Recognizing oneself as a disabled person certainly doesn't make the world seem any less confusing or threatening. However, accepting ourselves as Aut… - Devon Price
" "Recognizing oneself as a disabled person certainly doesn't make the world seem any less confusing or threatening. However, accepting ourselves as Autistic does free many of us (perhaps for the first time) to question whether it's fair that we be expected to live in such a concealed, apologetic way. The process of unmasking is all about rethinking the beliefs and behaviors that seemed normal prior to discovering we were Autistic. It means reexamining the stereotypes about Autistics (and other disabled people) we've been exposed to via media, education, and formative experiences in our youth. It requires we question society's most deeply cherished values, and notice where there are gaps between what we've been told we should be, and how we'd actually like to live. Finally, unmasking demands that we look back on our past selves with a spirit of grace, gradually learning to see that the sides of ourselves that we were told were too loud, too stilted, too weird, or too much are actually completely fine, even wonderful, and absolutely deserving of love.
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About Devon Price
Devon Price is an American social psychologist, blogger, and author focusing on autism. He is best known for his books, Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity and Laziness Does Not Exist, as well as for publishing shorter pieces on Medium and Psychology Today.
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Additional quotes by Devon Price
We live in a reality where people do accurately recognize that that we live and die by our ability to work. And so there's this self-defeating but also really rational quality to our compulsive overwork that a lot of us have. It becomes really self-defeating to say, "I'm in this on my own. I need to work really hard and make a lot of money so that I can take care of myself." Because when you think that way, you also take on a much gloomier view of other people. Anyone else and their needs is kind of a threat to my own kind of rugged individualism and independence. So it keeps us really isolated. It keeps us judging our co-workers for not pulling their own weight because we're suffering so hard. [It] can kind of create this downward spiral of just workaholism and isolation.
When we discuss the weight that stereotyping and Systemic Shame carry, it's hard not to contrast the lives of marginalized people, who are under nearly constant attack, and the lives of the comparatively more privileged, who carry the mark of Systemic Shame far less visibly. For the groups directly targeted by systems of oppression such as anti-Blackness or homophobia, the strength and stakes of Systemic Shame are undeniably more extreme. Yet it is also true that the varying degrees of isolation, self-blame, and societal condemnation that we all experience under Systemic Shame are of the same piece and that this massive social sickness of Systemic Shame will get better only once we begin to realize that we're all affected by it.
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When people run out of energy or motivation, there's a good reason for it. Tired, burned-out people aren't struggling with some shameful, evil inner laziness; rather, they're struggling to survive in an overly demanding, workaholic culture that berates people for having basic needs. We don't have to keep pushing ourselves to the brink, ignoring our body's alarm bells and punishing ourselves with self-recrimination. We don't have to deny ourselves breaks. We don't have to fear laziness. Laziness does not exist.
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