NPR did a story on me and my blog

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Umm... I think there must be some kind of misunderstanding here; I admit I'm really opinionated, but I don't accuse people of not having autism when I disagree with them. How would I know whether they do or not? I'm not a professional, I'm only talking over the Internet (i.e., only reading what someone types, and no other kind of input), and it'd be irrelevant to whatever argument it is, to begin with. I mean, if somebody had a point, it wouldn't matter whether they were autistic or not, would it?

...Somebody clue me in here. I'm confused.

Callista

Don't worry about it.

Just because he said it, it doesn't make it true.

As said before "don't take it personally"

Some people like to criticize simply to be heard, the inter-web would be a different place if we used our real names.

Brush it off, don't let it get to you.

So... more stuff:

There's an unfortunate tradition in the autistic community of trashing any autistic person who gets any media attention at all. Be prepared for it. Remember it's not about you. It's about other people's idea of who you are. Once people see you in the media they think they know more about you than they actually do. I don't know why but I'm assured by others that it happens a lot. People may criticize you for things you didn't even do or think. They may expect you to represent autistic people in a way nobody ever could. They may complain about how "all the autistic people who end up in the media" have this or that trait that you may not even have but they certainly think you have. Some may even be jealous (which I don't pick up on easily, someone had to point it out to me before I realized it could be true). None of that is about you, it's about an image of you. Remember who you really are and you should be able to handle it.

If you get enough exposure, people will come out of the woodwork that you haven't seen in ages. Sometimes this is a good thing, such as when I got back into contact with a childhood neighbor. Sometimes this is a bad thing, like when childhood bullies decided this was a good time to find novel ways of attacking me (that is where the "she wasn't really autistic when I knew her" crap comes from). Some people who didn't have that much contact with you may claim to have known you much better than they did. Some people who didn't know you, never even met you, may do the same. It's a weird and unpleasant phenomenon. Be prepared for anything. Again, I found the best reaction to all this was to remember who I am, remember what reality is, and try not to get fazed by people saying totally unreal things. (Easier said than done. I have a compulsion around correctness and accuracy. Being in the media has forced me to overcome it a bit, otherwise I would spend all my time correcting inaccurate crap that is said about me all the time now. The worst is when it's just slightly inaccurate, enough to make things look bad, but not enough to be totally inaccurate. Errrgh.)

In general, if what is going on looks hostile, don't bother engaging with it unless you have to. It's rarely worth it, and generally ends up causing more trouble than it gets rid of.

Generally if you're described in the media much at all, they'll get a lot wrong. You may be blamed for whatever they get wrong. I've been blamed for people crediting me with work I showed them and told them who really did the work, and when I wrote back telling them "Hey, I didn't do that!" they've told me essentially "Who really cares? It's not like it was a huge mistake," And then I've had to deal with the consequences whereas the reporter in question didn't have to deal with it at all.

You may find that people you know respond much more weirdly than you would've expected. What I was told was that essentially no matter what I did, some people would assume I had agreed to appear in the media for egotistical reasons rather than the reasons I actually did, some might even think I'd deliberately sought out the appearances, and that this would happen even without people actively defaming me because people have a lot of weird ideas of why and how people end up depicted in the media. (I never approached the media, they always approached me, and often were rather intense about their method of approaching me. They can be very good at getting what they want. They do not always tell the whole truth about what they will do with whatever story they are writing, or about anything else necessarily. Be careful in such situations.)

But the most important thing is still to basically be aware of who you really are, and be aware of how the rest of the world really is, and keep those things in mind despite whatever nonsense gets said by whoever. Keeping those things in mind can be important if whatever is going on ends up being weird enough to warp your view of reality at all, and is also important when dealing with stuff that's just annoying.

That's all I can think of now. Feel free to email or pm me if you have any questions that I might know the answer to. I've gotten rather a crash course in this crap the past several years.

I've never seen her do it either.

And more than that -- even if she had? Doing it to her would not be appropriate. I have been accused of being nonautistic by an autistic person who used that idea to try to solicit people to kill me (among many other things). And even with all that person has done I don't claim they're not autistic and have tried to stop others from claiming they are not autistic. (I think someone has made that claim on my behalf but I wasn't aware at the time or I would have requested they stop.) When you object to what someone has done it's generally not good to turn around and do to them the same thing they're doing.

..except that if you don't, who will?

Anbuend, thank you very much for your advice. I'm kind of thinking this should blow over soon; I've had ten thousand hits on my blog for a couple of days, but I'm pretty sure most of them are just curiosity-seekers. I might have an increase in audience, which is kind of cool; but I get the impression that some people are actually listening to me, which is kind of a big responsibility.

Going to have to make the point that the value of an autistic person can't be judged by the fact that we're adding techie genes to the human gene pool... "Still around despite natural selection" is not a measure of human value.

My reluctance to share my diagnosis outside the Internet is based on several factors:

1. It could lead to greater understanding, or it could lead to great patronizing.

2. It would get kind of annoying having to deal with people who didn't think I was autistic because I didn't do this or that.

3. I often feel like it would be making excuses, as irrational as I realize that is.

4. I generally do not like attention.

It was interesting comparing the audio story to the written story - they were very close in most places, but not exact matches. I noticed that in the audio version you said that one of your housemates really liked watching Friends, while the written version says that your housemates "used to get together to watch the TV show Friends."

I was very amused by and laughed at your analogy of NTs with "nonexistent unipolar magnets" - which makes it into the audio version just after 3 minutes in, but not the written version.