If could go NT would you?

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hell no, i am who i am, i like who i am, and im proud to be a aspie, although i wish i had mythical ninja powers, i wish i was born with mythical ninja powers and became a pirate.

I voted yes, I like some aspects, but without social skills, life is very, very difficult. I don't have them and I need them.

If I didn't I wouldn't mind keeping it, and I don't mind anyway, but there are downsides to Autism, very real ones.

Last edited by Avarice on 26 Mar 2010, 2:35 am, edited 1 time in total.

See that's one thing... okay wanting to stay autistic does not mean denial of the downsides. Period. It just doesn't.

Because of some aspect of being autistic I crashed badly in adolescence so that I either quickly or slowly depending, lost a lot of skills I had struggled to gain or gained late to begin with (including that so people know I once had some of these skills or could pass as having them for at least some years of my life). M

So where I currently am at?

No usable speech (can say words sometimes but can't attach them to my thoughts so really can't speak in any meaningful way). Find it hard to either approach people or get away from them. Have nearly no ability to deliberately direct my words, thoughts, movements, or memories (either they are triggered by something outside me or are barely there at all). Used to stim most of the time and still would if it weren't for physical impairments. Pretty much bottomed out a test of adaptive skills (specific practical applications of the skills of communication, functional academics, self-direction, social, leisure, self-care, home living, community use, and health and safety). Have to exert a fair bit of effort to connect to my body, understand things around me as more than just patterns of light/sound/etc. Can still end up in the middle of the street, forget to put clothes on before going out, and all those other lovely cliches. And generally (unless passing as purely physically disabled) am the sort of person whose appearance makes some people assume I'm not there at all. Oh yeah and I struggled with severe self injury for a long time and while I am at my best now it's not entirely over.

And I get kind of sick of seeing people who from their descriptions could probably run rings around me in many of those areas, acting like the only reason I want to stay autistic is because I just don't get that autism has a downside (whether they are talking about me or about people in general whose opinions resemble mine, either way it irritates me).

I don't mind when people don't want to be autistic. I just don't like seeing generalizations about why people do or don't want that. (It's just as bad when someone who wants to stay autistic claims it's just because their problems are really mild.)

The reality is that why people do and don't want to stay autistic has nothing to do with how many problems we either have or appear to have. The reason has to do with some combination of our views about autism, our understanding of disability, and our personal feelings. I've known a lot of autistic people on both sides of these question. And each side runs the full range of difficulties from lots to few.

So why I don't mind being autistic is some combination of:

My view of disability as part of human diversity even when it is far less ambiguous than autism.

Knowing that some of my greatest difficulties are inseparable from things I would never give up for the world. (As described in the link I linked from my last post on this thread.)

Coming from a family where autistic people outnumbered nonautistic people in my immediate family and in some branches of the family were accepted and automatically accommodated in the way that nondisabled people are in mainstream society. So I know from experience that cultural differences make a huge difference, not just a theory for me.

Having friends whose autistic traits come from the same source as mine. Because of that, having an experience of closeness, automatic understanding, the ability to communicate without words, sharing of our most important experiences, the ability to have "high level" discussions (ones where we each have the same basics so we don't need to go through those to get to the less basic stuff), etc. An experience that can't possibly be inferior to social experiences between nondisabled people. Even one such friend is more than enough for me, more than I ever expected out of life. (Although I was actually fine with being autistic before this happened. It's just one more experience I would never give up for anything.)

My belief that no matter what limitations a human has in comparison to the average human, the amount of beauty and richness in the world is so much more dense than any of us can perceive, that any person of any amount of limitation can find themselves absolutely saturated in it and experiencing more of it than they can individually hold. So it's not necessary to become a nondisabled person to experience it, and each kind of person has their own unique segment of it that we can perceive.

Probably other factors as well. But these are things anyone with any kind of autism can experience. They aren't limited to people who are traditionally described as milder nor the opposite. These are ways of seeing things, not outgrowths of mildness or severeness or anything else along those lines and I have seen all of them in every sort of autistic person.

As to the idea that autism forms a wall between us and the world... everyone has their walls. Typical people's perception puts a wall of thought in between themselves and the world that my variant of autism makes me not always experience, even if it puts up other walls. Why trade familiar walls that I have learned to climb or find other ways around, for a different set of walls that would require learning all over again?

I have nearly thirty years in this body. Thirty years of learning how to navigate in the world through a body that, if a nondisabled person were suddenly put into, they would doubtless be immobilized and incapable of comprehension. Why change it for a body I would have to spend the rest of my life learning from square one? I would be far more limited in such an unfamiliar body than in my own. Much as most people blind from birth find sight to be merely a distracting source of overload that impairs their understanding rather than enhances it. Tinkering with bodies is not so simple. (And that blindness analogy works just as much for a nonautistic person becoming autistic, since some of their perceptions are less acute than ours. I mean that in a scientific way, not a supremacist way -- autistic people are better at some things than nonautistic people and vice versa.)

Anyway... It's just not as simple as "The more problems autism gives you the more you want to become nonautistic." It's more like "Different ways of viewing autism and disability make people make different choices on this regardless of number or kind of problems." (Different understandings of autism also influence whether people realize that some of their good experiences have to do with autism and are surprisingly connected with their deficits.)

no, because it i was an NT, more likely than not i'd have a boring 9-5 job and go to after work drinks and leaving dos all the time!

Anbuend, you make some very good points. I'm not entirely sure that I would want to have to relearn how the world works for me.

I don't know what to think, if I lost the good parts of this disorder I would be very upset but I've seen less intelligent people than me get ahead simply because of their people skills. People skills matter, and with this I can't have them.

I do think though, that I'm more important (to me) than them, so I would keep it, I've grown to like myself, and I'm content with that.

No, I would never choose to be "cured". It would be signing up to change literally everything I've ever known, it would be choosing to become someone else completely. I compare this topic to people who learn they have a brain tumor, and face the surgery involved to chance removing it. Depending on where it's located they risk the chance of forgetting who they are and everyone they've ever known, or simply forgetting how to move. The things of nightmares.

Hell no! Not if you paid me all the money in the world!

Couldn't have put it more accurately myself. Bravo.

well for one, if some one gave you all the money in the world, the money would become worthless ;P but if some one offer me a trillion dollars a large house with alot of land and a underground complex, i would consider it.

Yes. If it was much earlier in my life.

No now. I am too old to start over and relearn everything.

but the beauty of it is that you wouldn't have to "relearn everything" - you would immediately notice that things would start coming to you as though via osmosis. it would be a very organic thing. but there remains the problem that would be like in that old twilight zone episode about oddball "Mr. Bevis" and his guardian angel exhorting him to change into something less unconventional- with the transition to NT one might lose a lot of bright aspie color in exchange for the mixed blessing of more conservatively muted NT color.

Too many metaphors... or something.

probably - after all..there's little denying they do have it easier in every conceivable way than we do. after all, life is meaningless without nice friends - what hope has someone with AS of ever finding those things, very little

I can deny it

I don't think nonautistic people are actually any happier. They sure don't seem all that happy to me overall. And in general when they've studied happiness in disabled people we tend to be just as happy or unhappy. I think sometimes it can seem easy to assume we are unhappy because of one particular trait of ours and wish we could fix it so we'd be happier. But I suspect many of us would be in for the same rude surprise that generally awaits people who think cosmetic surgery will make them happy. The fact is that both misery and happiness are rather universal things in that they exist among every category of people, not just those of us who are assumed to be at a disadvantage in that department. About the only set of people I have seen who are generally more miserable are depressed people and that's because of the definition of depression.

I found it interesting to read in another thread about someone who said that failing to meet all his goals and dreams meant he was living a terrible life. My life has also failed to meet any of my prior expectations. And I fall far shorter of the norm than the person in question did. But failing to meet my expectations... Ihad a period of misery and then eventually realized that my misery was more because I was basing my happiness on meeting those expectations, rather than because I failed to meet them. And now I am a reasonably happy person despite being far more limited in the areas discussed than the miserable person.

I again don't mean happiness is easy, just that it's possible. And frankly I have seen just as many abjectly miserable people who met all expectations or even exceeded them. There are always ways anyone in any situation can find that misery has made inroads into their life, and the same is true of happiness. I was sent to a school of people far richer than my family, people who could have anything they wanted, children whose parents bought them fancy cars eight years before they were minimum driving age (whereas my family couldn't afford to buy the children cars at any age) and lots of them were totally unhappy. (Just like the poem about the rich guy everyone admired who shot himself in the head.)

So no, I've seen too many nonautistic people to believe that as a rule they are happier than we are. Which is not to say we are all happy or they are all miserable. Just that... lots of times assuming someone has a better life based on their abilities isn't as accurate as it seems in a society where we are taught certain people are happier.

sorry fella, but i need 'em to make sense with, even when they sometimes fail to make clear sense to others. it is just that the old twilight zone episode-

Mr. Bevis

spoke about what your original post communicated. the protagonist of the episode had the choice of change or remaining the same, but the change came with lots of unwelcome baggage. so if you were suddenly granted NT-hood you wouldn't have to relearn anything as new knowledge would just come to you without you having to exert yourself one bit. but it would come with compromises.