As far as dropping a cure from their mission statement, I for one do not want to be cured. I can understand how severely autistic people might want to be, but I do not.
I have aspergers, and I am a functional (semi-functional, really) person. Sure, I get hired and fired faster and more frequently than Ubisoft puts out a half-finished game, and I have some problems understanding people, and I have a bit of face blindness, but there are so many things my autism gives me that I can only partially quantify with words that I would be sad to lose.
I can sometimes just read people. Not everybody, but some people. I can tell what they're thinking about. I am very good at picking out inconsistencies visually. I went looking for praying mantises with an entimologist once in some tall grass. I found a few dozen, he found zero. We were like ten feet apart.
I have perfect pitch. I can pick up a new musical instrument and be competent at it inside a month or two. I remember all my dreams in their entirety, and lots of other great things that I attribute to my autism.
I have seen autistic kids- mildly autistic I mean, do absolutely amazing things. My neighbor when I lived up north had an autistic six year old. The things this kid made with lego (this is before you could design lego things on PC) were MINDBLOWING. They were better than any licensed lego set I had ever seen. He just saw them in his head and built them. He could pick up a video game, play online, and be eviscerating everybody he came up against in minutes. I watched him play Homeworld once for an afternoon and people would tell him how amazing he was at it in chat and he'd say "I'm six" and they'd think he was joking. My friend's son, also six, is autistic. His understanding of 3 dimensional space is better than most adults. He builds incredible things. He can solve any puzzle in minutes. Amazing stuff.
I saw a video once, I'm so sad I don't remember this lady's name, she's a quantum physicist who has come up with EXTREMELY novel ideas that have blown the minds of her peers who say they would have never thought in those terms and she is considerably on the ASD spectrum to the point of having irregular speech and facial expressions. But she's a genius. She says society NEEDS people like us and doesn't realize it- because we think outside the box. We know we do that because we can't for the life of us know where the box IS but that's besides the point. Any autism where the person is able to be functional and is not crippled and isolated by their autism can be as much a gift as a burden if that person focuses and applies themselves- which again is hard for us... but I'm just saying.
22 Oct 2016, 3:51 am
