There is one question that constantly bugs me. That one puzzle that I can never quite seem to solve. Do I know what it feels like to be Autistic? What does autism feel like? More importantly, does autism have a feel, and if so, would it be distinct enough to accurately describe.
What does autism feel like?
Autism is an abstract, man-made concept that attempts to categorise and describe a particular group of people. The question as to whether one can feel autism more so than the defined identity it can give your existence is one that I have been unpacking for years.
The primary challenge to knowing if I feel Autistic is that I don’t know what it feels like to be NOT Autistic.
The irony of Autistic identity is that to truly describe the feeling if Autistic experience to a non-Autistic person requires us to close the double empathy gap.
In more simple terms, to describe what being Autistic feels like, I would need to know what not being Autistic feels like to give me a point of comparison.
It’s not just that I have no reference points outside of my Autistic locality, it’s that I am living on a different map altogether.
What Can I Tell You About What Being Autistic Feels Like?
The key points that I can describe that a non-Autistic person may understand are those experiences that can be translated into relatable emotions and experiences.
I can describe overwhelm, and sensory issues, or even social struggles because they are relatable issues that most of us can, at the very least, imagine.
The real problem is that as an Autistic adult, I have been raised to describe my experiences using a language that was largely not designed with my experiences in mind.
My descriptions are, at best, an approximation of a translation into a shared language. To understand my reality, you would need access to a language that was written to describe Autistic realities.
Sapir-Whorf And Linguistic Relativity
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is something that proposes the concept of linguistic relativity. That is, our interpretation and experience of reality is relative to our understanding and use of language.
So, in admitting that I have never been provided with a language that truly “fits” my experience as an Autistic person, there is also an admission that I have been denied access to my reality.
As such, to develop a language that is native to my experience of my Self is to queer the reality i have been raised on.
We have been raised on a reality of alethenormative (Aletheia= Revealing of Reality / Normativity= socially constructed and often oppressive ideas of “normal”) language and descriptions.
We develop a new language, then, to queer that alethenormativity, to diverge our reality and reveal parts of our experience that were concealed from us, alethedivergence. Fundamentally, to tell you what it truly feels like to be Autistic, I would require an entirely new language.
The Double Empathy Divide Within Ourselves
We speak about the double empathy problem as though it requires another individual to exist. However, if we’re really honest with ourselves, that divide exists within our Autistic Selves. A schism caused by the alethenormative denial of access to our own lived and embodied experience.
And so, I have learned to just avoid answer the question of what autism feels like, because the answer is too complex. But perhaps it is time that we put the work into diverging into our own language, one that gives us access to our full selves and not just the parts that are palatable to the non-Autistic masses.
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