I'm medically diagnosed autistic. I struggle with a lot. But some upsides I've encountered:
I tend to form stronger empathy and justice models, and commit to them wholly. This has allowed me to, for instance, work on improving access to benefits or healthcare for others while other people around me burn out. But I often fight way too long, and I get upset when people disagree.
I often hyperfocus on projects I'm interested in and can produce a high level of output if given an interesting task.
I enjoy counting, categorization, and organization tasks. Find all bugs that meet these rules, or, double check every unit test to check we're meeting coverage goals. Give me those tedious, repeatable, rules based gardening tasks and I'll churn through them all day every day.
I believe I have a more systemic way of thinking than my peers, and while this does cause problems sometimes it also enables me to decompose systems more easily.
I tend to maintain my cool under pressure or bullying. I simply do not notice nor care about emotionally loaded conversations. This causes problems often but also helps often, I can mediate with "we're here now, let's focus on how to improve".
These, of course, are not the upsides of every autistic person. They are my upsides for me. Again, I am medically diagnosed and do require support to operate as an adult. My childhood was... not good.
I do not want to say it's only upsides, but I do think for some autistic people there are things those people do consider up sides.
Edit: if I could choose to not be autistic, even with the massive burden it has for me, I would choose to remain autistic and I would fight tooth and nail against anyone who tried to change me to remove it.
That's an optimistic take, a more pessimistic one I've had is it seems to me for every trait that an autistic person has that is "good" there's some neurotypical person that has it as well without the suffering.
But it's also not clear what "being you but not autistic" would even mean, since it's an exercise in an imaginary hypothetical.
Mostly access to healthcare, like, "why don't we offer this? Why are there barriers? Why can't we get automatic approvals for this?" Etc.
It turns out there are lots of groups who have greater than median barriers to access even basic care (trans folks, Black folks, immigrants, neurodiverse folks, disabled folks, etc). I happen to have a "I'll just keep calling and escalating until I've called every person in the company" attitude that doesn't seem to find that exhausting.
Interesting. I’m working on a similar project/idea (?app, I don’t know what to call it, doesn’t matter), about helping patients understand what they need to do for primary prevention. I hadn’t thought of the specific barriers that each group might face. I’m a doctor and feel that too much is reliant on the doctor remembering to ask (“oh have we checked your blood sugars btw!”) I want to empower patients with this info.
I tend to form stronger empathy and justice models, and commit to them wholly. This has allowed me to, for instance, work on improving access to benefits or healthcare for others while other people around me burn out. But I often fight way too long, and I get upset when people disagree.
I often hyperfocus on projects I'm interested in and can produce a high level of output if given an interesting task.
I enjoy counting, categorization, and organization tasks. Find all bugs that meet these rules, or, double check every unit test to check we're meeting coverage goals. Give me those tedious, repeatable, rules based gardening tasks and I'll churn through them all day every day.
I believe I have a more systemic way of thinking than my peers, and while this does cause problems sometimes it also enables me to decompose systems more easily.
I tend to maintain my cool under pressure or bullying. I simply do not notice nor care about emotionally loaded conversations. This causes problems often but also helps often, I can mediate with "we're here now, let's focus on how to improve".
These, of course, are not the upsides of every autistic person. They are my upsides for me. Again, I am medically diagnosed and do require support to operate as an adult. My childhood was... not good.
I do not want to say it's only upsides, but I do think for some autistic people there are things those people do consider up sides.
Edit: if I could choose to not be autistic, even with the massive burden it has for me, I would choose to remain autistic and I would fight tooth and nail against anyone who tried to change me to remove it.