Cerulean Blue

This is an old post that I wrote back in April. It was posted on my original site on April 11, it is my thoughts and reactions to how autism is treated by schools and even organizations such as Autism Speaks. Please comment with your thoughts:

April, like clockwork the process of plastering everything with the cerulean blue of autism awareness begins same as every year. Each year growing up I have been made to sit through videos all through the month of April "educating" me about the so called tsunami of autism. But this year is different, for the first time I am going into this month with genuine knowledge about the disorder, and suddenly the false spotlight of April does more than simply shine, it burns, it stigmatizes.
All at once the student council is full of "experts" each one of whom regards autism as a disease to be cured, or a plight which must be eradicated. And each time one of them opens their mouths and begins to recite their speech about autism I die a little bit inside. I open my mouth to rebut, but nothing comes out and I silently go about my day wishing I had the courage speak.
Sometimes I think about what I would have said to those kids, how would I show them that autism isn't a disease, and how would I explain why I care, how could I get my peers to understand that what they don't understand can hurt me more than they know? I listen as comments so ignorant they boggle my mind are made, people are so blissfully stupid that it is easier for them to simply take up the pseudo crusade of autism awareness and ignore those around them who are living with autism every day than it is to educate themselves. I am on the spectrum, not that any of the students that surround me know that. I do not lack empathy, as everyone seems to think of us with autism, in fact I feel more deeply for the suffering of others than many of my peers can imagine. I do not lack emotion, or feeling, and I am not an idiot. And yet, the very people who claim to be the champions of the autistic continually reinforce these same false statements as fact, that all autistic people are somehow damaged.
When I was diagnosed just a few months ago I was in shock, I wanted to scream I am not broken! I had always assumed that autistic was just another word for mentally deficient. I grew up with the idea that because people were different they were somehow worse. The last month or so I have realized that mercifully, incredibly, I was dead wrong. We are human beings with uniquely valuable traits, while social interaction might not be my forte, I take serious offense at the thought that because of some diagnosis I am somehow inferior to my neurotypical counterparts, and have begun to resent the groups such as autism speaks which paint with such a wide brush, assuming that we cannot speak for ourselves, when in fact we can. While some may be nonverbal or even borderline, when given a computer suddenly people who were stigmatized as idiots are capable of expressing amazingly complex ideas. These organizations should highlight that, push for acceptance. Instead we are represented with a puzzle piece. As if the videos and lights were not bad enough, the symbol is a stunningly brazen stab at the autistic community. Perhaps I am the only one who sees this but to me the puzzle piece flies in the face of all that the month supposedly represents. We are not fragmented puzzles, I am a complete human being, with complete human feelings. April should be about learning to accept and encourage those among us with autism, not stigmatize and demean them.
Let me be clear -- autism is not a disease. Autism is a congenital variation in neurological structure -- and a lot of us take pride in our difference. So stop referring to autism as a tsunami, a deluge, an epidemic, a tragedy, a situation, and most of all… a burden. Autism does not need a cure, it needs recognition as a community of individuals who think differently.