Autism Speaks Is A Hate Group: A Reading

I read this at the Dayton Poetry Slam on 9/14; if the embed is not visible or working for you, it’s at:
Youtube: https://youtu.be/3CIfUkU5doA
Invidious: https://invidious.jing.rocks/watch?v=3CIfUkU5doA

They hold slams every other Sunday at Yellow Cab Tavern.

If there are any questions about the title of the work, I direct you to this post: "Just Because The World Wasn’t Built For You Doesn’t Mean You Have To Change"

Autism Speaks Is A Hate Group.
by Steven Saus

It made sense to me when I read that autistic people like me wear emotional masks, trying to pretend to be like the people around them. Pretending to fit in, taking "fake it ’till you make it" in a predictably disastrously literal way.

But it’s difficult to learn that it is impossible.

Even if you get the mask right, copying the behaviors of those around you, warping and twisting yourself so that maybe, just fucking maybe, this time you’ll be accepted, it isn’t enough.

Because that isn’t you. They don’t like you; they don’t even know the real you. At best, you’re only liked for a character you’re playing. Usually, you’re merely tolerated until you’re too inconvenient, too weird, too much. You stop getting invited to things. People don’t show up, and too late you realize their offers of social engagement were never, ever meant to be taken seriously. That the things you said in earnest, they only meant out of a misguided sense of "politeness," a lack of boundaries, and not wanting to upset you.

Eventually, your life becomes a littered mess of the relics of your attempts to build a life with other people, the scattered detritus of the masks you’ve worn, artifacts of lives you hoped for. Artifacts of lives you’d worked for, strived for. A life where you belonged. Where you were not tolerated, but mattered as much to them as they did to you.

Now, though, they’re just reminders of your failures. Reminders of how you do not belong.

You can’t talk about it. Nobody takes you seriously. Not even those you’ve supported and helped and cared about and empowered. You’re doing reasonably well, they tell you. You’ve got a bunch of privilege; why are you complaining? What about everyone else’s needs, you selfish prick? People are dying elsewhere, and you’re whining about being lonely and feeling rejected?

You can’t help it, though. You got "pattern recognition" in the ’tism lottery, and you’ve seen this pattern over and over since you were a kid. You literally can’t ignore it; the best you can do is distract yourself with whatever you can find, no matter how unhealthy it might be.

They don’t work. They never work. It isn’t the real thing.

"Just be yourself," the few who still tolerate you say. But you don’t know who that is. If there was something — someone — there, it’s been distorted so much by the masks that you don’t know what its original shape was. And anything that might be there are the bits that always, always are what’s wrong with you.

And that’s it. You might as well be the subject of a melancholy indie art film, banal and unoriginal, striving for some kind of meaning, some kind of point, and utterly, completely failing.

There is no resolution. No way to make it better. No moment where a superficial makeover — removing glasses, a quick glowup — provides a happy, satisfying ending.

There is just an arbitrary end to the story.