Getting Along in the Online Autistic Community

Posted on April 23, 2024

April is Autism Acceptance or Awareness Month. Whatever you wish to call it, it is a month when the autistic community is more visible than ever. And one where we often work to become more visible still. In the age of the internet, connecting with others around the world is easier than ever, and this is what has allowed disabled communities to grow and thrive.

There is no arguing that this is anything but a positive. One of the struggles of disability is the way it can make a person feel isolated and set apart from others around them who cannot understand their experiences. I know for many on the spectrum, even before they were diagnosed, they knew there was something about them that separated them from their peers. A diagnosis may explain the isolation, but it can also worsen it. Yet now, thanks to the power of the internet to build communities across vast distances, this isolation no longer needs to be so profound. Armed with new knowledge of themselves, a person who learns the name of their disability can take to the internet to find others like them. They can find their community, and through that community, they can find the understanding they may be missing from others in their lives.

That’s how it should be ideally, anyway.

In reality, online communities can be… complicated. They can come with just as many negatives as they do positives. There’s no point in shying away from this, as pretending it isn’t true can only make the negatives worse. The internet has been an important tool in empowering autistic self-advocates to build their communities and amplify their voices. Yet those voices can cause others to feel drowned out. One narrative or perspective can overshadow another. Or differences can seem starker, causing infighting to become more rampant. The internet can bring out the worst in us just as much as it can bring out the best.

I have often felt like a bit of an outsider in the autistic community, whether online or beyond the screen in real life. I’ve never found the idea of neurodivergent individuals naturally getting along better to be true in my case. I think many of the people who I’ve had the most conflict with, or have disliked the most, have been others on the spectrum. Many fellow autistic people can rub me the wrong way. Maybe I see my own social blunders in them. Maybe the same kind of rigidity I display when dealing with others is something I don’t like to be on the receiving end of. Whatever it is, I rarely feel as if I am “on the same wavelength” as other autistic folks. Maybe I understand why they do what they do better than any neurotypical person would, but that often fails to improve my disposition towards them when we find each other at odds.

Some of it, I think, is just that my own social difficulties become more pronounced around my peers on the spectrum. When I have a neurotypical person to cue off, it helps me feel more comfortable navigating a social situation. I can mask better and with less effort. But when there are only other autistic people around, I feel more off-kilter. The conversation often slogs awkwardly along instead of flowing with more ease. Sure, not masking isn’t always a bad thing, but I need to be comfortable with a person before I can feel comfortable unmasking around them.

Of course, like anything, this isn’t universally true. There are plenty of my peers on the spectrum I get along with. Most of my closest friends are autistic or otherwise neurodivergent. But my experiences do still cause me to automatically dislike the narrative I often see the autistic community trying to push; that we’re all one big happy neurodivergent family. That we all automatically understand each other better than any neurotypical could. With autism – the spectrum that it is – being such a varied experience from person to person, how could that ever be the full truth?

On a personal level, I’ve had my share of conflicts with other autistic self-advocates. Part of the reason I became so active in autism advocacy was because I felt I had some unique perspectives to offer. And because I felt some other autistic self-advocates I encountered weren’t always mindful of the limits of their own perspectives. I won’t get into specifics, because that isn’t the point of this blog post, but there are times I’ve felt talked over in the past. I’ve had other self-advocates I’ve worked with push for a way of talking about or doing things that I wasn’t comfortable with, in such a way that I knew to speak up would be to start an argument I wasn’t always ready to have. Sometimes I have had those arguments, and sometimes it didn’t go well. I won’t diminish how these other self-advocates may have felt, or what led them to advocate for things to be done a certain way, but it’s still never been a validating or welcoming interaction for me. I wish I could have felt more comfortable voicing my feelings without fear of causing a problem.

I won’t talk as if I’m not biased towards my own opinion, of course I am. I have beliefs about how I think things should be done in autism advocacy that I feel passionate about. But I’m still just one person. Not everyone else in the autistic community feels the way I do. I try to remember that. I can’t say I always succeed, but I try. That’s all I can ask my fellow self-advocates too.

Beyond my own experiences, I have witnessed plenty of similar conflicts in the online autism community from the sidelines. Communities spring up and then fracture into pieces under the weight of different opinions and perspectives. There are more autism-focused subreddits than I think I can even count on two hands. Each offers a space for those who might feel alienated and unheard in others. There are lots of things that cause disagreements in the online autistic community. ABA is one example among many. A lot of autistic folks object heavily to the use of ABA therapy on autistic people and call it abuse.

Others feel they have received positive results from ABA, or at least believe it can be reformed into something better. Any post on the internet discussing the topic rarely remains peaceful for long.

I decided to talk about all this in my blog post for April because, as I said earlier, it is important to acknowledge the difficult aspects of coming together as a community in the expansive age of the internet. We need to acknowledge those difficulties so we can thrive despite them. We can do so much more in advocacy together if we truly acknowledge we aren’t and will never be a monolith. I understand the tendency to speak for everyone on the spectrum when that’s often the expectation put on you as a self-advocate, the token autistic voice in a given space, but we still need to be mindful. We will all be stronger together if we learn to respect our differences. That can unite us, even as it also means some of us need our own smaller spaces too.

I’ve seen the good done by autistic communities online. I’ve seen the support we can offer each other, and the changes we can push for together. There are so many self-advocates I’ve gotten to know over the past few years who have helped me out in so many ways. I’ve been able to do the work I do, including writing this blog post right now, because of the way technology has connected us. It’s possible to reach so many people now, and that can and has been used for so much good. I would never diminish that. I just want to see the positive parts of our online communities thrive, instead of letting ourselves give in to the negativity. The online world has helped center autistic people in the conversation more than ever before. We just need to make sure that the conversation is a good one.