seven awesome things about being autistic

This post is part of my april autism series for autism acceptance month. Visit the first post here for links to the rest of the series!

Because autism is still seen in a largely negative light, I thought I’d cover some of the positive aspects of being autistic before addressing the challenges associated with it (you can come back tomorrow for that side of the coin). And since today is also the {sqt} linkup with Kelly, I have seven positive autistic traits listed here!

1. Systems-oriented thinking and pattern recognition
   • “Autistic systems-oriented thinking, developed to its fullest potentials, means insight into the rich depths of underlying patterns and structures, the beauty of the deeper levels of natural order beneath surface realities, the beauty of the Tao.” – Nick Walker, “Autism, Aikido, and Systems-Oriented Thinking”
   • This is probably the defining characteristic of my method of approaching the world. I strive to organize the data I observe into systems and structures and patterns, always editing them to encompass more complete datasets, always delighting in each new connection and relationship I can find. As a kid, it meant I was quite good at games like Set (which is all about patterns), and loved exploring the grammatical structures of language and the mathematical patterns of numbers. In school, it meant I was able to assimilate information from different classes into a cohesive whole, giving myself a strong network of data to pull from for tests and projects. At work, it means I’ve spent a lot of my time learning database science on the side to help my team process and record information more efficiently, to pull out the patterns and connections between the datapoints we need to store. And personally, it means I never settle into one philosophy of life – new information can always shift my internal understanding of the structures of reality, hopefully into a more accurate conformation 🙂
2. Sensitivity to beauty
   • Increased sensory sensitivities, while definitely a challenge at times, can be accompanied by increased awareness of and sensitivity to beauty in the world. This could be natural beauty: the still blue of a cloudless sky, or the undulating mist off a waterfall; it could be artistic beauty: the throbbing pulse or soaring heights of instruments that express emotion we could never put into words; it could be the small and unnoticed details of life: the scent of rising bread or the sweep of curtains blowing in the wind. Just as we can be inordinately bothered by sensory inputs most people don’t notice, so too we can see and be awed by the beauty of things most people don’t notice – like the texture of a piece of fabric, or the feathers on the back of a moth.
3. Powers of observation
   • This is connected to the first two traits, obviously: good observational skills are needed to create useful systems for understanding the patterns of reality, or to find beauty in the details that often escape attention. It makes a lot of sense in light of the definition of autism I shared here earlier also – if the autistic mind is taking in more information more intensely than the neurotypical mind, it’s going to be able to observe more details. Rondel notices all the bugs around him wherever he goes, and pays attention to the shape of their bodies and the patterns of their color; when he wasn’t even two, he was able to figure out the make (and often model) of a car by paying attention to the details of its shape and design. A friend at church notices the relationships between the people around him, putting together the connections of family and friendship in his mind even though he struggles to articulate them verbally. I was apparently able to see instantly if something had been changed in a room when I was a very young child. The details we observe may not always be particularly useful, but our minds are thirsty for them, hungrily seeking out the information around us to store away inside.
4. Honesty and Loyalty
   • Many autistic people are highly uncomfortable with untruths. As the author of the blog An Intense World says, “It’s not that someone with autism cannot lie. I can lie… [but] when I lie, it really, really, really, really, really bothers me. It’s like a deep brain itch I can’t scratch. So I don’t lie. It just bothers me too deeply, and I’d rather not be that uncomfortable all the time.” I’ve found that I can tell incomplete truths if absolutely necessary, but even that is difficult to do – part of me wants to provide all the information involved so the communicated picture is accurate.
   • Many autistic people are also highly loyal. While autistic individuals may not form many attachments, the ones we do form are deep and lasting. I can see this already in my son: while he has normal conflicts with his siblings, he has equally as many conflicts with me because he identifies himself so strongly with his siblings that he is ready to fight for them if I reprimand or correct them. As Cynthia Kim writes on her blog Musings of an Aspie, “My attachments to people are few, but when I do form a bond with someone it’s a strong one. I will stand up for the people I care about in the face of a great deal of opposition.”
5. Creativity and Unique Problem-Solving Skills
   • Autistic people see the world differently – so the things they create and the solutions they envision are also often a bit different! In my personal life, I see the unique style and form of my sister’s poetry and other creative writing; the way a child with severe speech delays at my church is able to communicate his thoughts through actions and echoed scripts; and the endless repertoire of “games” my son designs to explore his interest in the animal world and include his siblings at the same time (not to mention his eye for three-dimensional representation of said animals). When I was in high school volunteering in the children’s ministry at my church, a young boy who was later diagnosed with Asperger’s (part of the autism spectrum) noticed the folding table wiggling one week, crawled under the table, and proceeded to analyze the joints until he’d discovered multiple potential causes and tried to fix them. And he was only five!
6. Deep or abstract thinking
   • Rondel asked me the other day why Jesus needed the disciples if He is God and can do anything. He asks me if God can know what we are going to do before we do it, and how that works, and seems to understand the answers I give him. He wants to know how high you can go before the air ends, and why the earth holds the air to it, and what exactly gravity is. He asks me if I will always love him, and why, and how I know that I will, and the answers give him peace when he’s recovering from a struggle with his more negative impulses. Autistic people usually don’t have much “common sense”, but our minds like to explore the deeper questions of life, and we are often able to separate facts and ideas from their social context to examine and compare them on a level field or in a new context.
7. Expertise (and special interests!)
   • When the autistic brain gets excited about something, that thing becomes rather all-encompassing. We can spend hours a day for months or even years absorbed in the thing that is so fascinating to us – and as a result, we can accumulate some serious expertise in those areas! Rondel is a good example of how this can look in young children. His first special interest was vehicles, and as I noted above he was a master of vehicle identification at a ridiculously young age (I once asked him if a particular car that he’d told me was a Mazda was a Mazda 5 or a Mazda 3 hatchback and he knew the right answer without hesitation…). Next came dinosaurs, when he learned so many different species of dinosaurs that his grandparents were amazed (and often emphatically corrected!). Now that animals are his primary focus, he can talk for hours about the characteristics of different animals, the interactions between them, the environments they live in, and so on. By the time an autistic person reaches adulthood, they’ve cycled through quite a few of these interests, providing themselves with a solid network of information to build upon for the next one (or for more mundane things like work). And even in areas that are not special interests, autistic skills in observation and pattern recognition can lead to the development of expertise, as I’ve found in my own work environment.
   • Beyond the usefulness of expertise, of course, special interests are a source of pure joy. Rondel is so happy when his mind is full of animal facts and stories and experiences, and he’ll engage with anyone available about the topic. I am so happy when I’m reading Harry Potter fan fiction (my current most embarrassing interest) that I struggle to stop reading and do anything else, and if someone is willing to listen I can share all my favorite theories and plot lines and alternate universes until they manage to escape. It is satisfying in a profound way to plunge into the depths of something and discover the hidden treasure within, to block out the overload of information from everywhere else and really seek to know one specific category of things. And experiencing that joy is one of the most awesome things I can think of about being autistic.

If you are autistic, what is one of your favorite things about it? If you have a friend or family member who is autistic, what is one of your favorite things about them that stems from the fact that they are autistic?