My story reaches a point at which – at least as I feel it – it feels like the baton should now pass to others. Doreen, perhaps Paul, or Klaus – each of them has their own stories, which could, and probably should, be shared as versions of our family’s Rashomon. I don’t know when or how this might ever happen – for now, that possibility seems out of reach. Between the year in which my account ends – sometime in 2011 – and the year Lea began her independent life – 2014 – lies a span of time surely filled with challenges and complications. But my own presence during that period was more peripheral, and the evidence I have – fragmentary memories, supplemented by a few snapshots of family celebrations – is far from suited to the kind of intensely intimate narration I’ve sustained until now.
That’s why I think it’s time to close – but before I do, I want to share a few final thoughts that still occupy my mind. Important thoughts, or so I believe.

The point is this: after everything I’ve told – after this torrent of painful stories that were also, I hope, illuminating and at times inspiring – many of you might still be left with a question, one that would likely remain unspoken unless I asked it myself:

“All right, your story is moving, touching, sincere… But is it necessary? Do we really need to know all this? After all, autism is a relatively rare condition. It doesn’t feature in most people’s lives. We live in a world saturated with stories, facts, and information. Why should we devote any of our most scarce resources – our time and attention – to your story?”

My answer is that this way of understanding autism and its spectrum is deeply flawed. No, it is not some exotic phenomenon, some distant fragment of existence, cut off from everyday life. The very fact that interest in it – in the entire theme of neurodiversity in all its astonishing variety – has grown exponentially over the last few decades is already evidence enough that we are only now beginning to open our eyes to something we have lived with constantly – for centuries, likely millennia – while refusing to see it, recognise it, and accept it as an inevitable part of the human experience.

The sudden unveiling of so many long-tabooed dimensions of human life – something we’ve all been witnessing over the past thirty or forty years – no doubt has many possible explanations: the collapse of political and cultural boundaries, unprecedented cultural mixing, technological and informational revolutions… you name it. But perhaps the most important and decisive precondition is something much simpler – something closer to the everyday experience of most of us: the fact that we, as a species, are maturing. We’re reaching a milestone in our individual and collective development at which we can no longer avoid the realisation that only by embracing difference and otherness – not as threats but as necessary and even vital – do we stand a chance of overcoming the difficulties we face at this historical moment.

Have I lost you somewhere along that rather elaborate sentence? Fair enough. Let me simplify:

We need autism.

Ha! Short and sweet, at least. And if I haven’t lost you yet, read on for a few more paragraphs to see what I mean.

Let’s return to that old question: “What is autism, really?”
After everything that’s been said, I hope you won’t be too surprised by the definition I now offer: besides everything else, autism is also a form of extraordinary mental concentration, perhaps impossible to achieve outside the spectrum.

And if that sounds like compensatory language – coming from someone who sees himself as part of that same spectrum – I ask you to consider this: such concentration arises inevitably from the basic fact of autistic existence – namely, the partial or total inaccessibility (to varying degrees across the spectrum) of one core component of neurotypical human communication: the sharing of non-verbal, intuitive signals and information.

From where I stand in my own autistic ivory tower, it seems that the daily existence of most high-functioning people on the spectrum is marked above all by one thing: boredom.

Neurotypical people invest enormous amounts of time and energy in behaviours that, to the autistic eye, seem wildly wasteful: they constantly reassure each other, soothe each other, therapise each other – exchanging phrases, gestures, and emotions that don’t enrich their lives or consciousness in any concrete way, except for one thing: the feeling of belonging, of being a small part of a larger whole whose very existence is the true source and carrier of their individual identity.

The core purpose of human communication – seen through autistic eyes – is the collective overcoming of fear before the unknown. But the autistic person, too, lives with that fear – magnified many times by the impossibility of sharing it in the neurotypical way. And so, by necessity, they are forced to concentrate on things others attend to only in the margins of life, after their primary activity: the relentless confirmation of their group membership. The autistic person is a solitary being, with no choice but to focus on what is essential.

I know how controversial, how unflattering this may sound – but in essence the thought is very simple. It is precisely the “impairment” that turns belonging to the autism spectrum into a kind of necessary precondition for the very fields we usually associate with “special abilities” and “special achievements” – above all, art and science. Of course, if given the choice, most autistic people would gladly join the community of the neurotypicals, would throw themselves with enthusiasm into the rituals of parties, rallies, clubs, endless “sharing” – the things that so often leave them quietly desperate. But no: that choice is not available. They have tried, again and again, and returned, again and again, to the only place where they feel at ease: their own mental, emotional, and sensory world. And it is precisely there – by sheer lack of alternative – that they may reach depths or heights inaccessible to the neurotypical mind.

Without autism, human culture, art, and science would almost certainly be poorer – flatter, more uniform in content and direction. It is now widely accepted that many of the great minds who shaped modern science and art belonged to the spectrum. To name just a few: Sir Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Bill Gates, Barbara McClintock – all showed pronounced autistic traits and tendencies.

This idea – “geniuses are strange” (hardly a new observation) – lies at the very heart of the idea of neurodiversity with which I began this story. Autism and autistic people are not merely to be tolerated. They are needed – perhaps even indispensable – links in the chain of human progress.

If this still sounds like wishful thinking, consider this: the deeper awareness of autism becomes, both in science and in public life, the more firmly grows the conviction that autistic people often display extraordinary capacities for creative thought. Whether this is an innate trait of the spectrum or a compensatory adaptation to an alien world may not be the most important question. What matters is to grasp the fact that the “strange ones” are essential to the fabric of human coexistence. Not idiots. Not invalids. Not even the unfortunate. Different – and for that very reason, indispensable.

Hence the motto I would propose as the starting point for a public conversation on this topic – here and now:

The Other is me!

Nothing smaller, nothing veiled, nothing less insistent. The idea of neurodiversity requires not only that we accept the difference of others but that we recognise its presence in ourselves, in our own ways of thinking and experiencing the world. In the seemingly banal phrase, “Every intelligent person is, in some way, inside the spectrum,” there may be far more truth than we admit at first. And only when this phrase ceases to sound defensive and becomes self-evident will the full potential of otherness reveal itself – as a necessary condition of progress.

As always, the change begins at its origin: the self.
So let us live – and see.