How Can Anyone "Be Proud" of being autistic?

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if it is a choice of being proud or ashamed, i'll take the former any day.

What do you mean?

think of the pain and enervation of being ashamed all the time, when it does no good in terms of either advancing one's position in life or even to forestall deterioration of one's living condition. one might as well be proud or take pride in some aspect of oneself, so much easier on the psyche and the physiology. I hope this made sense to you.

I'd like the part where I suffered from not connecting with people to not be there. I struggle understanding what people are thinking and what I am supposed to do in a given situation everyday. After a certain point though, I think that I got tired of stressing out over how to be correct and got lazy when I'm around people. I mostly avoid talking or bringing up any difficult topic because I'd rather not get into a difficult conversation again.
Pride comes from not only accepting yourself but celebrating yourself. I think that people who proud of autism are either those who aren't okay with who they are so they fake confidence to protect themselves, or they have adapted and see their own worth as a person so they are proud of themselves in general which also applies to their autism.

By all means, be proud when you achieve something that is difficult, when you push your own boundaries, when you don't give up in the face of adversity. Hell yes.

BUT being proud of something you have no control over... like being born in a specific country, or with a mental condition or the lack thereof... that's ret*d imho.

Just my 2 cents.

If you are a mild or moderate Autistic you can be really smart and unique.

If you are severe you can be unique and make contributions also.

There is more than two answers to that, the query presents it as a near ultimatum. The argument of the beard is not compelling nor is it as complicated as our actual lives, thus a poor generalization. For me it's more about being proud of spefics. What I am, rather than my subjective self distortion. I look in horror at low functioning AS folks so far comunicativly inert they are stuck on family and the public teat. Us high functioners don't get all the buttwiping and lifetime care. We just tough it out and it sucks. Be proud of that. As pissed off as I get, I can't take it out on a bunch of clueless neurotypicals unless I adopt a victim mentally. They are as clueless about us as we are regarding normal social circles. but I really don't know life any different. So if a bunch of typitards want to toot about curing me of me by cutting my personality out with chems or blades. Or want to cram every AS out there in the same room as wheelchair ridden seizure prone, drooling degenerative disorder severe down syndrome charity, they can stuff it. They are just wrong, they don't get it anymore than a man gets a woman's menstrual period or a woman gets getting wacked in the testicles. They just don't get it cause of the difference short of some Sci-Fi brain scrambling , it never will. We are what we are, no awareness will help. It only leads to socialist reform. I mean do we really want neurotypicals creating law based off of what they think we need? That would be like us personally calling 500 strangers for a lound unfamiliar dinner party that is outside our preferred subject. Hellish, actually pretty much impossible, I would rather get my teeth drilled. No I don't need the NTs awareness, I don't need the "help", I get new "friends" every year (my wife keeps tabs going for 5 years or so) and new jobs every other year or so. I am a sucky friend and terrible employee, who is more interested in my own world than doing the job I am hired to do. Then I panic and quit go on food stamps or if i am lucky I get written up because my sense of time is infantile at best. If I didnt have my wife to be my "spotter" i would probably be in prison or homeless. Proud of not driving my wife mad, not so proud of not knowing how to "spend time" with my kids and just railroading them into my preferred activities. That's about it.

This is the dumbest post I have ever seen. I'm not sending a threat, but I would be happy that people like you would leave this world. My mom is autistic

She is a mother
married to a man
had a lot of friends (so did I)
is generally happy
has a master's degree
can drive (obviously)

F*** your stereotypes

What is the former?

proud

We should be proud of having survived what we all been through, the different childhood, the bullying, the rejection, the disapointment, the lonelyness the mental breakdowns and so on.

Anyone born before the 90's you can double the impact of all that for each decade going back to birth!

I believe we can feel that way without rose tinted glasses falsly pretending we had a gift when its obvious it was more of a curse.

In fact prentending our autism is a gift is disingenuous and just undermines our struggles and demeans our victories.

Many NTs think they had it hard try having what we have.

The famous rocky saying comes to mind:

"it ain’t how hard you hit; it’s about how hard you can get hit, and keep moving forward."

^ - - - - - - - - -THIS - - - - - - - - ^
I would like to have the ability to take any random NT who says we are "gifted" and plop him or her right into the middle of a foreign country where they don't understand the language or customs, and where everyone else sees them as "strange", "weird", and even "creepy" for just trying to get their help and understanding.

I was born in 1957 and I find it hard to understand how anybody my age can look at anything through rose colored glasses never mind autism.

A lot of autistics have negative thought loops me included. But we are also pattern thinkers. It took a long time but I started noticing the worst I kept expecting did not happen. Yes we should be proud of surviving and our accomplishments beyond that. We should not go too far and develop a martyr complex. If autism was a compete curse no amount of toughness, willpower, and smarts would be able to overcome it.

We were born the same year, and were likely raised in similar family/community environments. Coddling was for people who were genuinely sick, not for people who were later found to have an ASD. If anything, people of our generation were treated like we were being deliberately difficult.

"Look at me when I speak to you!"

"Stop that rocking, you look stupid!"

"I don't care if it's itchy, you're gonna wear that sweater your gramma gave you, and that's final!"

"Go outside and play with the other kids."

... and the worst ...

"A black eye, huh? What did you do to deserve that?"

But we are not victims, we are SURVIVORS!!

You were just a bad person loser in life, either "crazy" thus sent away and forgotten, a "homo/fa***t/queer", "ret*d", "lazy" or a "drama queen" or all of the above.

It went way beyond autism, it was a completely different world view than today.

Ask anybody about the reaction they got when they came home from college in 1970 the year national guard killed 4 students at Kent State. It was just like you said "they must have something to deserve it", or "too bad they did not kill all of them. "

Be it a teacher, cop, or doctor a judgement by an authority/expert was not questioned by our parents generation
Why? The experts had led them to victory in WWII, and the American economy and culture ruled the world.

About those autistic behaviors being viewed as deliberate, that has not really changed. Go to most ABA sites or forums or anywhere ABA is discussed and you will likely see the word "tantruming" used.