There is a typical view that autistic people are sullen, silent, and solitary. They can be. I have certainly been these things over the years, and can still be these things as and when the occasion demands. I need to escape, withdraw, recharge. I have also been guarded with people, and probably for the same reason other autistic people have been guarded. You know you are different and you know that people will be neither comprehending of nor accommodating towards your differences. If you pay attention, as someday you surely must, you cannot fail to notice that people find you and your thoughts and actions a little, well, ‘odd.’ So you learn to curtail your eccentricities, your flair and panache, your dreams and visions. You pull back, observe silently from the sidelines. And then people describe you as sullen, silent, and solitary. The truth is that you are feeling uncomfortable with the world and with others. The real person emerges like an explosion when circumstances and relations become comfortable, trustworthy. An effulgence that is unsuspected.
They may take quite awhile waiting for the moment for growth to come their way, but people with utism know something that ‘normal’ people may not know: they know that they are not stereotypes.
[And talking of stereotypes, I really dislike having to compare and contrast the autistic and the neurotypical, setting people against one another. But I’m not sure how the contrast can be avoided.]
