embracing your autism?

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It depends on what you mean by "embracing my autism". If somebody had a magic wand and could "cure" my autism, I'm going to have to admit I'd take that opportunity and ask them to "cure" me. I hope that doesn't make me a bad person or make anybody think less of me. It's just that autism has presented challenges in my life, and my life was already challenging enough.

With that said, I won't deny that my autism doesn't come with its perks. I have a very vivid imagination and I also write extremely well (not my handwriting, which is terrible). I'm putting together a science fiction novel which I'll probably make into a series, but I'll be focusing on that more once I finish physical therapy school. But the novel has some really cool stuff in it that I know people will think is pretty imaginative. Actually, I would give examples except I don't want to give away my ideas (LOL).

In one on one situations, I can read people pretty well and know if they are trying to take advantage of me or not. 20 years ago I couldn't do that, but autistics can, through a ton of practice and trial and error, learn to actually do things like read somebody and their expressions even better than most NTs could do.

I can also do a lot of math that almost every NT would need to get a calculator for. Nothing too complicated, but I'm extremely good with percentages, adding, subtracting, and multiplication/division even with relatively large numbers. Just don't think I'm Will Hunting or something, this is fairly basic math that doesn't involve equations.

There's a lot of other stuff I can do as well just from learning how to do it. My theory is that the autistic brain is always working, and focuses on different things than the NT mind. We are exercising that left part of our brain which is very linear and analytical and by doing that we actually acquire abilities as we go along.

So yeah, if you consider me enjoying some of the benefits of being autistic and enhancing those abilities, I guess you could say that I'm embracing my autism and have come to appreciate some of the perks that go along with it. I figure things could be worse and I could have something like cerebral palsy where there's pretty much no upside. That's one of the weird things about autism, it usually comes with some cool benefits that make NT people stop say, "Hey, how'd you do that?"