I attended and facilitated three different online groups supporting autistic people, families and women with autism; during this period, I learned a lot.
During this time, I can say that I learned much more from the groups than I did from my personal training, the books I read, and the therapy and counselling I received. So, for this fantastic experience, I have to thank Credu and all my friends whom I met in our support groups.
First of all, it was such a unique experience for me to see how similar our quirks were, which we sometimes don’t even fully admit to ourselves. For the first time in my life, I didn’t feel alone on this planet. Even though we are all very different, at the core, we are very similar. Furthermore, every solution that we talked about came from our own experiences, so they were all life-changing.
Yes, autism has a spectrum, but we certainly have a lot in common; it doesn’t matter where you are within the spectrum. So it was an exciting experience for all of us to talk about our problems, such as how it could be problematic for autistic people to wear a hat or hoodie… And, unfortunately, we could quite easily talk about this for over an hour. We all have different fixations and issues with wearing a hat daily. In other words, the situation was much more than wearing or not wearing a hat…
In the meantime, we discovered that the solutions we came up with would sometimes seem silly to neurotypical people, but they helped us greatly. That’s why a support group is beneficial for all of us. We saw many new ideas since everyone started to share their solutions when they had difficulties. I hope that one day, neurotypical people will learn to listen to us without judgment.
We’ve talked about many examples of how autism affects men and women differently. We have witnessed people’s experiences about how difficult it is to still diagnose autism for women or girls. Sometimes we are just talking, and sometimes we are just listening, sometimes we write, sometimes we cook together. But we always spoke openly about our experiences. I have witnessed the magic of listening. I’ve experienced how listening without judgment has changed my outlook on life and me…
I’ve witnessed how much autistic people have been judged in the past, and sadly, it continuous today. We have been misunderstood and sometimes made to feel guilty just because most of us cannot lie. Although we all came from different walks of life, the similarities in our life stories sometimes surprised all of us. Although we are innocent, we are often found to be guilty through no fault of our own due to the misunderstanding that neurotypical people often have of autistic people.
The things the group had in common would suggest that we were not of this world. It was as though we were aliens. But after spending most of last year with autistic people, I felt that maybe we were children of the love who came from the moon.
We resemble the moon shining from afar on a dark night…
Sometimes very bright,
sometimes invisible,
occasionally inaccessible…
We all have our own unique beauty,
mostly undetected,
indistinguishable unless carefully observed.
we are children of love
who came from the moon
bright, pure, cold, lonely
Unreachable…
Incomprehensible…
And Enigmatic.
Comments