“You are a flaw in the pattern.”

– George Orwell, 1984.

When I was a kid, I wondered why I was so different. Whenever I did something “unusual,” the kids in my school would give me a look. It was a look that was hard to explain, but it didn’t make me feel great about myself. It was like I was, to quote George Orwell’s 1984, “a flaw in the pattern.” Looking back, now that I know the truth, I wonder why that look was even a thing I had to endure. Then I realized that part of the blame stems from something I love so much and want to make a career out of. Before I start explaining why this is, I’ll explain how my life completely changed, for the better, almost nine years ago. You see, twenty-seven days before my fourteenth birthday, my eyes were truly opened for the first time. I was told that I have what is now called “level one” autism.

The first question we need to ask ourselves is, “what is autism?” According to Autism Ontario, autism is a lifelong condition that affects the way a person socializes, sympathizes, and communicates with the world around them. Boys are four times more likely to be diagnosed with autism than girls are, one in sixty-six Canadian children are on the spectrum, and one percent of the Canadian population is on the spectrum. And even though people are born with autism, the cause of it is still unknown. 

Social skills can be very, very difficult for us. Eye contact is excruciating. We can’t sit still and tend to fidget a lot. We can be overly honest. Our senses are heightened. We hate being touched. We prefer wearing certain clothes and eating foods a certain way. Routines are extremely important. If we have sensory overloads, we have meltdowns. But we interpret the world differently. We become experts at things we’re passionate about. We have incredible memories. We care about and protect those they love. And we’re very intelligent- I just want to clear up this infuriating stigma that I constantly see and hear: autistic people are NOT dim-witted. Quite the opposite, in fact. We’re very intelligent. I personally think that the reason why people have this ignorant belief is because autistic people have difficulty with social skills and that is a reflection of their intelligence. Assumptions are evil, people! And one more thing, some of the sweetest, smartest kids I know are on the spectrum, and I mean every word of that. 

You wouldn’t believe how happy I was when I got diagnosed. I finally had my answer: I’m not unusual; I’m autistic. I embrace who I am. And it has positively affected my life goals. As an aspiring writer, I want to help spread autism awareness through my characters. But as much as I love writing YA, I’ve become discouraged. 

Advice that has always been given to me is to read a lot. And as someone who has always wanted to write young adult books, YA books have always been my go-to choice. Yet YA books have also become one of my worst enemies because I started seeing that the world is a broken mirror. And as hard as it is for me to accept it, there’s a huge, obvious problem right in front of our faces that no one seems to want to address. Until now.

I never, ever saw myself in books. There were very few autistic characters, and when there was, they were heavily stereotyped and the “token” autistic kids. But it wasn’t just with autistic kids. The Middle Grade and Young Adult genres have huge problems with not representing disabled kids. And when there were disabled kids even mentioned, the majority of the time they were disrespected by ableist protagonists. And it’s way more common than it should ever be. Instead of just taking my word for it, I’ve created a slideshow with ableist passages that proves that publishing industries still have a very long way to go. I have to give you a huge trigger warning because these passages are really tough to read. 

So here’s the first one, from Speechless, from 2012: “I ended up sitting at the table where the Special Ed kids eat, and even they ignored me. Talk about humiliating.” This passage is so wrong on so many levels. Not only is it incredibly insulting to the kids with special needs, but the protagonist is presenting herself as better than them, when she isn’t.

The next passage on my slideshow is very similar to the first, but takes it to a whole other ableist level. Many of you have probably heard of Before I Fall, from 2010: “Special ed kids sit all the way down, at the table closest to the classrooms… Okay, so it only looks out over the parking lot, but it’s still better than getting a straight view of the short-bus brigade dribbling their applesauce. No offense.” 

Next, when you read the back cover of Shooter from 2016, you are immediately greeted with character introductions, the first one being, “There’s Alice: an introverted writer, trapped in the role of caregiver to her older autistic brother, Noah.” First of all, one thing to know is that every protagonist is given a description to learn about their personalities. The only description Noah gets is that he’s autistic, which is basically saying that that’s all the reader needs to know about him. Hence the token autistic character who’s extremely unrealistic. Not only that, the book is riddled with hurtful stereotypes, such as autistic people are “liabilities” to those around them and that autistic people are violent and dangerous. And the word used is “trapped,” as if taking care of an autistic sibling is a curse. Here’s another quote from the book: “I look at her for her rule-following support but she’s too busy trying to calm down her weirdo brother.” And the final passage from this particular book is absolutely sickening, please excuse the language used: “It is the weirdest thing: the Hulk- school badass and loner- in a furry costume, lying on the bathroom floor, bear-hugging this retar- autistic kid. But I don’t mind it. Not at all.” This particular character actually grows to like and protect the autistic character, but the fact that it was an automatic reflex to call an autistic person the r-word is very problematic. 

The next passage is from The List, published in 2012. To give context, Candace is reacting to being labeled the ugliest sophomore in her school: “[“]On the plus side,” Candace continues, mainly to fill the awkward silence, “I guess we know for sure that Lynette Wilcox wrote the list this year. Mystery solved!”/Lynette Wilcox uses a Seeing Eye dog to lead her through the hallways. She was born blind, her eyes milky white and too wet. /So it’s a joke. Obviously”. 

I came across this final passage on a bookstore website. It is from the MG novel, Bad Best Friend, unfortunately published just in 2020. I will read a section of the back cover: “Meanwhile, life at home is complicated. Niki’s nine-year-old brother Danny continues to act out more and more publicly. Their mother refuses to admit that Danny is somewhere on the autism spectrum, but it’s clear he needs help. Niki doesn’t want to be like her brother, to be labeled as different. She just wants to be popular! Is she a bad sister and a bad best friend?” I have never read the book, but the back cover is filled with ableist sentiments. There’s the stereotype that kids who act out in public are autistic. There’s the mother, being ashamed of having a possibly autistic son. There’s the main character, who doesn’t want to be compared to her “different” brother. And the fact that something like this would be published in 2020, when we’re supposed to be “so progressive” is absolutely heartbreaking. Now really, if a book with something so ableist on the back cover could be published in 2020, we have to ask ourselves the million dollar question: how progressive are we?

Whenever I read these ableist sentiments, I always think to myself, is that how kids see people like me? Is this how authors think kids see people like me? If authors keep writing characters who think like this, it justifies the mistreatment of kids with disabilities. 

I’m actually working on editing a book I wrote a couple of years ago, where a girl gets diagnosed with autism in June of her eighth grade year after believing there was something wrong with her her whole life. She’s extremely happy to get the answer she’s been looking for, tells her class about her new reality the day she gets diagnosed, gets inspired to write autistic characters, and spends her summer before high school learning how she’s supposed to see the world. When I reread the chapters of my girl’s diagnosis day, part of me thinks, “Is this really believable?” And that makes me sick, because it is real. It happened. I did it. I told my class about my diagnosis the day it happened. But because of the stigmas and stereotypes created by neurotypical people, I can’t even find my own experiences believable. Because of these very wrong preconceptions that have been created by and continue to be endorsed by the media, I’m stigmatizing and gaslighting myself. My experience isn’t authentic to the world.

One thing I’ll always remember is how people have told me that what I’m writing is meaningful. So why is there limited authentic autistic representation? Don’t you think that you’d be pleasantly surprised if you, just for a few hundred pages, saw the world through someone else’s eyes?

I cannot stress this enough, representation is extremely important. If the media is constantly letting autistic people down with horrible sentiments, kids are not going to be accepting of disabled people, and they’ll grow up to be very ignorant. Autistic kids are more likely to be bullied than neurotypical kids. Speaking from very painful experiences, when you’re bullied, you feel alone. To top it all off, you can’t even see yourself in the media, and when you do, you’re being mocked or misrepresented. It makes you think that you don’t belong in the world just because you were born “abnormal,” but really, who gets to decide who’s “normal?” No one, that’s who. No kid should go through that. Things need to change now.