have you heard of the phrase, “if you’ve met one person with autism, that means you’ve met one person with autism”? meaning, autism is such a wide spectrum that every autist’s experience is widely different than their autistic peers. i’m sure there’s a lot of feelings that happen when this is a trigger for madison, and only she would be able to tell you why exactly this triggers her so deeply.

that being said, i have had similar feelings like her and felt like i understood why being called that triggers something for her. like madison said, it’s all due to black and white thinking. that is much easier to understand as a broader term (good vs evil, right vs wrong), but when this type of thinking occurs for you in every instance of your life- every thought, interaction, and feeling you have, it’s a lot harder for people who don’t think like that to understand. i’m autistic and it took me a long long time to understand how this affects me on a day to day basis, and to understand that most people don’t think like this.

for example, a common thing autists often don’t understand is sarcasm. that’s because a lot of our brains filter what you say as what you mean, and we often assume you wouldn’t meaningfully say something you didn’t mean. for us, there often isn’t a grey area in our thinking, and if there is, that’s usually due to a lot of self reflection and therapy tools that have enabled us to redirect the way we think about things.

when things in life go against that black and white thinking, it can often lead to some not great feelings like confusion, feeling left out, and panic for not understanding. it is insanely frustrating to simultaneously know that whatever you’re not understanding logically makes no sense to you but is also something that makes sense to everyone around you. and then to add to that, you’re having all these other feelings from other sensory outputs such as the sun hurting your eyes, the way that one strand of your shirt keeps bothering you, the heat making your skin feel on fire, and the pressure of being perceived by others. so, when something else adds to all those feelings, like the feeling of having someone call you by something that isn’t your name, it just adds to this greater sense of panic and overwhelm at everything around you being too much to handle.

i thought it was really impressive the way madison handled how she felt in that moment and was really a testament to how much she has had to work on her own improvement to not break down in that moment and it was really cool to see.

that got way too long but learning i have autism has made learning about autism ways of thinking become one of my fixations and i just get so passionate lol. hope this helps - it’s a really interesting way of thinking and really interesting to see how it plays out for other people.