OK So this is entirely not edited but enjoyyy
Being someone who is both an artist and autistic, I find myself constantly plagued by the same question—can I not be autistic and artistic? I find that so often people cannot reconcile the two in one person. To me, this seems irrational. I’ve lived my entire life this way, so it seems quite natural to me, but maybe it is otherwise absurd. It seems that when people know the real me, they belittle my talents and assume I am incapable. Yet when I write, I transform into a incorporeal concept that cannot possibly anchor back into the person I am. I cannot have it both ways. I cannot be both capable and accommodated. Somehow I find myself in a paradox of needing and providing things that others will never accept can come from the same person. Is it really that weird that I am a complex human that not everyone fully understand? Of course, having lived my entire life this way, it seems completely logical that I do not understand everyone, that people will make mistakes, that people will need paradoxical things, and it seems logical that I will do my best to provide both.
Yet quite often have I had my boundaries tread on. When I let it happen, others are happy at my expense, and when I enforce them, even gently, others treat me like I have asked them to cut their own heads off. I have asked you to not invalidate my opinion or my identity in a space you have asked that I feel safe in. I am not safe if your idea of respect for others is different than it is for others. I am not safe is your respect for me is conditional. I am not safe if you mean I am supposed to treat you like an authority when you ask for respect, and your reciprocal “respect” is anything less. I am no less of a human than you. If you respect someone for other differences but not mine, are you truly respectful of differences? A particular sticking point I have experienced in my life is the difference in dominion over my room and other spaces. From a very young age, I learned that not the entire world was a safe space that would respect everything I needed, as it is for everyone. I began retracting and retracting my own dominion—what I deemed would be exactly as I wanted so that it wouldn’t stress me or make me spend extra effort to maintain the same level of composure as most people—until it reached the smallest and only bastion I have left to this day—my room. Quite honestly, this (and somewhat my car) is the only place I feel even remotely safe, and people still question why I am so protective over it. Admittedly, I grew up in an upper middle class household, so we often had cleaners come through to dust and vacuum, to clean the bathroom, whatnot. I initially allowed my room to be cleaned, but I would always have to reset things to how I preferred it, I would not be able to find things, and I always had things that I did not want strangers to see. I grew up, and in my early teens, maybe 12-14, I stopped letting my room be cleaned by the cleaners because it caused me great distress to have my room in a state deemed acceptable to be cleaned and it distressed me how it was left. I would have to clean any projects I was working on and it took me upwards of 30 minutes to put it away in an acceptable manner. It caused chaos in my drawers and storage, and it caused me to stop being creative because I had to rearrange what I had to how it was, again at least 30 minutes. I would come home, however, and my plants would be moved, my soap was in the wrong order, or I could tell my pens and notebooks were moved in the process. I hated it, and I greatly dreaded whenever the cleaners were scheduled to come through. It evolved naturally in the first house I lived in, but when it carried over into my grandmother’s house, she questioned me about it for the first nearly year I lived there. I explained I disliked having my room changed or cleaned by other people, especially without me present. She would always tell me she hoped I would change my mind, however, and tried to convince me that I should be letting them into my room. It struck her as a weird boundary to have, and therefore invalid, though she couldn’t go around me because I knew, and I defended my own peace at that age. This is a common occurrence with my room.
Yet as an autistic individual, nobody seems to make the efforts I need. I never have the space I need, the peace I need, and so I endeavor to make it for myself behind the walls that are impenetrable for those that do not see a world in which I need both. These walls are time in and time out in such confusing areas to other people that I must sincerely come across as an evil fire breathing dragon whenever I enforce them because this is the only way I ever have my own peace of mind where I am not catering to the needs of others and actively having my own ignored and treated as perplexing and therefore invalid. Am I not as worthy of the same respect and effort of other people simply because my boundaries are not the same as the crowd’s? Every once in a while I delude myself into thinking that my boundaries are less valid or I am less deserving but no. I am mad and I am deserving. I can be two things at the same time and people will respect me.
My other grandmother, especially when I was younger, would knock on my room and then walk in without me saying anything. Scared the crap out of me a couple times, and made me feel violated, especially after I told her to please knock and wait. She would walk in with her shoes on, (we had carpet) and touch my things, put her hand on my shoulder, and lean in the doorway in a way where I could neither walk out nor close the door. It opened up my own peace of mind to the rest of the house which decidedly disrespected it. I was rendered powerless to another person’s will in my entirety, and it greatly stressed me to have to live with her for the couple years when she and my grandfather were finding a house to move to. As a young kid, I did not know how to explain this, and I did not know what exactly made me feel this way, so I flipped out a couple times. I shut the door in her face and yelled at her to knock, to get out, to please respect me, and it just made her mad that I had a boundary that she didn’t understand. She continued to ignore my requests until an adult stepped in and told her that my behavior wouldn’t stop until she did as I said. Yet, she never understood that I simply had different boundaries than other people did. As an autistic child without any advocate, life was really hell when I had something to say, or a discomfort outside the general experiences and therefore lexicon that I was exposed to. I couldn’t express both sides of me, only the side that I knew how to because it was the more common experience.
This is why I am first and foremost an artist, and secondly an autistic child in the world. People can accept the eccentricities and talents of artists even if it does not fully align with their worldview. They see them as people who can be learned from, they see them as people who can interpret the world in new ways. They respect artists. I have not met anyone who has, even as they get closer, respected that autism means I am simply different from the majority of people, that I will forever and inalienably be different, that I will need and do different things than others, while still be talented and artistic and independent. The general idea of autism is just beginning to evolve, but it still is an infantilizing understanding. Those who see me as talented cannot reconcile that with me being autistic, and those who see me as autistic cannot reconcile that with me being academically or artistically or socially capable. I am not the spitting image of the DSM-5. I am only mildly autistic, and I am high-functioning. I am my own independent person who can provide for themself, and this somehow does not click with anyone who can view me as autistic.
I am autistic. I am artistic. I am my own individual. I am different. And I am angry that nobody else sees that I am.
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