BENDING
'I was an oak, now I'm a willow, and I can bend,' as the Buffy Sainte Marie song puts it. Or a cactus, str.aight, hard, and prickly. One of the dangers of perceiving autism by way of the impairment model is that it can have autistic people damning themselves by constant recitation of their alleged deficiencies. According to this model, typical traits of autism are the tendencies to be rigid and monotone. This places the focus entirely on autistic people, and diverts attention from where the problem in miscommunication really lies - in the relations between autistic people and others. Autistic people are thinking through their relations to others all the time, working out what is and is not appropriate behaviour, how to fit the social rules, meet expectations. When autistic people have the temerity to ask for the slightest accommodation on the part of others, they are deemed 'difficult' and 'demanding.' When there is a misstep or a breakdown in communication, it is autistic people who are to blame - the impairment model says that it is so.
The truth is otherwise - it is autistic people who make most of the accommodations, it is autistic people who are forever working out appropriate patterns of behaviour, anticipating what to say and what not to say in encounters, changing their preferred modes of interaction in order to accommodate others. And they when they ask for that little bit of help and support to go the rest of the way, the people who have made zero effort to accommodate autistic people accuse autistic people of being rigid, unbending, difficult, and demanding. This is one of many reasons why the impairment model needs to be supplanted by a view of autism which focuses not on what autistic people lack in relation to 'normal' society, but on the qualities they have, and in which 'society' is deficient.
