Reply #137: There is a justification.

[Banazir]

In my eyes, there is a justification for calling some people autistic even though they don't fit the exact original stereotype.

One is that autism is a landscape that merges with other neurologically atypical states as well as neurotypical states. People can pretend that away, drive a hard line between autism and not-autism, and in some ways there is a really big difference between autistic and non-autistic, as many people will testify, but there are always shades of grey and different colors as well.

Another is that a very functional person may well be doing a lot of work behind the scenes that nobody knows about. What this often results in is someone looking very successful in all areas while in their head they are performing a massive juggling act, like juggling seven balls while tap-dancing. One day, they get exhausted and fail at the juggling act. Then they have nowhere to turn because people claim if they were ever doing the "functioning" at all (and they never see the juggling act behind it) then they were never truly "impaired" and therefore never truly autistic. People in this position often find themselves suddenly unable to care for themselves, burned out, and hopeless because they cannot get the assistance or diagnosis they need. They were not non-autistic in the interim time, they were autistic people who were doing an awful lot of work in their minds to appear normal. I know one woman who went through her entire adult life that way until she found herself in her fifties having married someone without quite realizing what she was doing and started a family. She had only seemed slightly odd, but suddenly for whatever reason she couldn't keep up the balancng act anymore and fell over. Fortunately her husband was supportive, many people don't have that.

To trivialize the experiences of the people in that second category is to set them up for a lot of misery later in life. No matter how their outward functioning appears during a certain period of time, it does not mean they will be able to keep that up indefinitely since they are piling all they have to do to do "normal" things on top of all they have to do just to do the basics.