Do labels change me? The simple answer is no. I’ve always highlighted this and, on a rational level, I still believe it. No-one who knows me well has regarded me any differently after we found out the mental health folks labeled me autistic. Worse yet, I still cannot claim, according to Arda, that I’m not social, even though being asocial is one of the core symptoms of my so-called disability and it is probably one of the main reasons why the mental health folks have come to believe I’m on the spectrum, as the social interaction deficits were the ones my parents highlighted most and I was most clear about - cause it’s the thing that I understand best. Still, I’ve not seen anyone here at training home respond differently to me and my parents, besides not saying a word about the label, are still acting the same, too.
And, of course, I haven’t changed. Autism, as well as neurotypicality, is congenital. And so are other characreristics. Like, I didn’t become gifted the day a remedial educationalist identifed me as such. All the identification did, was to highlight that my parents were right.
That “being right” thing works here, too. Arda says the staff long suspected I’m on the spectrum. Yet they can’t label me. It’s even like I only need a label to show future agencies - like I only needed to be labeled gifted to show my high school that I was intellectually capable. Arda even seems to think it was that simple, back in November. I tend to assume it was not, as we were getting stuck quite a bit at the time. That is, however, not anything a label can change. Like, the label of an ASD doesn’t enable the staff to cater their support to what an autistic is supposed to need any more than a staff’s suspection of an ASD - and, in this sense, I sincerely don’t believe the mental health folks have any better power of authority than the staff who’ve known me for a year. Labels can help in clarifying my situation for people who don’t have extensive experience with me, but they will not change the way I respond.
There is, however, another factor to this, that is the fact that I’m still getting stuck. Arda says that, because I’m labeled what they suspected I should be labeled, it means they’re on the right track. I say that they may be on the right track in interpreting my behavior, but the situation was, and still is, clearly not what it should be. That may be cause of my behavior - everything is cause of my behavior, directly or indirectly, cause I belong to a behavioral minority -, but that doesn’t change it. Labels do, hopefully, open the door to a better understanding of and working on this. To expand on the gifted analogy: without my identification as highly intelligent, no-one at the schools for the blind might’ve cared to give me enrichment work. That label didn’t change me as an individual, but it made it easier to understand me.
There is another part to this: labesls don’t help me understand myself even if I have good knowledge of these labels. I have better than average knowledge of autism. Incidentally, last week I almost engaged in a lengthy monologue about autism causation theories (was only stopped cause Marianne made the comment that Kanner’s original article dates from 1942, which I had to correct). That doesn’t mean a label enables me to have a lot of knowledge about myself. This is not only cause each individual is more than their label, but also cause there is a lot of difference between theorectical and practical knowledge. I know almost every bit of theoretical knowledge on autism till April of 2004, but I am seriously lacking in practical, applicable knowledge. I use the word “labeled” to connote that lack of knowledge: just because I understand autism and the mental health folks say I’m on the spectrum, doesn’t mean I understand myself.
