Harmful messaging
When prominent government officials make bogus claims about autism, it’s easy to spot that as harmful messaging. But there’s also a more specific name for it: it’s a form of ableism.
It’s essentially saying that only those who fit their particular conception of what an “able-bodied” and “able-minded” person is like are acceptable, and that people who have different minds and bodies—different physical and mental abilities and disabilities—are anything from unacceptable to a drain on resources to needing to be eradicated. It’s a slippery slope from there to eugenics.
When those kinds of wild and bogus claims are made on the public stage, it’s easy to point to that and see it for what it is.
But we’ve been getting a much more subtle, low-key version of this on a daily basis for our entire lives.
What we’re taught
Messages like “just try harder” blame the person having difficulty as the problem, rather than a lack of clear instructions or reasonable expectations.
“You’re too sensitive” or “you’re making a big deal out of nothing” dismisses the valid concerns of living, breathing human beings because they’re inconvenient to other people and would require other people to expend energy to think about those concerns and make adjustments to what they’re doing.
“No one else has a problem with it. It’s just your problem. Deal with it” or “he’s just a jerk” reduces differences in communication style to writing off a person who has a really interesting personality, a different take on things, gifts to share, and a unique perspective on how to make the situation they’re complaining about better.
All of that is bad enough, and it really is bad.
But when we hear these kinds of messages over and over from so many people in our lives, from so many different sources—from home and school and work—and the same refrains get repeated so many times from every direction, it can feel so normal that it seems like it’s just the way that it is, that they’re right, that it’s really me, I’m the one with the problem, and I’m making a big deal out of nothing.
We can go down the self-blame route: “It’s just me. I’m making a big deal out of nothing. I’m the problem. There’s something wrong with me.”
Or we can take the blaming-others route: “Everyone else is the problem. They never listen. Why can’t they just X? The world sucks. Everyone sucks. It’s never gonna get any better. What’s the point?”
And we can do both of these. I’ve definitely spent plenty of time doing both of them, at different times, depending on mood or circumstances or what was driving me nuts at the moment.
Weeding out ableism
Here’s the crux of it:
The self-blame route is a form of internalized ableism—when we take those messages and turn them back on ourselves, and then apply those standards to ourselves and get on our own case before anyone else does, relieving them of the burden of doing it to us because we’ll do it to ourselves.
And that’s when they’ve really won, because then they don’t have to continue harping on us—we do it for them.
I, for one, don’t want to do their dirty work for them.
I, for one, don’t want to do their dirty work for them.
I’ve spent the last several years gradually weeding out more and more of this internalized ableism from my own thoughts and actions. It’s not completely gone. That is going to be a lifelong process, and I keep noticing new versions of it every now and then.
But I have made huge progress compared to the incredibly ableist version of myself who found out almost ten years ago that I’m Autistic, and started grappling with what that means for me and how that understanding could inform my choices and make my life better.
I hope and expect that you’ve already been figuring out some of this. If you’d like more information that will give you a shortcut so you don’t have to figure it out from scratch on your own, I’ve made a workshop that will guide you through it.
If you’d like more info about that, or to register, go to AutismChrysalis.com/ia.
But either way, I hope you find more and more of this ableism in your own life and your thoughts, and weed it out so that you’re not bound by this. So that you can live a life free from these harmful messages.
Okay, wishing you a neurowonderful day. Take care.