Sunday, May 24, 2015

someone told me I was expressive compared to this person once

(Crossposted on Tumblr)

I object to being compared to other autistic people like this. I think it’s unhelpful to do comparisons. The saying ‘you’ve met one autistic person, you’ve met one autistic person’ exists for a reason. Using someone else’s so-called expressiveness to justify an argument is not okay. They are not a prop.
Their faculty with words is not in direct comparison to mine.

(withasmoothroundstone I think wrote something along the lines that some people are “more autistic” in some areas to hir, and “less autistic” in some areas, and about the same in others - as in autistic people all share common traits, on varying planes of communication and sensory and other things - by the way, that’s the spectrum, not high to low).

I am not okay with using people as props, though.

And it also makes me wonder: what is expressive? What does the word expressive mean?

Because by all means, people would call me expressive. I have opinions and I have loud thoughts. But by loud I mean colorful, because my faculty on language out loud is not the greatest. I sound crass, blunt, angry, and full of swears.

But my favorite phrase is “I don’t know;” my hands flutter when people make eye contact with me for too long and I can’t think when they stare at me, interjecting placeholder words while I try to articulate. I can put together great presentations when I rehearse and script and have outlines, though. And I get passionate, if I know a lot about it.

But anyway, tl;dr

If your value rests on how well a person speaks, that their worth is directly related to how they present themselves, I question your value of what expressive is. 

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