mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:
Trust me, I'd rather be the way I am right now, than be confined to a wheelchair. Aspergers may be a pain in the ass, but at least I can do simple things like climb stairs without assistance. I would hate to have to be reliant on other people for things like that.
Or an
elevator.
Just 'cause you don't think you'd like it, doesn't mean it's not totally normal for people who've used a wheelchair for their whole lives, or for years. They learn how to work around not being able to walk. And simple accommodations can make life much easier for them--such as requiring public buildings to either have one main story (like a grocery store does) or to have elevators (like in a courthouse). Besides, elevators help everybody--how often have you used one because you were holding a mug of coffee, or because you were carrying something heavy, or because it was six stories up? They work around their disability with technology and creativity.
Which is a lot like what we do; we learn to work around sensory overload and crappy social skills and getting stuck on one thing. We even use technology, like how we're talking now by way of Internet forum.
I don't think it is very easy to compare the two situations. Rather than one being better or worse than the other, they are simply different. An Aspie wouldn't have trouble with stairs (except on a clumsy day or when around bullies who like to push us down them), and someone with, say, a spinal cord injury, wouldn't have problems with being oblivious to others' social signals (except for the social distance that comes from people being awkward around someone in a wheelchair).
They are both disabilities, and in that they have a lot of things in common, mostly when it comes to accommodations, treatment in society, others' opinions of what our lives must be like, etc. For example, notice how you immediately decided that being "confined to a wheelchair" would be really horrible? That's something you learned from the culture we all live in, and it's an assumption that people in wheelchairs have to deal with when others assume they must hate their lives. Similarly, we have to deal with the idea that we as autistic people are tragic and isolated and not capable of love or compassion.
I don't think it helps anyone very much by trying to compare to see who has it better or worse; I would rather recognize that we have similar experiences, because we share the experience of being disabled, and are natural allies.
You're forgetting that not all of us live in big cities where wheelchair ramps and elevators are common. The town closest to where I live would be a severe pain in the ass to navigate by wheelchair, and my house would be practically impossible with all the stairs and tight corridors, not to mention the rough terrain outside. I'll take some quirkiness and sensory issues over limited mobility and independence, thank you very much. I can work around my issues to a decent extent, at least compared to dealing with having unusable legs. This is saying nothing about how ASDs manifest in other people, because I can see how being on the lower-functioning part of the spectrum could be just as much of a drag as being confined to a wheelchair.
15 Aug 2014, 10:18 pm
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