Azusa of Amorpha writes, in Don’t Take Advantage of Our Good Will:
If you want to get to know us just for the sake of getting to know a plural, any plural, we’re not interested (especially if you want to try to exploit us– been there done that). If you want to get to know us as individual persons, then we’ll talk.
If you replace ‘plural’ with ‘autistic’, you have my current view on things.
I have just read, listened to, and watched (yep, all three) some stuff by Dave Hingsburger around the topic of people whose only ‘friends’ are staff, and whose staff don’t bother to think about how isolated people really are whose only ‘friends’ would never be their ‘friends’ if they weren’t paid to be with them. He describes how this is not real friendship, and how staff’s refusal to acknowledge it impedes the development of real friendship.
He talks, in particular, about how horrible it is for the disabled person to suddenly realize that none of their friends are really friends, but only people paid to pretend to be their friends.
The story of a person’s life is supposed to be personal. If that person chooses to reveal it to a lot of people, that happens, but most often a person will choose to reveal it only to a few friends. Real friends, not fake friends.
Many people believe, however, that the story of my life should be public property. The boldest will tell me outright that it is my obligation to provide them as much detail as possible about my life, that anything else is pure selfishness and avoidance of responsibility. Some of the slightly tamer sorts will simply say, “Tell me your story.” Others are more slippery, and will try to ask in roundabout ways that amount to the same thing but are harder to detect, or will badger incessantly but subtly with little hints about what’s wrong with not complying with their wishes. Some will pull the good-autie/bad-autie split, where good auties tell their stories and bad auties are just weird angry twisted bitter creatures who should tell their stories but refuse to. All show a lack of respect for me as a person, even more so than someone demanding to look at my naked body.
I met a woman once who kept insisting that I “tell my story”. I kept explaining to her that I found her insistence exploitative and demeaning. She kept ‘explaining’ to me that “telling my story” was the most powerful thing I could do. All the other things I was doing, stating my opinion, telling only the pieces of my story that I see fit, are somehow not powerful enough, in her eyes. And she had no clue how disempowering it is to have someone insist they know exactly how to ’empower’ you and you damn well better do what they tell you. (Er…)
If I had a nickel for every person who asked, told, or demanded me to write my autobiography, I would have more money than the royalties from the book itself.
This is invasive. This is demeaning. This is exploitative. Not just when it is done to me, but when this insistence is foisted on autistic people in general. I have been treated like my body belongs to other people, and that they could do anything they wanted with any part of it. This “story” thing is worse. It’s saying that our lives belong to other people, and should be taken by coercion, trickery, or force if we’re not willing to give them out freely. If that sounds uglier than you’d imagined, it’s because it is.
However, this ugly thing is often carried out, like many ugly things, in an innocent disguise. People’s belief that our stories belong to them may not be a conscious one, but it’s implicit in asking autistic people routinely for our stories when the same people would rarely ask a non-disabled complete stranger for the same thing. People’s belief that our stories can and should be taken by force might not be a conscious one, but it’s implicit in the numerous ways they try to convince us to “tell our stories” after we’ve made it abundantly clear that we don’t want to.
I don’t know about other people, but my life story is a hell of a lot more private than my genitalia, and I don’t give out my genitalia to everyone willing either.
The people I’m the most worried about, though, aren’t me. They’re lonely autistic people who are new to the “autism community”. People who’ve never had a friend in their lives, or whose friends left a long time ago, who come onto the Internet, or parent support groups.
And what do they find?
They find people hanging on their every word. They are asked really basic, obvious questions about autism. Things any autistic person would know. And they answer correctly. And people go “Oh wow, what amazing wisdom and insight,” because they don’t realize that they’re doing the equivalent of asking “What emotion does smiling generally convey?”
Then people continue: “You should write your autobiography. You should tell your story.” And a whole litany of questions, often intensely personal ones, ensues, leaving autistic people even more confused about what we’re allowed to have privacy about and what we’re not.
These people are not friends. But a lonely autistic person may not realize that, any more than we always realize at first that paid friends will leave when they quit being paid.
So it’s lonely newbies that I worry about the most, in these areas.
Nonetheless, even not being a newbie, it still wears me down. I know many autistic adults who won’t go near groups dominated by parents, because of this kind of pressure. They have learned that if they want to be considered an individual and interesting person in their own right, they need to hang out with people who aren’t looking for an autiebiography on legs. The single most exhausting part about being around large numbers of un-autie-accustomed parents, for me, is the constant questions, the seemingly insatiable thirst for information pointed straight at me. It’s like walking into a mosquito convention, only instead of blood they’re trying to suck up information and advice. It ends up uncomfortable, itchy, and potentially dangerous.
“Auto-vivisection” is what one of my friends calls this procedure. Ripping yourself open and displaying your insides for everyone to see.
For all autistics, the insistence and encouragement that we tell our stories is a real and problematic issue. Some solve it by telling their stories. Some do so prematurely, and will regret it later, after the irreversible act of publication, after their opinions change, after they learn more about themselves, and so on.
So if the first thing out of your mouth, or fingers, when an autistic person tells you something that you happen to find interesting or insightful, is “Tell your story,” find some way to counteract this impulse before it makes it from your brain into words. Don’t try to soften it with “if it’s not too personal,” just don’t say it. The pressure on us in this department is already immense. Don’t contribute to the destruction of our privacy.