Tanjiro wrote:
My 17 yr. old son is having a hard time accepting his autism diagnosis. He is high functioning, and feels his life is not worth living if he has autism. He equates autism with mental retardation, but I tell him some of the smartest people in the world have autism. He feels he cannot have a happy life, and that everyone thinks he is weird. I don’t know what to do.
I understand how he feels. Being a child or a teen with a diagnosis that most of the world doesn't understand is very hard, especially if you are self-aware and are kind of expected to fit into the mainstream world. It can cause the young person to feel frustrated and fear social failure.
I always used to think autism is a mental retardation as well, because of the way we ''can't'' understand or recognise social things that most people find so natural, and it makes us feel isolated and miserable. I mean, being a human that is unable to understand something so natural to humans is like a bee not understanding how to make honey or a lion not understanding how to hunt.
But thankfully not all autistics are 100% ignorant to social cues, and there are some social things we learnt naturally. Knowing this makes me feel a little better about myself. I've never been 100% clueless socially, and I do not have a social mind of a newborn (which has actually been specified here on WP in the past).
_________________
Female
28 Jul 2020, 12:35 pm
