One Person

One person. One person less can fall to the idea that autistic is like retarded. I honestly think that might be my biggest achievement of the day, that one person just found out that yes, the top of the class CAN be autistic. Because that's what I was in my recitation for international politics. When we played Jeopardy with the answers from the classwork, I was the single biggest point scorer and my team decided that I was the reason they had won. Things like that mean that almost regardless of how weird I am, people weren't really going to guess that I'm autistic. So on the last day of recitation, I told the TA. I told him that I'm autistic, and that if anyone ever tries to tell him that autistics don't understand what's going on around them or that they're not as smart or that people can always tell if someone is autistic or not, he should remember me, and ignore them.

He was surprised. Most people who don't know me that well are. (My friends from high school displayed a complete lack of surprise to hear that I'm on the spectrum. They were more surprised by the fact it had taken so long for anyone else to figure it out.) But he got the point. He understood, at the end, why I winced whenever my classmates said something logically inconsistent with what they had said a moment before. He understood why I wasn't looking him in the eye when I told him, and that I had never actually looked him in the eye all semester. (I had used the forehead trick, though.) And most importantly, he understood that it is perfectly possible for the loud smart kid to be autistic, and that autism and intellectual disability are two very different things, neither of which make a person less of a person. My TA is only one person, but he is still one person who won't make that mistake, if that makes sense to anyone besides me.