There’s a question that I’ve been mulling over quite a bit in recent months. How did we get to a point where we accept injury or damage as either inevitable, or worse, intrinsic to who we are?
I’ve been approached by a handful of people lately about their children either having been or currently being diagnosed with autism. It feels eerie, like something is accelerating. And what’s accelerating is widespread damage. I have been pretty convinced that those who have evaded autism in this current generation will not be spared in the next. It’s hard to watch, but also excruciatingly obvious to me, since it’s the world we live in already.
Unfortunately, we’ve normalized the damage being done. Call it neurodiversity, call it neurodivergence – we’re increasingly turning our eyes from the crippling of our children and celebrating them for being different. It’s kind of like someone cutting off your arms, but instead of finding who did it so they can’t do it again, we just celebrate this new and remarkable human form that has emerged.
I spent some time with a friend the other day who has been a therapist and aide for my older son since he was five years old. She has recently been diagnosed herself as being on the autism spectrum. And since embracing that diagnosis, she has changed dramatically. Every time I see her now, she’s on more medications for various things. She is training a therapy dog to help interrupt her autism behaviors that she literally developed since her diagnosis.
Now, that sounds harsh, as if the diagnosis alone brought on her symptoms, which I know absolutely is not true. She was very good at repressing these impulses, and covered up what was going wrong behind her ability to “function,” which means that she is currently going through what I like to call a reboot. She’s allowing things to come out that she became adept at squashing.
That’s actually a positive thing, but the concerning part of it is how she views her autism. It’s intrinsic to who she is. It IS who she is. It’s not damage that needs fixing, or shouldn’t have happened. It’s who she is.
When she said these words to me the other day, knowing that people feel this way, I was still taken back. I kind of sputtered. And I blurted out, but my son cannot speak – or at least not very well. That’s not supposed to happen. That’s not who he is.
She waved it off as, well, that’s the disability part of it.
As if they’re separate issues.
I’m not autistic, so generally speaking, I’m not allowed to even speak about this concept. But I’m going to risk two comparisons here. And the second really helped me come to a hypothesis of why we’re at this moment of just accepting this neurological damage.
Several years ago, my brother learned he had a brain tumor. By the time it was diagnosed, it had grown into his brain, creating little finger-like tendrils that intertwined with his brain tissue. Surgery helped to remove some, but obviously they couldn’t remove it all. It had become one with his brain. It would ultimately take his life.
We would joke sometimes about his behavior in the intervening years – was it his brain or his tumor making him do certain things? We’d brush off the crazy as, meh, that’s just his tumor talking.
Now, imagine if we believed that tumor was supposed to be part of him. That it defined him. Or if he had believed it himself. Your oncologist says, don’t worry, now you have a beautiful and unique brain. So go be proud of it! They’d get run out of their profession in a heartbeat. Well, maybe not in today’s world. Who knows.
The second experience was my own. 20 years ago, when I was in my early 20s, I injured my hip from running. I’ll spare the full story, because I can really be dramatic when I retell it. But here’s a short version of it.
I am not a natural runner, and almost failed high school PE because of it. Therefore, I tried to incorporate it into an active single-adult lifestyle, even though my form was probably poor, and my ability moderate at best. But I pushed at it anyhow.
Training for a race one year, I started having mysterious pain down my left leg. I brushed it off. During the actual race, something happened. I can still remember the exact moment of jogging down a hill, and the very impact of my foot with the pavement that sent shock waves through my entire body.
I went to the doctor a day or two later, and after taking into account my physical attributes (young, physically active, healthy, etc), the orthopedist did not seem to think anything was wrong. I had an inflamed hip joint. Or something. I said it happened during a race, and he looked down his nose at me and asked, “well, did you finish the race?”
I’ve thought about that statement a lot over the years. Was he judging me for causing further damage by trying to finish what had injured me in the first place, or was he gauging my toughness based on my ability to get through a race anyways?
A third option has surfaced in my thinking recently, though. I wonder if he asked because it helped him gauge how serious the injury was. If I put on a brave face and said I had finished (I sort of had, I limped through to the end, letting a golf cart pick me up for the last several hundred yards), then he knew my complaint was not that serious.
He sent me home to just self-monitor. Then, after some excruciating weeks, I had to finally assume that whatever happened was not minor, and that I couldn’t just tough it out. I returned to the doctor. He agreed to x-ray it this time.
I’ll never forget his reaction when he studied the x-ray image. After staring at the stress fracture that ran all the way through the neck of my left femur, he turned to me and said, you should not have been able to walk into my office with that injury.
To be fair, I wasn’t walking gracefully. I was often hugging the wall to get from one place to another. But what choice did I have? I had to go to work. I had to get on with life.
I adapted to the injury as best as I could. And it was a bad injury. And my ability to cope with it belied the painful problem beneath.
As I looked at my dear friend, who is more like a little sister – or even daughter – in our family, I saw what I had experienced in those days. Being able to cope with an injury means that no one buys that you are, in fact, injured. Then the moment of relief at knowing what actually is going on, and reaching for the crutches – the crutches I should have had from day one.
But when you’re talking the brain and not a bone, it gets worse from there. And it seems to indicate what we’re experiencing as a society at large – convincing ourselves that injury is not injury, and is in fact who we are and intrinsic to our very beings.
Yes, I just compared autism (or other mental disorders) to a fractured bone. But a bone will heal itself in time. Whatever we’ve done to injure the brains of countless millions (and rapidly increasing) isn’t so easily undone, and that injury may run too deep to fix in my lifetime.
And while we do need to adapt and keep soldiering on, it’s terrifying that, as humans, the injury is starting to define us. We’re starting to believe that the bone was always broken, or at least meant to be so. And we should celebrate it.
Because honestly, that seems to be easier than trying to figure out what’s causing the break. Just give everyone a pair of crutches and eventually we’ll forget that anyone was ever supposed to walk unassisted.
This is a really good point. RFK Jr points out that the occurrence of Autism has surged from 1 in ten thousand in his generation to something like 1 in 30 today. Truly shocking to think we have simply "normalized" this.
Thank you for your article. I am in the UK and sadly this happened to my grandmother in London.
She was about 80 years old and had a fall in 1981. She had broken her hip but the idiot doctors didn't think to x-ray her hip. I recall she had physiotherapy instead for several months before someone had the wit to x-ray.
I have had my own issues with the NHS which I have started to write about. This may interest you re sodium nitrite (E250) and the alleged cancer I was diagnosed with.
https://baldmichael.substack.com/p/sodium-nitrite-e250-the-poison-in