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What would your life have been if you weren't autistic?

M

Misty Avich

I have ADHD
V.I.P Member
Apparently when an autistic person is asked, "what do you think your life would have been like if you were NT?" they typically reply with "I don't know."

But I know. Well, by that I mean with my imagination I can easily take an educated guess. My life would be the same but different. I can even imagine an NT version of me.

Just like if someone was to ask what my life would have been like if I were a boy. It would be the same...but different, if that makes sense. But I can only take an educated guess.

I hate when people say "but if you were NT you wouldn't be you at all, you'd be someone else", because I don't believe that. ASD doesn't define me. When I say "me", I mean born in this body, from my mother's womb, in this part of the world, etc. Still me, but with a better brain lol.
 
I'm in the don't know camp. I've learned most things from pain and most pain comes from ASD. So I guess I'd be more callous and less understanding? Without that greater priority of pain I suppose I'd be more swayed by the other fear factors in life as well like status. Being less intensely stimulated could also potentially rob me of the depth of love I hold for art. Basically I get the impression I'd be very very bland and normal. But probably happy within that blandness. The head-full-of-worries type of happiness that most people have.
 
Too complicated of a question for me because there are intermixed variables of which their own level of impact isn't something I can separate since I also have ADHD which has definitely impacted my life. Also, social NT or introverted NT?

If I left ADHD out of this thought exercise completely and only focused on ASD then I'd say my life would likely be different as an NT in that as an NT me, I'd probably not have "felt" the intensity of being alive and all the life around me as much as I do because of my autism. So in short I think I'd be a duller version of myself.
 
Misty Avich said:
Just like if someone was to ask what my life would have been like if I were a boy. It would be the same...but different, if that makes sense. But I can only take an educated guess.
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I get what you're getting at, but I have zero idea what it would look like if I didn't have the autistic traits, they defined my experience much more than gender, socioeconomic background, occupation, interests, people I've met, place I live in etc. It defined me not in a bad way and not by suffering, but I have zero idea what it would be like to have a lower sensitivity, different sensory experience and to not have attention all over the place.

Duller, yes. It's hard for me to imagine how experience can be so dull that you don't need downtime - I don't think that's neccesarily a positive. Or that you don't have an interest that you go back to over and over.
 
I'm going to go with undefined / not possible to answer.

There would be so many things different (interactions, decisions).

For me, being on the spectrum is a part of me and my experiences and how I interact with and view the world. As such, it would not be possible to imagine life otherwise.
 
I may have enjoyed the confidence of being social and enjoyed love at an earlier age. But I do not think that I would have developed the marvelous love and understanding I have for our world and its history. This week at the AMNH I was getting emotional (nearly teary) to see the vertebrate history laid out as a cladogram, conveying the fascinating but contingent relationships of life on earth.
 
Having not been born Neurotypical, there's no frame of reference I have to contemplate who and what I might have been. I may have impressions of NTs, but no first-person frame of reference to pine over.

Though as an autistic person, I do think about what life might have been had I known at an early age who and what I was, as opposed to just being a confused introvert.
 
I lack what other people seem to call imagination, so I can't put myself into a different situation I never experienced. I am on the spectrum, and my life has been defined by it, so there is no way to know what that life could or would have been without being on the spectrum.

Some might think this is just pedantic: I wasn't like that so it isn't relevant what I would have been otherwise, but having never been able to project an unknown, it's really just like asking what my life would have been like if I was from Alpha Centauri.

I'm not sure how it would be even possible to say that without autism, what I'd be is part of this, part of that, some mix of another. Without autism, I wouldn't be me but someone else, and I can't see how I'd know who that might be.
 
In my afterlife contract, you sign this before you are born, l wrote l refuse to come back as NT. So l guess l can't answer this. I probably would be a cat.
 
I suppose one would be similar in some respects. But that NT with most of my genetics would not be me.
That person would probably have had a smoother course through life? And those around me could have had a smoother course as well.
 
Even before my diagnosis, I would have said that my defining characteristic as a human being is how intensely sensitive I am. It's been my blessing and often my curse. I can't picture losing any of this sensitivity because it's all I have ever known. Maybe my lack of imagination on this topic is another sign of my autism (I am on the eternal hunt for clues even post-diagnosis in order to dispel doubts).
 
I don't seem to lack imagination, which might explain why I've always been self-loathing and yearning to be NT. I'm not saying being NT means no problems. That is naive to believe that. But I'd rather have the NT problems than the ASD problems, and I'm not talking about problems that anyone could have such as the death of a loved one, being any person can have those problems and I've been through it myself.

In my early teens I was often an outsider looking in at my friends (well, the girls in my class who all hung out together and would have automatically included me had I have been NT like them). I could just picture myself being one of them, being accepted, included, thought of as cool as the next girl.
 
Misty Avich said:
I don't seem to lack imagination, which might explain why I've always been self-loathing and yearning to be NT. I'm not saying being NT means no problems. That is naive to believe that. But I'd rather have the NT problems than the ASD problems, and I'm not talking about problems that anyone could have such as the death of a loved one, being any person can have those problems and I've been through it myself.

In my early teens I was often an outsider looking in at my friends (well, the girls in my class who all hung out together and would have automatically included me had I have been NT like them). I could just picture myself being one of them, being accepted, included, thought of as cool as the next girl.
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Lack of imagination is a curse in some respects, but a huge benefit in others. Having assumed, as one does, that everyone else is the same as me, I was very unsettled by those who seemed capable of living a different experience than they were really having. But I can't say I ever would have wanted to be NT, even if I'd known I wasn't.

That world is splintered into fragments of what other people think and like, or what one thing means based upon another, and how you connect seemingly totally different things together with unstable and constantly changing emotional and seemingly superficial landscapes governed by social rules that are little more than mysticism.

I'd rather have my problems in my autistic world, than those problems with their fluidity, inconsistencies and contrived alliances.

There isn't a right or a wrong way, but the question of 'acceptance' stands out, because the most critical thing is accepting yourself. Autistic people may have problems with that, but I've never met an NT person who was even close to managing it. It seems to me that's one reason they gather in cliques the way they do, because if they can be accepted by others into a peer group, they don't have to work out how to accept themselves as they are.
 
Misty Avich said:
What would your life have been if you weren't autistic?
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I've always liked who I am and how I am even though others didn't. Most people are too stupid to realise which side of the bread's got the butter on it. I was born better than average.

I also grew up in an era when autism was unheard of and nonconformity was seen as problematic. I spent most of my childhood hearing people discussing ways of "curing" me and ways of forcing me to "be normal". The mere thought of this terrified me. All of these suggestions came exclusively from religious groups.
 
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