Imagine Being A Social Animal And Then Having A Disability That Affects Your Ability To Be Social

Imagine being a social animal and then having a disability that affects your ability to be social

In case it isn’t clear, being Autistic doesn’t mean you aren’t still a social mammal. If you look at my entire life history, the vast majority of my social relationships have crumbled due to misunderstandings directly due to my autism. If you asked my allistic counterparts, they would most certainly not see what happened as related to autism because they would think I knew what I was doing. But 95% of the time, I didn't know because that's what my disability entails, an inability to know what to do in social encounters. Even if I might look like I do know, that is called masking and basically, I learned to fake it And it remains a mostly invisible disability due to this lack of understanding.

In our culture, it is never assumed that someone has a social/communication deficit when they cause someone to be upset. We generally ascribe this to personality flaws or the person simply being selfish, manipulative, or an a**hole. I am not here to defend true a**holes, I realize being Autistic is not mutually exclusive to being an a**hole by any means. But think back to all of your social interactions with humans, have you ever had a difficult or confusing interaction with someone? Did you ever consider that maybe they didn’t know what they were saying/doing because of their disability?

Honestly, it has only been since discovering I was Autistic and diving down the rabbit hole of the disability rights movement and ableism that I realized how much external and internalized ableism I had that kept me from realizing how people like me can have various disabilities including ones that would make it hard for us to pick up on social cues, maintain friendships, etc.

Having a disability that impacts social communication is really rough. It’s probably one of the number one issues why Autistic folks seek out therapy with me. Imagine being a SOCIAL ANIMAL and then having a disability related to an integral part of how your species survives. Yeah. Some of us learn to survive via other means such as being super well educated or masking heavily or both. Some of us barely survive or don’t. We always need to factor in that survivor bias is real.