Chapter 4: I’m not autistic, I’m Sarah
Fall/Winter 2021–22
Finally, something is starting to make sense. Other autistic people’s stories resonate with my experience and I feel like I am starting to understand myself more. “No wonder people respond to me like this”…“ah, I see.” It feels like a homecoming.
But then that novel feeling of finally finding a category I could fit into started to wear off. The more autistic people I met or followed, the more my autistic bubble started to strengthen. Lists of what we are like circulating, tid bits of why we are valuable fueled my excitement of realizing I am not the problem.
But my relief soon started to wear off, as the binary thinking that so many of us loath started to creep in. If neurodivergent people are not the problem, maybe neurotypical people are. If autistic people have a hightened sense of ethics and truth seeking, does that make neurotypical people unethical liars? If our overusage of deeper empathy is confused with lacking the superficial empathy, well, then that’s too bad for the less authentic people of the world.
I didn’t like this narrative either but I couldn’t turn it off, neither in my own head, nor in my social media feed. On top of this, there is a lot to commit to when ordering an identity off the menu. One must say they “are” autistic not that they “have autism”. One must fight against “ableism” while at the same time embracing our “super powers”. It became just as exhausting as masking.
Eventually, the austic people I once enjoyed sparring with began making me feel drained. As a person who is obsessed with the process of sensemaking it felt too cheap to have an off the shelf sensemaking card. And all of my obsession with context, which is shared by many austic people started to feel hypocritical, which is ironic, given how we hate hypocrisy. The solution to my identity crisis was giving me a new type of identity crisis. “I am not austic, I am just Sarah,” I cried.