top of page
Frankie Abralind

If You've Met One Person

Updated: Aug 1

May 29, 2022


There’s a saying in the Autism community, “If you’ve met one Autistic person, you’ve met one Autistic person.”

Allow me to walk you around the block on this one.

It’s a spin on an old trope of stereotyping. An example: “If you’ve met one lawyer, you’ve met ‘em all.” Strange, but that’s how many of us were trained to see the world. We say things like, “My math teacher was a Muslim, so I know how they are.”

It’s quite delusional, if you think about it.

It’s also human nature. A lot of people, including me, learned about Autism for the first time by watching Rainman, the 1988 movie featuring Dustin Hoffman. Its title character was a rigidly-inflexible, institutionalized savant who could count spilled matchsticks at a glance. It was based on a real-life person named Kim Peek.

“Aha,” we thought, “now I know what Autism is like.”

It was as if we’d watched Batman: The Dark Knight and decided we knew the stories of every other comic book superhero from then on.

Instagram is a favorite communication tool for a lot of folks in the Autistic community. Thus, it can give you a front row seat for some of the many (infinite?) nodes of the spectrum. Here are some of my fave Autistic thought leaders' accounts:


# # #


READ NEXT: The Rainbow

Commentaires


bottom of page