Being a mutant

If anyone would like to know, being a mutant aka being different isn’t nearly as Cool as depicted in the movies or in comics.

the best way it is depicted is, like in the x-men movies, I think it is x-men 3: the last stand, where xavier and Magneto visit the parents of a youngster called Jean Grey, and explain to them that she is a mutant, and they want to take her away with them.

it’s almost the same as in the history of autism, where people like us, where not liked at all in society, and ‘others were almost coerced, forced, to put their child in a home and given the advice to forget the kid.

The reaction I get the most when I tell people I’m autistic is one of four: “shock”, “something apologetic” or “you don’t look autistic” or “everybody is a little autistic.”

I think the shock and you don’t look-reaction are basically the same. Only one of the two is verbalized. Sometimes I get something like “I’m sorry”. Your sympathy isn’t going to cure me, so I don’t need it. My autism isn’t all good, but it absolutely isn’t all bad either. The most hurtful is the last one. It really gets under my skin. People don’t say it because they want you to be angry. They think it’s a polite thing to say. Compare it to this: all people have a bit of down syndrome, or all people are a bit disabled. Would you say it like this? Nope, so quit it.

I don’t mind the good things my autism brings me. I have a phenomenal long term memory. I store all my memories in pictures in my mind and can recall them as if they happened yesterday.

The you,don’t look autistic is hurtful as well because people don’t know how much effort and learning it already took to be this way. I wasn’t like this all the time. I was more introverted during my teens and early life. Now I can be more sociable, but I still do faux-pas every now and then.

the worst is the fact that a lot of people don’t really know what autism is, they speak about it as if they are experts, but they haven’t lives with it for so many years, so they don’t know. Even the mother of an autistic kid, whom knows more than most, doesn’t know anything. She doesn’t know how,it feels like to be one. To be subjected to everyday reality like we, autistics, are. I don’t know how it is to be non-verbally autistic, but I have moments that I go non-verbal and I communicate with grunts until i feel better again.