I've also posted this over on Chertsey, but it belongs here really. Apologies for the long interlude and the irrelevant photos - they were things I wanted to post on CanalWorld so they needed to be on the internet somewhere.Hopefully abnormal service will be resumed at some point. No promises, mind.
Since getting my assessment over
eighteen months ago now I've just been quietly getting on with being
Aspie, not thinking about it a lot of the time; forgetting it sometimes.
After all, I haven't changed; my life hasn't changed - I just acquired a
label, a description, an explanation (of sorts) for what that life
feels like. It's still the only one I know, and it still feels normal to
me - because it is normal for me. The most interesting thing is getting an insight into how other people are different from me, which I never really appreciated before.
One
of the things I've been doing is looking into setting up an autism
network at work - and I'd particularly like to have a network for
autistic women - partially because our experience is often different,
and partly so as not to be totally outnumbered by men from the computing
service... In the course of this I met up with the author of this blog, and then I read this post, and it got me thinking.
I've
dipped into a few autism blogs, but (as you may know) I don't do
Twitter or Facebook, and I'm not really that au fait with the world of
autism activism - perhaps I have all that to come. But I've long been
quite interested in the idea of identity politics, primarily because I
don't really get it. So it seems to me ironic that autistic
people should be arguing whether being autistic constitutes their
identity, or is seen to, and whether this is a good or a bad thing.
From
the start, I felt most comfortable saying that 'I am autistic' - even
better, because I think (hope) it gives a more accurate impression, 'I
am Aspie' - and wishing there was a more 'official' adjective for that. I
much prefer this to saying 'I have autism', or 'I have Asperger's
Syndrome', or 'I am a woman with autism' - or even worse 'I have an
autism spectrum condition', or worst of all, 'I have an autism spectrum
disorder'. Because having someting, even something as neutral-sounding as a 'condition', still - to me at least - implies a pathology.
But when I say 'I am autistic', or 'I am Aspie', I am not asserting an identity, or defining myself. I am not an autistic; I am not an
Aspie. I am applying an adjective. It describes an aspect of me (the
way my brain works) in the same way that other adjectives like brunette,
right-handed, or ticklish, describe other aspects of me. But when I say
I am female, white, heterosexual, to me those are still just
adjectives. Feminist, liberal, atheist. Even English. To me these are
all just adjectives. They describe me but they do not define me. But to
many people at least some of these categories of description would constitute their identity, or at least an important part of it.
And
I had the feeling that it was perhaps a particularly autistic
perspective to see things like this; to not be happy with - or able to -
adopt any identity other than 'I am me' - and not really knowing what
that is, from day to day. Which is why the idea of autistic identity
politics feels contradictory.
However, as I think about
it - and I'm going to start rambling now - I begin to see how an
off-the-shelf identity could actually be especially attractive to
someone who has always struggled to define themself and find their place
in the world, and that the perspective I've set out above is that of a
mature and relatively confident woman. The me of thirty years ago might
well have felt - in a way she probably couldn't have articulated - quite
different.
So the answer will no doubt be different
for different people for all sorts of different reasons - but it's still
an interesting question. When does an adjective become an identity?
