You can't fault a dog for being a dog.

Hi there.  I don't write often enough. Mostly because my depression grinds me into the dirt until i am unable to function, and if i survive each bout with it, i inexorably return to the page. Even though, it seems to do me no good. I want to believe my words mean something, that i can help someone, or even better, that i can help myself.  Years of writing to no one in particular have left me spent, isolated, and lacking the confidence one usually requires to succeed at such endeavors.

I digress.

This is an autism blog, and i am a formally diagnosed autistic.

There are too many studies out there for me to go through single-handedly, even with my perseverance operating at peak "forgetting to feed myself and sleep" levels of efficiency.   What i can bring you however, paints a picture.

Several studies using MRI brain imaging scans and autopsy of the brain have shown a connection between autism and brain size, as well as white tissue volume.  The variances are significant person to person, from some studies suggesting as low as a 17% greater volume of white matter and 9-13% increase in overall brain size, all the way up to 71.3% more white matter, and 66% greater brain size. These variances only serve to illustrate to those already in the know in the autistic community something we have always been aware of.

Autistic people are DIFFERENT.

Not just different from the population at large, different from one another, sometime in orders of magnitude greater then the average person would consider.  Lets not forget this is the brain we are talking about here. The seat of human consciousness. The thing that makes you, YOU.  The least understood of all the organs in the human body, and arguably the most important.  The complexity of the brain, as has been said by scientists, makes decoding the human genome look easy.

What i'm saying is, we really don't have the tools or techniques yet to understand just what these sorts of radical changes in our brains are doing to us completely, or what it means. This is an evolutionary grey area and no one was, or is prepared for what it could mean in the history of mankind. Autistic's could possibly be a new mutation, an evolutionary branch off of homosapien, just as we evolved from neanderthal man.

Yet, we have some out there, who have been trying to co-op our community, speak for us, suggest we are diseased, we need cures for our "illness."  A fundamental change in the biologic operating system of our brains from BIRTH, as it's re-branded as an illness. A sickness compared to cancer, suggested by some as a cancer of the mind.  There are organizations out that pity us, make money from others on the pity they cultivate, the guilt they inflict on confused, desperate parents.  All the while we set up our own communities, our own networks, and we wonder aloud together, "Why can't autistic people speak out for autistic people?"

Lets start over.

You may be wondering what the title of these piece means,

"You can't fault a dog for being a dog."

It's something i came up with many years ago.

I was frustrated, like a lot of people, with my failures in social situations. I endured early years of torture, bullying, abuse, and detention instead of proper care and consideration in school. They didn't have a diagnosis back then.  Still, no one seemed to be able to change this course for me.  In high school, i adapted a new, more vicious strategy. Having had my share of beatings, i choose not to back down to threats and attacks my first few weeks, and it allowed me to scare my bullies off, and even be invited into a few social groups.  Long story short? It worked for a while.  Teenagers love weird offbeat thinkers, and i had that in spades.  I was infamous, well known, and enjoyed a modest amount of popularity.  It was strictly off of my novelty, but i wouldn't figure that out until much later.  It didn't change the fact that i was still completely and thoroughly misunderstood. While i had some renown and with it a few benefits i never had before, i still felt like i could not make proper relationships. I felt like people were, incredibly stupid most of the time, and i could not relate to their limitations when i radically exceeded them.

It was hard to me to understand, because i was born this way, born with some extra ability that made my brain a bit bigger, a bit faster, and i just assumed that this is what everyone could do.  That when they seemed stupid, it was because they were just not applying themselves, not trying to think about things like i did.   I never felt that special, so how could so much of the world seem so obvious and simple to me and seem so vexing and irritating to others?  

It wasn't until i was in college that i understood what i had missed before. I was doing that same thing to them they did to me.  Judging them based on their inherent limitations, on what they were born able to do. On how they were created, not who they were.  Calling people stupid is just as unfair coming out of my mouth as it is anyone elses.  It wasn't any better then me getting beat up for being extremely poor at sports, wracked with cripplingly severe asthma, or being "weird."  I was born that way, and they in turn were born their own way.

Intelligence is just ONE evolutionary adaptation to try to succeed as a species in this world. Physical attractiveness is another. Raw strength is another. Incredible dexterity is another. Hell, one scientist when asked about his intelligence joked that it was the worst of the adaptive advantages to be born with.
He said something to the effect of, "Sure, intelligence might save me from predators, but so would running really fast. Personally i find running really fast to be the superior adaptation."

I learned something. I might be smarter. In one narrow little metric or maybe two. But that doesn't make me BETTER.  It just makes us different.  A big brain is very biologically expensive. That is to say, there was/is a finite pool of resources to draw from when i was created, so many of those resources when into my brain that my body was frail and extremely vulnerable. My allergies were life threatening from the moment i was born. I have been near death from asthma attacks in my lifetime, before the age of 10, and multiple times.

As an adult, my enlarged brain is severely demanding and poses many significant difficulties to my life that a regular brain does not. I am prone to heat stroke due to my head quite literally overheating from over activity (referred to by some as "racing mind.") I have Irritable bowl syndrome that seems to plague many on the spectrum.  I have constant pain from muscle spasms and a profound inability to sleep regular hours or restfully with any reliability.  My senses of hearing, smell and sight are elevated resulting in severe sensitivity and acute awareness to these stimuli often causing severe pain.  This results in me often wearing sunglasses indoors to cut the light, alienating me further. I have to wear earplugs in environments that normal people would never have to, and if i do not i can damage my body so severely that i have triggered benign paroxysmal positional vertigo. Multiple times. This took weeks, and weeks to heal, there is no means to make it heal faster.  Unpleasant smells are extremely unpleasant when you have a heightened sense of smell. I also have migraine headaches frequently due to changes in atmospheric pressure that can stay with me for days, rendering me wracked with pain with no real way to stop it until the storm passes, so to speak.

And that, is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.  All of that for the evolutionary boon of a big brain. It's a horrible trade off. On occasion is has proven helpful, most of the time it just results in me being penalized socially.  No one likes someone who is right all the time, it makes them self conscious. Most of the time my nature effortless language and cadence make people around me feel bad about themselves, even when i am trying my hardest not to offend or insult anyone.  Being smarter is bad for ME too, not just others. It makes me hyper aware of my problems, my limitations,  and the statistical likelihood of overcoming them. It makes me a jaded overly studious cynic par excellence. It's nothing to be jealous of for certain. It leaves me exhausted, depressed, lonely and unable to connect to others due to the heaviness of my demeanor.

But i am, what i am. And i can't be mad at you, for being what you are.

The average brain is being inundated with 11 million bits of information a second, and yet we are only able to process 50 bits per second.  Maybe i can process 100. Maybe more. But that is a fundamental difference in our biology, and should not be asserted to make other inferences about one another's character. I can't be angry anymore when someone doesn't understand me, i have to respect their limitations and hope they can make an effort to respect mine.  If that happens, at least we can tolerate each other.

We still have a problem though. A problem greater then any other manner of communication barrier one could possibly fathom.  This is no mere language barrier. There is no computer program or off the shelf linguist out there that can translate "autistic" to "neurotypical."  We still cannot understand each other, and while that is a lost to both parties, it is invariably a greater blow for the autistic in this exchange. Nt's rule the world. You are plentiful, powerful, and completely ubiquitous. When one thinks of a person, they think of you.  Autistic's are rare and vastly different even from one another, and losing the ability to communicate with the most bountiful human life form on the planet lea leaves us severely disadvantaged, and honestly, pretty alienated and alone.

How can we bridge this impossible gap? How can we accurately relay what those extra bits per second are doing to us, how they shape our lives and decisions, how they make us feel. Neanderthal man simply died out, but who knows how long that took or exactly how it transpired.

You are different from us. We are different from you.  Does that mean we are doomed to live entirely separate lives, operating in parallel from one another, forever?

I don't have many neurotypical friends.  You might not have any autistic friends. It starts with me, but as the dominate species out there in the world..... neurotypicals, it ends with you.