Disability Futures

Please know that the behavior of people with autism makes sense in the context of their experience of the world around them. Because typical people do not share our context they are not often able to assign correct . They do their best by assigning meaning to our behavior based on what the behavior would mean were they themselves engaged in it the behavior. Often they arrive at wrong conclusions. Sometimes they even assign negative character traits to us based on their wrong conclusions.

Example: As an autistic I can readily see environmental phenomena of sun particles interacting with moisture in the air and rising up from the ground. I thought of these things I could see as sun sparkles and world tails. As a young child in the 1950s I organized my world according to this information. This allowed me to know when it would be lunchtime, naptime, dinnertime, bedtime and gage when other things might occur during the day. I could organize my day and come to understand the typical way in which I could expect the day to unfold.

Sometimes, as life would have it, something that was supposed to happen later in the day occurred earlier. For example, I can recall a morning when ice cream cones were passed around before lunch. To my organizational scheme this was out of order. I really wanted the treat, but couldn’t eat it out of order. My solution was to eat lunch first and then eat the ice cream cone. My use of language wasn’t an asset at the time, so I insisted on lunch in a way others perceived as quite unpleasant.