Autism is my favorite color

Colors or the absence of them are what help us navigate and experience the world around us. Often a part of getting to know someone is asking them about their favorite color. What if though your favorite color is beyond the norm? What if my favorite color is autism?

I stand much indifferent to the world around me. Often, I am thought to be eccentric by most, odd and awkward by many. I stand homeless, once living in the land of Asperger's until much like Pluto my title was stripped and, in the mix, I was thrown. I had been mislabeled, misdiagnosed over a one-hour crisis center chat with a visiting doctor. Perhaps they didn't the struggle I felt. The struggle to know how many minutes it was socially acceptable to arrive early for class to the point I skipped it all together. Perhaps they didn't know most of my friendships I wrote in my own stories changing our relationship with each chapter. I did not fit in with seeing life through BPD, but really, they talked to me for an hour how could they know that autism was at the core of my differences. Perhaps I myself didn't even know yet. My mother had found out many years before but for fear out of my inability for normalcy if I knew kept it a secret. Later it would make sense. My paralyzing social anxiety, my inability to tell body language and faces. Later it would make sense how I felt. Every tick, every tock of that clock like a pulse through my body electrifying my brain sending me into a fit of panic and irritation. My feeling of wanting to be touched, dare I say it loved but not knowing how to accept or enjoy it would become numbingly understandable. Looking at every image of normalcy being placed behind a picket fence wondering how I just a mortal could ever hope to grasp such experiences. Everything would fly into a perfect storm and paint the world in a brilliant color of understanding.

You ask me what is my favorite color and the only true answer that I can give you is autism. What color is autism? You laugh, just thinking it another one of my quirks. Autism is every melanin shade on the planet combined with the burst of a million, no billion, irises all connected by the beating universal pulse of an autistic nation, inhabited by mothers, fathers, doctors, artist, homeless, animal lovers and so many more. We stand together often a colony of loners with our fist in the air not because we are oppressed by others but because the worst oppression is that which you force upon yourself. We oppress, depress, and sometimes regress ourselves but this never makes us less. This is my family one brought together by differences other than similarities. So yes, autism is my favorite color because from the moment I looked through those spectral lenses, the moment I basked in the adjective that set my soul free I had never felt more alive.

I had grown from a suicidal child scared of my own oddness to a mother who added autism to the colorful coat of adjectives I wore. I now knew the secret to finding happiness within myself was realizing that while autism had its quirk which would thwart my everyday life it gave me an ability to see the world in the ways that no one else can. The word disability hints at being at a disadvantage and often is perceived as less than. However, these differences no matter what they are allow us to view the world and interact with it in a way those with normality never could. All you who have these abilities that make you derive from the norm, every odd adjective that makes you different wear them with pride. Never forget that we all are superheroes in our own right no matter what our favorite color is.