I’m glad Kristina finds joy in her life and her son. What I note, though, is a sense of attempting to combat attitude with attitude, both personally and in public perception. I don’t think it’s necessary. For some people, raising autistic children appears genuinely to be a hellish experience, so that should be part of the story too.

If you are of the feeling that Autism is a mental illness then please realize that use of the mental illness phraseology is going to get some heated feedback, like this response.

I happen to be an Asperger (Pervasive Developmental Disorder/Neurological Condition) ‘patient’ who also suffers from Major Depressive Disorder, a true mental illness, until they find out (if they ever do) that this is also a neurological condition.

I daresay there are others in the support community that would also find your candor disturbing.

I was lucky; I didn’t want the professor job (or this job or that job), and it was decades before I noticed that there hadn’t actually been a choice, despite all the training and encouragement and early promise.

In each instance of encouragement and/or early promise, nice mid-career people were giving me a hand up, welcoming me aboard, and meanwhile I was completely oblivious. No idea what “aboard” meant, no interest in what it might mean. I saw only the job at hand. I’ve rejected jobs, literary representation, publication, valuable mentorship, and spots in nice academic programs without understanding that people were genuinely offering. They never said, “I’d like to offer you a _____. Will you do ______?” People had to point it out later (often in annoyance). I’d have turned down a scholarship and a fellowship, too, if the people offering hadn’t recognized my idiocy and gotten more explicit.

It’s funny until you see what you’ve done with the time instead. Then again, it’s unlikely I’d have been able to keep playing ball, even if I did catch once. In the serious jobs I’ve gotten, I’ve routinely misread cues.

The waste of time and gifts — and I don’t mean to be offensive to people who haven’t got problems this nice — is difficult to get across, because things look reasonable enough, successful enough, from the outside, if a bit patchy and bohemian sometimes. Take Mian. Civil servant, nice degrees, successful pop book, has the odd publication in a good magazine. But obviously he’s capable of far more. It’s just that the chance to do “far more” requires considerably better social tuning; and perhaps I’m wrong, perhaps the work isn’t so good without that social tuning. But I bet everything he turns out is much better than it has to be, given the level at which he’s working. His story about Craig is another iteration. And.

He writes about that consciousness of being hired because you have a useful talent, but when it comes down to it, I don’t think we can see why we’ve been hired. Eventually what they want will change, we will get no memo and carry on doing what we do best, and bip, there goes the job. Or that’s how it’ll look to us. To them, it’ll look like they sweated blood and made sacrifices trying to get us to be flexible and pick up the new game, and we were unbelievably obstinate and unfriendly for no clear reason at all. Personally, I have no idea, at any time, whether my regular clients love what I’m doing or are searching for replacements. Which means I’m always ridiculously grateful when they offer more work. When they say, “You’re crucial to our business, please let us know if someone else is making offers,” I have no idea whether or not they mean it, or what they mean by “crucial” (should I ask for more money?), or if it means they want to offer me something. I’m left feeling deeply uneasy.

And for all Emran’s talk about the value of argumentative skills, this is only an hypothesis. That example he gave of Craig wowing the aide? I’d bet good money the aide wasn’t wowed by the quality of Craig’s argument. I bet her mental ticker went more like this: “OMG, this Professional Speechwriter sounds great and super-smart, and he works wicked fast.”

That’s the thing, Kristina — we don’t know how we’re useful and often don’t care. Total morons in that regard, even when we’re doing relatively well. Which means that “finding jobs for autistic people” isn’t really the whole story — what’s needed is what already exists, only more of it, or in a more focused sense. People who are very good at understanding how to exploit other people’s talents. Who will spot something in another person, say, “I can use that,” or “I know who can use that,” and then — privately, or whatever, it doesn’t matter — make it clear to the prospective employer that the person is oblivious and a bit of a loon, but nice and housebroken, and is crackerjack at _____. The Randall story also caught it nicely.

Cliff

Are there things I might wish I could do? Sometimes. Amy notes being part of an academic department, and while I’m not sure if I could do that (not entirely sure what it entails, to be completely honest), I certainly wouldn’t give it up. Even if it meant being completely isolated, I would prefer to keep me the way I am. Would I like being isolated? Not really. But it’s the easy choice over becoming something other than me. And I could care less about the perspective of others in regards to my personality, because, really, I probably matter as little to them as they matter to me.

On the other hand, it’s not easy being a minority regardless of functional differences, and when there are expectations to function in certain ways, there will be issues to deal with. That’s not so much the individual as the world he or she lives in, including cultural resources and tendencies.

And I’m not trying to undermine that difficulty. I understand that the task of getting resources for the kind of teaching autistics are suited for is a harrowing task, and that the process is tough on the individual. But I don’t think any of that really has something to do with the person. And I think that the differences of the person, in terms of the differences themselves, are valuable, as any difference is.

Cliff