What it feels like to be Autistic

Three years ago, I asked the question What does it feel like to be Autistic? By the time I wrote that article, I was quite confident in both my Autistic identity and my blossoming advocacy work, but in the time since writing it, I have learned and grown at an exponential rate. So now I feel it’s necessary to revisit this question and explore it further.

So, what does it feel like to be Autistic?

I’ve always been different. Some of my earliest memories are hazy recollections of feeling distinctly different from the expectations of what a person should be. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was being conditioned by society and its normative values. I was effectively being indoctrinated into the cult of normality. This probably explains why I spent a lot of my twenties despising who I was and wishing I could change it.

Our identities, our conscious sense of being, is a social construct. We internalise the experiences afforded to us by our environment. Autistic people often experience Self-hatred and internalised ableism because hatred and ableism is what we experience in the wider world. The building blocks we are given to construct ourselves are born of normative violence.

There is a fundamental issue with me telling you exactly what it’s like to be Autistic; there is a solipsistic asymmetry in my experience. I have never not been Autistic. I have no point of reference in an experience outside of my own. What I can speak to are the experiences that I have had.

Even calling myself Autistic has, at times, felt strange. It was an identity given to me by the world. I exist as David. Others describe me as Autistic. I have internalised and related that description. It has become a facet of my identity, but it is a surface feature of my deeper Self.

I have at times doubted my Autistic identity. I have been so adept at concealing parts of myself that I have doubted their existence. This is all-the-more complicated due to the abstract nature of autism. It is not a natural kind, it is a social descriptor that existed originally to segregate my mind from those who can perform neurotypicality. For this reason, my Autistic experience is often one of Self-doubt and imposter syndrome.

For me, to be Autistic is to bear witness to the detailed connections between all things at all times. I am Chronically overwhelmed because I can not filter out the complexity of the world. I experience the whole, and not the aspect.

Of course, my experience will differ from another’s because Autistic identity is not my sole identity. I am Schizophrenic, I am ADHD, and I am in recovery from addiction. However, my identity is not a maths problem that sums up to a whole person. The distribution of identities onto my person gives the illusion of multiplicity when, in fact, I am a singularity. I do not exist as many, but as one singular experience that ticks many boxes.

So, what does it feel like to be Autistic?

It feels like being me.