A Rather Special Thing, Autism....

Written by William Murff, Grade 12, Round Rock High School 

I have been living with autism for… well… all my life, really. I don’t really consider it a defining feature of my life, considering other qualities such as my skill for writing fiction and my generally accepted good sense of humor as far more indicative to what I am like then being broadly labeled as “Autistic” or slightly less broadly labeled as “kid with aspergers”.

Not that I don’t care for having aspergers, quite the contrary in fact! It could very well be responsible for my high level of intelligence, and once I got past the whole difficulty at reading thing and managed to become socially adept, there was no real downside to my little quirk. But even then, I would still carry my title proudly, like most people who share the whole autism thing.

            Something I do rather dislike is the side effect of all of us autistic people being grouped into one sizable group: That, to those who don’t know better, that all kids with autism are basically all alike.

            This is, of course, dead wrong. I, a rather talkative nerd, share very little with, say, my brother with severe autism, who can’t do addition past 12 and can’t communicate verbally. But that would be a more extreme example, as most people with autism fall in between those two extremes. Some people can’t talk very well, some talk far too much; some flail their hands about a lot, or say meaningless words over and over again. Difficulties reading or being better at math can happen, or any number of random quirks. Really, a more accurate thing to go by would be that most people with autism are not like most people with autism, or even all that many people with autism.