Going Through Life with Autism
For most of my teenage years, I used to say "A" when I was talking about my autism, substituting the letter "A" for "autism" or "autistic" because I didn’t want to say the actual word. This is because I don’t like to even think about autism unless I’m talking or writing about it in a way that might help people understand autism better. Now that I’m grown up and more mature, I can use the word "autism" or "autistic" without hesitation. There are occasional days when I don’t even think about autism; I just go about living my life, which I think is good.
I’ve learned how to write "social stories" to help deal with difficult areas in everyday living. Social stories have helped me learn how to act at a job interview, how to behave properly at the grocery store, how to treat a guest, and how to joke around in a way that other people think is funny. Social stories have really helped me reduce autistic behaviors. Autistic people always have difficulty with social situations, no matter how much training they receive. This is the nature of autism: things we have to work hard to learn are often things that come naturally to other people. This is an ongoing battle for me and needs to be addressed constantly. If it’s not one thing, it’ll be another. As old problems get solved, new autistic problems always seem to arise. Social situations are sometimes very hard to figure out. It’s interesting to me that the common symbol for autism has become a jigsaw puzzle, symbolizing what a "puzzle" autism is to figure out. I think it’s a particularly good symbol because to those of us with autism, life itself is a puzzle!!!
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People often ask me how old I was when I learned I had autism. Here’s how it happened: by the time I was ten, I knew I was different from the other kids around me because I had to go to language therapy, and my brother and classmates didn’t. I’d also figured out that I was in special classes for parts of each school day, classes that lots of kids I knew never had to go to. Something was different! It was then that Mom (she told me this later) decided that it was the right time to tell me that I have autism. She did this by reading me a book about a little boy with autism, and what his life was like (I’m sorry, but neither Mom nor I can remember the name of the book). Amazingly, it was good to hear this story because it explained a lot of things to me and helped me understand why I did some of the things I did. It was okay for me to learn that I had autism. In fact, it actually helped me to feel better about things!
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