Here’s What Autism Looks Like
It’s about the inner.
Interest in (and acknowledgment of) the autistic adult community has gone up lately, which is wonderful. People at large are starting to understand that even though we’re different, we still have a lot to contribute; and autistic-led shows like Everything’s Gonna Be Okay are helping people to understand just how wide the spectrum can be.
But there’s still a lot of confusion in the allistic (not autistic) community about what autism “looks like,” usually in reference to how a person appears, but you really can’t tell if someone’s an Autist based on observation.
In addition to the truly infinite variety of ways autism presents, many of us have been taught to mask our traits; so knowing what’s happening inside the person, the reasons behind our behaviors, is essential to recognizing autism in someone.
Being autistic is about having different wiring, literally experiencing the world differently due to neurological differences; resulting in varied sensory perception, ways of relating to the world, and reacting to it differently.
A comic strip by Rebecca Burgess popularized a way to visualize this internal experience that’s been embraced by the autistic community. It explains that most people think that the autism spectrum is a linear thing — a spectrum from…
