Livid experience of autism

This is about livid experience of autism. Lived experience, but the things we’re really angry about.

People who preach “be kind”, then bully or mock people for being weird and different.

People who think we’re shifty and dishonest due to eye contact differences, whether not holding eye contact because it’s uncomfortable, or holding it too long because we’re self-conscious about it.

When people make us feel self-conscious about our eye contact.

Sometimes you know something is a bad idea, and will go badly wrong, with horrible consequences, because of your pattern-spotting abilities.

Yet nobody listens, and they think you’re “negative” and a harbinger of doom.

“Oh you’re neurotypical? That’s weird, because I know a neurotypical 8 year-old boy and you’re nothing like him”

Parent-shaming! That old “refrigerator parent” crap, child is autistic because you did this/ didn’t do that/ had a stressful pregnancy/ birth… All that crap, that can get in the bin.

Don’t even get me started on anti-vaxxers!

When people tell me I can’t self-identify as autistic, that I “have autism”.

People who say they accept us, then shame us about how we live, including #AuDHDers often in chaos and clutter. Accept us, accept our executive dysfunction, our abandoned creative projects, our mess.

I just clicked on the hashtag coined yesterday #LividExperience to see if it is catching on.

I found a lot of older tweets about “livid experience” – some fortuitous typos and autocorrect errors, almost never about things the tweeter is not livid about. Freudian slips, clearly.