A pretty girl smiled at me from across a café. Automatically my head jerked down, chin gripping chest. I scowled. Not her fault: she isn’t just pretty, she’s cheerful, friendly, and hardworking. In fact, she’s a decent person, as far as I can tell from watching somebody work at a café. Still, that’s what happened. My head jerked down and I scowled.
A little later I went up to the counter to pay. I didn’t put a tip on my card, since I read that sometimes the barista doesn’t get all the money. “Uh huh,” she said, mouth wry as she looked at the receipt. Then I put a five in the tip jar. “Oh,” she said, puzzled now.
What I should have said: “I’m autistic. Nothing personal, I have eye contact problems.” If I’d been feeling especially bold, I could have added, “I think you do a really good job” and even “You bring a good energy here.” Well, maybe not that last, but definitely the first. As it was, I didn’t say anything. I left. This happened last May and the café, a very nice one, is a block from where I live. But I didn’t go back there until last week, and first I looked to make sure she wasn’t on duty.
I just read a highly intelligent and well-written book that ends with a talk about how the author wouldn’t be her if she weren’t autistic and how she finds that being her is a beautiful thing. She figures that all neurotypes are beautiful: autistic, allistic, or whatever. Maybe it depends on the symptoms you have and how people treated you growing up. For me autism has been a curse. The example above is just one in a chain that goes back to when I was 13 (which is many decades now). When I think about being autistic, this chain comes first to mind. For me being autistic means that a few hundred people (most of them pretty girls) have shown me romantic interest or simple friendliness only to be rebuffed like I was some sort of jerk. It means I’ve been alone most of my life and I’m alone now.
We’re not supposed to say this, and I don’t speak for anybody else with autism. But they don’t speak for me either. So, all right, no. I don’t find that being autistic is good. It isn’t even neutral. It’s an affliction and causes pain: brief moments of pain for people I meet, and prolonged, spirit-crippling pain for myself. Everyone’s supposed to see autism as being like gayness or straightness. If you’re gay, you don’t want to be straight; if you’re straight, you don’t want to be gay. But I don’t want to be autistic. I want to be normal and I never will be.