Awareness

I was diagnosed with autism at age 44. That means that for the first 44+ years of my life, I didn’t know why everything was so difficult. I had trouble making friends; I was mercilessly mocked; I couldn’t keep a job; etc.. Perhaps the worst part, though, was that even when I said something remarkably simple, people never seemed to understand me. It’s not like they didn’t understand the words; they just didn’t understand what I was saying.

For example, one time while I was a full-time missionary, I was teaching the friend of a member of our congregation. The discussion was going great until her friend asked me why plural marriage was practiced in the 1800s. It was a simple question and I answered it simply, but somehow both she and her friend thought my response was me claiming God had called me to restore polygamy. (I still have no idea what I said that made them think that.)

In hindsight, I guess I subconsciously thought that since I was so incredibly intelligent, the average person couldn’t even begin to comprehend my thought processes. The miscommunications weren’t my fault; it was just that most everyone else was too stupid to even communicate with me. It took me many years and a lot of experience to realize that that’s what I’d been thinking, much less that it wasn’t correct.

My full-time mission was a major help, teaching me to truly love others instead of looking down on them. But once I got home, I experienced failure after failure, especially in the area of supporting my family financially. At this point, I’ve now had 39 different jobs in my lifetime, yet I’ve only left one professional position voluntarily. And for the first 2½ decades of adulthood, I hadn’t the slightest idea why.

Being diagnosed with autism has changed my life. Rather than struggling to understand allistic people (i.e. those that aren’t autistic), I recognize my differences and am learning to recognize theirs. Getting fired dozens of times has taught me humility and allowed me to keep my head down and do what I’m told. This, in turn, has allowed me to keep the same job for the last three years. In short, after 44+ years of living in constant emotional agony (and lashing out in response), I’ve finally got some kind of handle on this “life in society” thing, and it’s made my relationships far better than they ever were before.

One big problem that remains, though, is what I like to call “writing between the lines.” Autists are generally logic-based, so when an autist speaks, s/he generally says exactly what s/he means. Allists don’t tend to talk that way; there’s often an underlying meaning that they don’t express and intrinsically assume others will infer. But since autists don’t infer very well, we miss these implications; and conversely, we also don’t tend to imply in our own communications. If I say the sky is blue, there’s an extremely good chance that I mean the sky is blue. I don’t mean the sky isn’t green; I don’t mean the sky is bluer than usual; I don’t mean I can see the sky from here; I don’t mean the sky isn’t cloudy right now. I just mean… the sky is blue. Period. End of story. If you try to read between the lines, the only thing you’re going to find there is whatever you’ve written yourself.

So, why do I mention this?

Not too long after my diagnosis, it occurred to me that there was someone I saw regularly that was exactly what I had been and worse. He was full of himself. He seemed to think anyone that contradicted him was stupid. I never had trouble understanding him, but it seemed like nobody else could: people were constantly misrepresenting his words and positions, writing between the lines in ways that were so illogical as to make me sick. To me, it was glaringly obvious that this poor man was also an undiagnosed autist, and what’s more, he was three decades older than I and was therefore in that much more pain—and reacting with that much more vitriol and hubris.

That man is Donald Trump.

Once I realized this, everything suddenly made sense. Once upon a time, I was every bit as conceited and vile as he. I was every bit as sure that I was the smartest person in the room, and everyone else was my inferior. These feelings were tapered when I gave my life to Christ, but Donald never had the opportunity for that great change of heart. I then served a full-time mission and learned a lot about my own weakness, but Donald never had that opportunity, either. I worked for company after company and was fired dozens of times, which taught me to keep my head down and respect my boss; but Donald was always the boss’s son until he became the boss himself.

Everything fits perfectly, even the fact that his son Barron exhibits some stereotypes of Type 2 autism. President Trump is an undiagnosed autist!

Because of this, our former President cum President-elect has been hurting quite deeply for much longer than I’ve been alive. For almost eight decades, people have been mocking him, abusing him, misquoting him, misrepresenting him. They’re constantly attributing things to him that he’s never said, never believed, never did nor planned. And you know what?

Those people are bigots.

I know they don’t feel that way; they probably don’t even realize that they’re being that way. But when they’re mocking him, criticizing him, sometimes even lying about him because he’s different—because he has a so-called disability—they’re being ableist, and that’s bigotry.

President Trump was reelected, last night. I’m not among those that voted for him, but I think I understand him better than most. I know a lot of people are feeling afraid today, and I totally get it: if I believed half the things about him that you do, I’d be afraid of him, too. But please know that as hurt and damaged as he is, as immature as he can be, as much as he responds to hatred with more hatred, your fear is not coming from President Trump; it’s coming from those that have no idea what he’s talking about and, frankly, probably don’t even want to. These people are the bullies that have been beating him down for almost eight decades, and they’ve now rededicated their lives to destroying him. As long as you keeping reading their interpretations of what he said instead of what he said in the first place, you’re going to continue to be scared. And at that point, it’s no longer his fault; it’s yours.

So, here’s my strong recommendation: find the original transcript. See what he actually said. Try to actually understand it. Hopefully you’ll get it better than the ignorant people that rely on second- or third-hand sound bites, and that understanding will make you a better person. And hopefully, you’ll feel a little (or a lot!) less frightened, too.

Autists are people, too. The only reason you don’t notice us is because we look just like you do. But I’ll tell you, if you open your mind and open your heart, you’ll discover that we really aren’t so bad; we’re just severely damaged by the society in which we’re forced to live. But once you learn to understand us, I guarantee your life will be better—and hopefully, so will ours.