Discussing why I chose ASD Is Ability as title, my drive and how I have launched these articles

Welcome to this article of ASD Is Ability. New article, number three. I have to start saying about the reception I have received when I shared the news about my conversation with a few people. You might ask, why only a few? And this might be the reason why I started the conversation. From an ASD perspective, there's always the need for looking for perfectionism, and at the same time, reception from people to see how things are done, and if you want just a validation at some extent of what we do and how we do it.

In the past, whenever I have embarked in a project, or whenever I have taken a new challenge, sometimes I have gone on social media or reaching out to a lot of people to share what I have done and explaining what I'm embarking and creating quite a lot of expectation from people to see what I have done. In some cases, the outcome was not as expected, or just simply started, give it a go, and after a few days or weeks, went away. And that created an embarrassment, because from a perspective of telling people what I'm going to do, then I receive comments saying, oh, how come you stop that? Oh, I have heard before that you stop, and that might be a trait of ASD, might not, might be just my trait.

What is true is that in the case of this conversation, which I'm intending to do weekly, I have not gone wild and telling everybody. Yes, I have an Instagram account, I have my social media account, where I simply post the link to the conversation. No further marketing, no further explanation. And this is really to force myself to take a long view on the conversation. And as I said, I share with someone I met the other day, and it was very well received idea. So that person knew about neurodiversity, has been in contact with some people that were neurodiverse, and the reception I had was great to hear that you were doing that and you raise awareness. So just only for that gives me the reassurance of carry on going forward. What I do is really to talk about ASD in the context of neurodiversity, and if there's more people being aware, that's good, that's my intention.

And today, I'm going to talk about the title that I put for this conversation, refer to a specific about ability in the terms of ASD, and more generally how open we are to talk about neurodiversity. Let me start with the title. Why did I choose this title? When I look into what conversations are out there, about ASD, I was first of all surprised by the lack of amount and types of conversations available. There are some articles dedicated to ASD, which is great in the context of either mental health or raising awareness about people and cultures. When it came to a specific conversation about ASD, I found a few that use the term asperges, in some cases a bit more humorous, you could say. As an ASD, being like-hearted is a very difficult thing to do. So I thought, how about if I, first of all, I create this conversation, which is about ASD, about living with ASD, about living with people with ASD, and just raise more awareness.

I start by having a title that is short enough for people to remember. And that probably was the most difficult part. We get used to titles that tend to be quite long in conversations. The reason for it is because the short titles have already been taken. So for me, it had to be ASD, and then what else would that be? ASD and life experience, or mastering life with ASD. A lot of names came to mind. And it was through thinking about the word ASD, and then the word disability, that I wrote it down about ASD and how to live in with disability, etc. And then it came to my thought that, okay, ASD, the D is not disability, it's disorder, just simply D and disability, and when I combined together, then I thought, hold on a moment, if I put ASD, ASD's ability, it's like ASD Is Ability.

I thought, what better way to start raising awareness about ASD by saying Is an Ability? Like a lot of abilities that other people have. Simply people with ASD have certain ability, and they lack on others the other people have. So just being a bit more positive. And just by doing that, it really helped me to get a clear direction on the conversation, and it helped me a lot when it came to getting ideas on the different articles. So I think that was really, really helpful.

It helped me as well in terms of social media, the social media accounts that I have, that at the moment they are... it's silent running, or at least not publicly advertised. I have that one as a hashtag, ASD Is Ability, and we'll see where it goes.

I hope that at some point, that hashtag, ASD Is Ability, becomes like a trademark that people recognize about ASD, and a lot about neurodiversity. That understanding is not different. It's just, each one of us have a special way of looking at things, or if you want, is the richness of different aspects of looking at things, regardless of how is our brain and our neurodiversity. When it comes to the ASD, I think for me was crucial about the term ability, and that's what I wanted to cover here on this article as a main topic. We come across a lot of times about disability, which is great, raising awareness about disability is very important. It not only is a show of respect for people that have disabilities, it's also a way for us to be more open minded and have that kind of approach, good approach, to understand that the world is more complex than we think, and sometimes we make it more complex than it should be.

So for me, disability is very important in that respect. What I thought about the title of the conversation and the aim of the conversation is to really think how much we could turn the term of disability to actually look at an ability that people have when they're thinking the way they behave. And that's really looking at the other side of the coin. For me, making it positive, making it much more optimistic, looking at new diversity as a way that the society works better. If everybody was thinking the same way, it would be so boring, it would be just really not a place that I would enjoy and possibly most of you wouldn't. It's through that kind of neurodiversity that we have different approaches.

Think for a moment about how you might reach to a friend that is very good at certain aspects, or you might just go and start a new hobby, and you are able to do things that you thought you wouldn't be able to do before. And you have that new skill. That new skill is acquire.

How good would it be if you look at the way you think, the way you see things, the way how your brain works, to be a type of ability. And each of our brains might have a different set of abilities. When it comes to ASD is one type of ability, which is not the most common one, and by not being the one that people see everywhere, and by being a minority, also makes it an even more important ability.”

In other articles, I will talk about the difficulties of living in a society when experiencing ASD, and definitely there's a lot of elements where the ASD brain struggles and needs a lot of work and development. There's no doubt about it. Just simply, as I said, think about the coin on one side.

Yes, elements like feeling or understanding, meanings, and we'll go that in detail. It's more difficult. In other aspects, it's just really having that ability to make it easier to understand things in a way that maybe nobody else sees in the same way unless they have ASD. And that's the ability. This ability is something that with people with ASD, and people around those that have ASD, is so crucial to be recognized. Really, really crucial.”

The person that spoke about my conversation, about ASD, as I explained before, the person said to me, oh, if it's about autism, I think they have like a special power. And I disagree, because this is not about having a special power. This is not about being better than others. This is not about, I don't know what to think, well, is a better brain or more complex, it's not like that. Just really, it's about thinking that our brain and each of our brains can function in a certain way, and understanding how those work is how we interact. If you have an ASD talking to another person with ASD, they tend to click quite well, simply because they tend to think in a certain way, and by doing that, things go very smoothly.

Conversely, if it's someone with ASD, with someone who is really the opposite, sometimes he is a good complement as well. So that works well. When you have someone who has ASD in an environment of talking to people that don't have a much more aligned brain to either interacting with ASD or just generally not so open to neurodiversity, the things become a bit more complex.

So with the ability also comes the difficulty of putting it in place. I will explain in other articles about what does that mean, that sort of ability, and where people with ASD can really excel, and how those brains really channel the energy in a way that is so effective for certain tasks or for certain situations. And at the same time, how that brain really struggles in other situations of tasks that for the vast majority of people, that don't have ASD, they think it's mundane and it's so easy to do. That's part of the struggle that we have or I'm discussing here.

That takes me to the kind of the wider perspective of this article, which is about how to be open about neurodiversity. We are very lucky these days that neurodiversity becomes more and more open, there's more talk in communities, and the society starts talking about the importance of neurodiversity. And this conversation, as you are listening, launched in beginning of 2024.

And if you go back 5, 10, 15, 20 years, or even before then, neurodiversity was never an element to discuss, to be aware, or even to celebrate. It was always about confirming to the norm or not. And if you were not in the standard of the society, the way of thinking, the way the brain would operate, then it was like outside scope and not in the normality.

Luckily, we have moved on from there. Maybe not everybody has, and that's an effort we can all do to really educate those people and show that neurodiversity is the richness of our society. And as such, because neurodiversity becomes more and more important, we can talk about ASD.

ASD is important to be put in the framework of conversations so people really can tell what that means. There's a lot of stereotypes when it comes to personalities, and really that's sometimes looked at as an example. I'm saying, oh, ASD, I heard that such and such person has ASD, and that makes sense because he or she is behaving in a certain way, which is a bit unusual.

For me, that's not the right language. For me, it's very important to say what ASD is. You can put an example of someone who has that neurodiversity, that is more public. While doing so, just raise the awareness that there's more people with ASD than people can recognize, and there's great people and very successful people with ASD as it is successful people without. It's not an ingredient to be successful, and definitely is not a deterrent for someone to do really well in life. My motto around ASD is that the biggest hurdle a person with ASD has is in him or herself.

Coming to terms with having ASD and being able to be positive, embrace it, and just really celebrate the ability that I can see in having ASD, that's the main goal for someone with ASD in my view. Once that's achieved, is when that person can go out and celebrate neurodiversity and can face people that don't have that openness towards neurodiversity. And that's what I wanted to cover in today's article.

In the next article, I'm going to go through some life experience as a person with ASD in the context of flying, airports, and everything that goes around. And the reason why I'm going to do that is to show you guys how a person with ASD looks at that form of travel, how he interacts, and hopefully can bring a bit of light next time you are at an airport or on a plane and you see someone behaving in the way that sometimes I behave and understand, well, I can see that person does something that Joanne explained in that conversation. I wonder if he has a neurodiversity, I wonder if he has ASD, or maybe not. I just see that just by being different, by doing things that maybe some other people don't do, doesn't mean it's the wrong or right way. Just a different way. And I hope you enjoy that article, and I hope you have enjoyed this one.