autist risks being completely consumed by the other person’s emotions, making them her own.”
― Clara Törnvall, The Autists: women on the spectrum

“I will never perceive the world habitually, because I am constantly taking in new details. Every day, the streets are new and untrodden.”
― Clara Törnvall, The Autists: women on the spectrum