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There has been a lot of negativity recently in the U.S. about autism. Certain ugly old men would have us believe that autism is an undesirable condition which should be eradicated, that there are more people with autism today than there were a generation ago, and that there is a “cause” and a “solution”.

I don’t believe it. I can’t.

My adult son is neurodivergent. He wasn’t diagnosed as autistic when he was a child, because the thinking at the time was “we don’t want to put a label on him.” Extrapolate that out, and you might very well conclude that the label would be “defective.” My mother-in-law actually described him that way to me once. “I’m sorry you got a defective one.”

My father, in hindsight, was on the autism spectrum. My sister was the first person to recognize that. My father was born in 1934. I’m not sure autism was even a word in 1934.

So why should I have been blindsided to discover, when I was researching support programs for my son, that I fall somewhere on the spectrum, too?

It explains so much: why I was a strange, awkward child who grew up into a strange, awkward adult; my hyper-sensitivity and tendency to over-empathize; the way I process language and speech patterns, particularly accents. Now I have some insight into why first dates were excruciating and relationships have always been challenging—I don’t immediately pick up on social cues that other people recognize instinctively. Maybe it’s why I can be impossibly pedantic about subjects that are important to me. Why I always say too much, rather than too little, and frequently say the wrong thing. My mother used to tell me, “Think before you speak.” I did. I just didn’t think quite the same way as other people. Today I prefer to write rather than speak. I can revise my writing as many times as I need to.

I could never just drop by someone’s house unannounced. What if I was unwelcome? I don’t make spontaneous phone calls, or just “check in” with people. Texts have made that a little easier, but it’s still not my first inclination. I’ve been rebuffed too many times; I’m terrible at things like conferences and conventions, where I know no one. My attempts to organize parties, play-dates, or get-togethers have always been disasters. It’s not that I have poor planning skills. I have poor people skills.

I don’t know if it explains why I have no hand/eye coordination, can never remember dance steps, was terrible at every sport except yoga, and get incurably seasick. I guess you can’t blame everything on the way you process information.

I’ve known for a long time that I am introverted. I thought that was what had always made me something of a misfit. Maybe it should feel liberating to discover that it is simply the way my brain works. It isn’t just that I didn’t try hard enough. Or because I’m a bad friend. (I might be a bad friend, but it isn’t because I don’t care about you.)

The problem is, I was raised in a culture obsessed with perfection. Presentation was important. “What will people think of you?” We had to dress a certain way, be slim, and clean, and neat—presentable, with presentable homes and presentable cars and presentable hair. We were all supposed to become people who made things happen, who got things done: successful people. “There’s nothing wrong with you,” my parents told me when I went to therapy to try to figure out why I wasn’t succeeding in work, in life. “I don’t know why you’re wasting your money on that.” You know that saying, “Failure is not an option”? I’ve failed at so many things in my lifetime. I never realized that wasn’t it on the drop-down menu.

So, at the age of sixty, I have had to change the way I think about myself. Other people, throughout my life, probably recognized what I did not, but it wasn’t their job to tell me. And I might not have taken it well if they had. It’s hard to get past that old judgment of “undesirable” and “defective,” which today is still being perpetuated by dinosaurs. Unfortunately, they’re dinosaurs with influence. They probably consider the designation neurodivergent “elitist, woke bullshit,” but rethinking how we talk about neurologically-diverse people is a step towards normalizing and integrating people with neurological differences into our larger—and still highly dysfunctional, neurotypical people!—society.

Maybe our next step should be employing people like my son. He’s smarter than I am. He might be smarter than you are. He won’t waste company time socializing; he won’t be your best friend. He doesn’t do friends. You might find him “weird”. But he’s kind, and he’s funny, he loves learning for its own sake, and he never forgets a thing. Maybe he’ll never be independent, never own his own home, maybe he’ll never have a family of his own. But if society can only change its perception a little, he could make a brilliant contribution.

As for me, I have some processing to do.

But I still have contributions to make.