Photo by Julian Gentile on Unsplash

I found a new word today! It’s “Aspergers-like.” What does “Aspergers-like” mean? As someone with Asperger’s, I feel like I should know. It was used in an article about programmers preferring to code in dark rooms on black screens. The writer explains the use of this made-up word by asserting that people with Asperger’s are light-sensitive and could be suited to coding work.

I can’t choose among the many sarcastic repartees that came to mind, so feel free to insert your own.

While it is true that all of my senses are more likely to distract me than non-autistic people’s, some more likely to do so than others, namely hearing, smell, and taste. Light isn’t usually an issue for me unless I’m truly and well depleted, by which point everything hurts, light, sound, odor, even touch. In short, I don’t need darkness to work.

About ten years ago, back when I thought I might be a scientist, I took a programming course. It was a spectacular failure. Some autistics probably write and edit amazing code. I am not one of them. It took me four days to laboriously work and rework a few lines to spit out a simple graph. Even though I’m Aspergers-actual, not Aspergers-like, I am decidedly not better suited to programming than normal people who enjoy and excel at it.

This is not far off from those ridiculous lists of jobs that people on the spectrum should be good at, based on supposed stereotypical tendencies. Such tendencies are the mere trimmings of our autism and do not give any idea what an autistic’s life is really [sic] like. Inevitably, the people who make these lists are not autistic, don’t have any autistics in their family, don’t know anything about being autistic, and wouldn’t know an autistic if they bumped into me on the street.

Case in point: I do part-time work as a vet tech. I love working with animals. I’ve worked in lots of different clinics and hospitals in lots of different settings and you know what they all have in common? Noise and odor, two of my big three. Dogs barking, cats meowing, goats bleating, pigs squealing, you get the idea. They also smell, and not always pleasantly.

So someone who knows nothing about autism might look at the content of this post so far and think Hmmmm, maybe this is something that someone who was Aspergers-like, with hearing and scent sensitivities, wouldn’t be suited for.

They’d be wrong. For autistics, it’s not just any sound or smell (or light, taste or touch). It depends on the type, level and circumstances. For me, really loud stuff is bad. Really quiet, but still audible, stuff is worse. Dogs and cats barking and wailing? I tune it out. Scent-wise, I have trouble with dirty clothes, or too much perfume, or when a bathroom smells bad, but animals? Meh.

Not only that, but… …not everyone with sensory sensitivities is autistic.

[pause for effect]

I mean… Asperger’s-like? That’s like saying ambidextrous people are lefthanded-like. Pardon me while I puke in my cupholder.

The article itself had nothing–and I mean NOTHING–to do with being neurodivergent. I’m not even sure why this obviously unresearched factoid was even included. People make up terms to suit their purposes (see: factoid), and I get that, but not even the flimisiest of excuses justifies the waste of couple dozen words of copy on something they know little about and have even less business mentioning. Why couldn’t they just say “people with light sensitivities?” It’s more accurate, and requires less explanation.

I’m probably fighting a losing battle. I gave up on the verb form of “impact,” which, not long ago, was a medical condition of the colon that meant you were very, very sick. Despite being resigned that this one isn’t coming back, anytime someone says “impacted,” I still think of poop.

Why did the writer have to include Asperger’s at all? It completely took me out of the story. I can barely remember anything from the rest of the article.

Who knows? Maybe their brain has become impacted-like.