I need to start standing up for myself more as an autistic person. I am sick of people who think they know better about how to handle my condition and my life then I do. Just because you “knew a guy” who won the Nobel Prize and was autistic does not mean I should be able to hold down a job at a super market without having a nervous breakdown every week. Everyone tells me what I am capable of without even listening to me about my capacity or my struggles. I often go on about what I am on this blog, what I do, what I think, and what I am capable of. I have decided it is time to stand up for myself and declare what I am not.

I am not “lazy” because I can’t function emotionally or mentally in the general work force.

I am not…

Something I’ve often noticed about the way Asperger’s Syndrome impacts on my life is the disparity that it creates between my inability to speak or talk smoothly and freely to people in real life, compared with my ability to express myself clearly in writing.

Believe it or not I regularly forget the words I want to use when I’m talking to people face to face.

They simply seem to just escape me.

Like birds that have flown their coop and no amount of trying can retrieve them.

In moments like these I find myself gasping for breath and completely lost, as my inner panic at not being able to find the right words, envelopes me.

More often than not I end up stuttering or just stopping, awkwardly, half way through a sentence.

Trapped in a suspended silence, gazing solemnly at the floor, while my mind continues grasping for that which…