First and foremost….A great post to help better understand something we can’t fully understand–autism and its traits–but well worth our while to try. The main character of my WIP has many of these traits, because I do as well. I wish they had been better appreciated when I was young. I’m sure you’ll recognize friends or self as well, and a sensitivity to such a variety of folks can only help the writer. Thanks to Neuro-Divergent Rebel for leading me to this blog.
Problems
Autism is big and messy and confusing, and no-one really understands it. It’s difficult to make a good summary and description of autistic traits, because generally no-one can agree on what autism actually is. But even taking that into account, I’ve never read a satisfactory article or leaflet summarising and describing autistic traits. Every description I’ve ever read suffered from at least one of these problems:
- Wrongly weighted. So many descriptions of autism written by neurotypical people focus completely on social traits. Often autism is described as an entirely social thing, and any other differences are considered incidental if they’re mentioned at all.
- Vague. The “triad of impairments” is the worst offender here. It divides social traits arbitrarily into “interaction”, “communication”, and “imagination”, but there is absolutely no clear distinction between those categories. They’re meaningless and useless divisions that don’t remotely simplify the description, and so they serve no useful purpose…
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Gabriella L. Garlock, HistoReWriter 