Autism has fucked my entire life and is the source behind like, 80% or more of my problems. And mine is relatively mild. I can’t work a full time job or I deteriorate in about 3 weeks, socially I’m all over the shop and every major traumatic event in my life can be directly tied to being autistic.

It likely isn’t this way for all people with my relatively mild form, but if there are already going to be issues in life, autism will likely make those issues worse.

Yeah, very disabling.

i do, yes

it compounds a lot of issues for me and makes everything harder. i have a lot of trauma from growing up autistic. i can’t really point to if a certain basic thing being impossible to me is because of the autism or it’s just compounding the other things, but it doesn’t really matter much for me anyway.

to take a hard stance, i think saying it’s not a disability is just wrong. society is built around many things that is objectively harder if you have autism (namely having to understand social norms to get a job and what not). even if you think it doesn’t affect you that much, you still objectively are going to find certain things in life harder than an allistic person. so its a disability. imo, ppl who are saying otherwise are treating the term ‘disability’ like it’s a bad word, which makes sense given how society at large treats disabled people, but doesn’t actually change the meaning of disability

I do think it’s a disability but I would say the vast majority of ways it disables me would be eliminated if I didn’t have to survive in this capitalist hellscape.

I get frustrated by my processing speed but maybe that wouldn’t be frustrating if my free time wasn’t so limited and I could just float from one task to another like the mischievous spectre I was meant to be.

It’s absolutely a disability. It’s invisible to the normal person because of masking and shit but when it finally comes out, I always feel like I look like a weirdo or a monster.

I’m an open book so instead of rambling, if you have any more questions, feel free to ask. I’m self-diagnosed, then thrice-diagnosed by 2 therapists and one autistic friend if that helps in any way.

Yes, nobody with autism has a reference point for not being autistic while nobody who isn’t autistic has a reference point for being autistic, discerning between struggles you encounter because of autism, as opposed to other factors, is practically impossible IMO, and you can really only make flawed comparisons between your own outcomes and the outcomes of someone without autism. If you look at employment/education outcomes for Australia’s autistic populous you can see indication that having autism negatively impacts them.

Anyone who says autism isn’t a disability is harming the view towards autistic people and consequently the care they receive, but if an autistic person doesn’t want to identify as disabled bc of their support needs then that’s fine ig.

Most of the ways my autism disables me are either direct results of having to exist under capitalism, the way people treat me when they find out about it, or the ways I was systematically railroaded and thrown aside by institutions as a child when all other children and poorly trained adults in power saw was “a weird kid, who reacts with equal or greater violence when attacked and ganged up on by the other children”.

I don’t feel like my autism itself is a disability, or at least not a severe one, but I will describe it as such in situations where I feel saying “I have a disability” will get the necessary support and understanding I need, without triggering the infantilisation and miscellaneous mistreatment that disclosing autism specifically tends to cause. I don’t feel like it gets in the way of things I want to do, most of the time. Yes, life is harder for me than a nerurotypical person in otherwise identical circumstances, but some of that is the autism itself and a lot more is just due to society being incredibly inaccessible for anyone outside a very narrow norm and due to things that I missed out on as a child due indirectly to autism - aforementioned institutional abuse and my mother not knowing any better than to enable it.

Essentially, I believe very strongly in the social model of disability, and I really do think that I often suffer a lot more because of other people than directly because of how my brain works differently.

It’s not really, I just have this insatiable appetite for Tylenol.

Self-diagnosed autistic, formally diagnosed with ADHD. After a couple of years without work I’ve managed to barely land back on my feet with a decent steady job. But I’m very lucky to have had family to fall back on financially, and would have been far worse off otherwise. There’s been a lot of alcoholism and depression in my family history too. So I absolutely consider autism a disability, but a barely manageable one.

I feel like autism itself is not inherently disabling, but being forced to live in a world where the vast majority of people are not autistic, makes it so. An entire society built in such a way that is inherently hostile toward autistic people in every way conceivable, where practically no consideration is taken, creates a traumatizing environment. I think a society that took the needs of autistic people into consideration, or even a society in which everyone was autistic , would be a much better society overall, and it wouldn’t be nearly as disabling. Capitalism is not compatible with autism. (My experience as diagnosed)

Edit: More thoughts. It feels kinda like being born into an alien world, where you are (seemingly) the only of your species. You really don’t understand everyone else. They do and say things that make no sense to you. They expect you to do weird things in order to fit in. And they all get very very upset at you when you don’t do the right things to fit in. Nobody really seems to like you, avoid you, or are openly hostile toward you, and you have no idea why. You live in an entirely alien world where you are forced to go to strange places and do strange things, where everything feels like the worst thing, or the worst places you really do not like being in. You start to feel exhausted doing these things but you are not allowed to stop. It genuinely starts to feel like everyone around you is insane. Yet everyone is acting like you are.

Yeah I consider it a disability. Under other material circumstances it might not be as disabling but I will always struggle to manage certain social situations as a result of it.

So, im very “high functioning” (shitty way of organizing things but its how medical people do) and realllyyy good at masking. My autism is an impedance mismatch between me and society. If we organized society differently it would be a total nonissue. But instead i have to deal with this shit. Even among other autistic people i cant stop masking, its so frustrating. Like, i want to be able to take the mask off but i cant. Also everyone (like literally everyone) goes too fast. I dont have the time to actually analyze and realize and form a response before the conversation moves on. So any socialization (with allistic or autistic people) ends up being either me firing on all cylinders, basically redlining myself, or me just not participating in conversation. And ive gotten to the point i dont bother to have thoughts and opinions on things unless i read them or am talking to one of the like 3 people i trust in this way.

So the point is, i am socially incompetent, because social interactions are accompanied by a set of expectations that have a strong impedance mismatch with me.

Disability itself is a socially constructed idea, built on accepting societal expectations as normal and everyone who cant engage within acceptable parameters is disabled. So i am disabled in the sense that society sometimes perceives me that way. But i dont consider myself as such, because the problem isnt with me, the problem is how society is organized and structured and the norms it upholds and enforces.

No for myself in the same way I don’t consider my being trans a disability. I consider it a normal variation in the human experience. (Obviously others people’s experiences vary in both cases).

But fuck if we haven’t designed a society that makes it really hard for both.

It has made me completely unable to connect with other human beings. Which I now understand is at least in part due to existing under capitalism and existing mostly around crackers my entire life.

On the flip side I got wicked smart brains and I can hyperfocus on things. I wish I had something cool to direct my brainpower towards but I guess I’m using it to overthrow capitalism now

I have a lot of very separate symptoms, some of which are disabling, some are just who I am. I like obsessively playing Victoria 3. I don’t like freaking out because of the sound of the dog licking itself. Etc.

I will say, of my mental disorders, autism is the only one that has parts I consider core to who I am and wouldn’t want to change. The rest of them can go entirely. Depression can fuck off, the anxiety can also fuck off, and people like to say ADHD has upsides but I don’t see them and I’d like to be able to remember to do simple tasks.

I love not being capable of working more than 24-32 hours a week yippeeeee