In Conception, Amelia decides to create the College with Kit, a place to teach autistic students, because of his experiences as an autistic magician in the Greensward and hers as an autistic medical student, but for Amelia, itās also because the only books she knows about autism are medical texts and that isnāt story enough.
(The story ends with her yearning for story and her recognition that her actions here will create it.)
In Kit March, Iāve really only begun to foreshadow the importance of Doruk Ekberās having written about Darius (an adventure-having autistic magician) and what it means that Iris has access to it (and is writing his own autistic-authored history of an autistic person). In Dariusās first lesson, though, Tes explains why he has a classroom full of autistic students asking personal questions about his adventuring life as depicted in that book, and what that book means to the students who read it--something that makes Darius look, really look, at exactly what it is heās doing at the College.
(This is the point where he stops seeing the College as a second-best to the life he lost and starts seeing it as important as anything else he has ever done, if not more so, because these students are his own.)
In The King of Gears and Bone, Paide reads his brother Ein passages from Ekberās book about Darius when Ein is breaking down under the pressure of being the autistic heir to a throne he never wanted in an ableist setting. Because the inspiration of an autistic adventurer who made it into a history book is a thousand times more poignant than another allisticās reassurance about his surviving allistics.
(Ein ends up requesting a couple of magicians from the College to serve as court mages and companions, not only because autistics mentoring other autistics gives me life, but also because he recognises that he deserves community and needs it to survive a world not made for him ... in order that he can change it.)
I didnāt plan any of this, but it is right to me to write narrative about the need for our own narrative: stories about characters who want, need, celebrate, create, pursue and access representation as part of their journey to self-acceptance. Iām writing characters who have my own need to see themselves on the page, as part of a community of their own, and are taking action to create this.
Which makes me realise: there are some exceptions, but I seldom see a marginalised character in text have the need for, position in or connection to narrative about a marginalised person or community. I seldom see characters in text with a relationship to in text narratives, or lack thereof. I can think of only a few stories about marginalised characters wanting and needing and being inspired by or being changed by story about their own and/or told by their own. Despite the fact that we, as marginalised readers and creators, are in no small part defined by our needing of representation. Despite the fact that story makes us who we are, be it by its presence or absence.
Do you know what gives me life? Being autistic online with other autistics. Talking to autistic friends about being autistic. Writing about autistic characters being autistic and seeing an autistic reader respond. Reading about other autistics in fiction and non-fiction. Talking about the ways in which portrayals support us and fail us. Connection, community, representation, narrative. Story. The narratives made by us in counter to the narratives wielded by allistics.
If we do get to exist at all, the majority of our stories are about our being the singular exception, we minorities accomplishing something despite prejudice, our being exceptional enough that privileged people take note of us and change their in-text storytelling. Our stories are so seldom centred on our need for our own connection, community, representation, narrative--our own storytelling. (Oh, we sometimes get stories where the conclusion is our being accepted by privileged communities, but seldom do we get stories where we are loved and cherished by our own, where what we say changes us.) Why is our need for story, and the damage we bear caused by the absence of stories told by us, so seldom shown in stories about us? Why is it so rare for autistic characters in the media to have this in common with us real autistics?
I have seen stories about autistics who have been battered and broken under the weight of allistic storytelling and go on to prove the allistics wrong, but I am waiting for more stories about autistics who find wholeness and empowerment in the presence of autistic storytelling.
Do we live in a world where we autistics have free access to connection, community, representation and narrative by autistics for autistics? No, we donāt. But that makes it all the more important to show a character suffering the loss of it, a character longing for narrative. Show me a character who is building a world for autistics because no world exists, or a character who is trying to be exceptional because thatās the ableist narrative we are taught but suffers because it isnāt a story that makes us whole! Show me a character who is lost because they donāt have the story written by us that tells us who we are and how we should be. Show me a character who is making that story for those that come after them or seeking out those that exist in order to live their own. Show me an autistic character who has a relationship to narrative told by us, even if that relationship is simply desire for something not yet existing!
This isnāt something I only feel with autism: I feel this as a trans person, as an ace person, as an aro person, as a physically disabled person, as a mentally ill person. I feel this absence of awareness of our own narrative as a lodestone in the characters I read about that does not, in any way, match my lived experience.
Why are we so often leaving something so fundamental to being human out of our fictional characters when I cannot draw a sketch of myself without it?
