don’t try to fix me, I’m not broken

From fryfan20 at Clear-Spac, this post:

The people that want to cure autism have in my opinion the wrong idea about what autism is.What makes up our personality is an almost endless list of characteristics. Autism isn’t a additional characteristic to this list but being labelled autistic means that a lot of these characteristics are a bit different then the general population. Even if you could take and change all that makes me autistic, than what is left is a whole other person. I don’t know if that person would be better or worse but I do know it wouldn’t be me. I was once asked if a problem I was having was caused by my autism and I had to say that I didn’t know because I don’t know if I still have the problem without the autism and there is no “here stops me and behinds the autism” its all me, the whole package. I have thought about what if there will be a cure a lot, mainly because others describe autism as some kind of illness, something that should be fixed and it took me quite some time to realize that it is simply a word that helps describing what kind of person I am. I hate the phrase “autism stole my child” because that is not true and gives a very strong massage to the child is fundamentally wrong and only a burden that is quite hurtful. I believe that parents should try to understand there children, focus less about what they believe a child should be but love them for who they are. If the same energy is put in trying to understanding and finding the best way to live together then it is in trying to simply correct people with autism then the world would be better already. I believe that people have a great ability to overcome differences if they really want to, its where society is built on. If everyone does the best they can to understand one other then life will be greatly improved for all.