Yes, I'm Autistic. Yes, I sometimes Hit Mom. No, I'm not Adam Lanza.

Last Wednesday was the 10th anniversary of the Newton massacre, when a young man walked into his elementary school and shot about 20 students and a teacher. I still remember that fateful day- my late mother and I were at IHop, eating lunch right before a doctor's appointment, wondering when the hell the food would get there. Then suddenly, our waittress burst out that something terrible had happened.

"It's so awful!" she cried. "Several children and a teacher had just been murdered in cold blood, at Sandy Hook elementary! It's devastating!"

But that wasn't the last of it. Not long afterwards, she called out "And now they've got several more victims! Oh God!""

I was absolutely heartbroken. "Why can't my life be pretty?" I asked my parents when I got home. I couldn't even let my mother talk to a neighbor about it without falling apart and saying "I can't take it anymore!"

Now, around that time I was struggling to navigate my life as an autistic person, being trapped in a school that didn't truly "get me" and failed to give me proper stimuli. Even my mother often found my disability unmanageable at times, and with her "zero tolerance" policy for, well, everything, I felt as though I had too much and not enough. Sometimes, my own mother would even lash out at me due to frustration from dealing with me.

Was I perfect? Absolutely not. Sometimes, the stress would get to me and I would lash out and/or hit people (particularly my mother.) However, it would be a significant stretch to use my autism as a reason for my mood swings and aggressive behavior- I was, after all, nowhere near as troubled as this young man, in fact I had great relationships with people outside the family. Likewise, after a mental breakdown in April 2022, I was finally diagnosed with manic depression, explaining my erratic behavior and outbursts.

Unfortunately, in situations like this, some condition has to be the reason, so my parents used and that's exactly the bandwagon my parents used for my behavior. Why, you may ask? Good question. Perhaps they were persuaded by the "autism martyr" cult, maybe they read something somewhere on the internet, maybe they couldn't fathom how damaging their "brutally honest tough love" mentality was (which, for some reason, let them get away with yelling at me and/or my significantly more disabled younger sister. Funny how that logic works.) Or maybe they had narcassitic personality disorder. (They certainly were awfully defensive of themselves in public.)

My mother has since passed away from cancer and often wrote about my how awful having an autistic daughter was, and how it apparently "stimulating" the cancer growth. After she died, I felt so guilty that, after a doctor's visit no more than three months after she died, I cried about my abusive behavior and how it hastened her death.

And then....the nurse did a beautiful thing!

"You know what?" she said. "My daughter has bipolar disorder- and she's hit me. She's just like you. I can reassure you it does not cause cancer. I don't have it, let alone dead from it."

Then it dawned on me. Perhaps, if my parents listened to me, and not written me off as "talking nonsense" or wallowing in their self-pity, perhaps things would've been different. After all, there are plenty of parents whose kids are drug-addicted, mentally ill, failing school, and these parents (usually) don't play the victim card- certainly not the nice nurse I talked to. Maybe Mom would still be here if she didn't let the "cancer stress" get to her. I'll never know for sure. In any case, my autism did not make me violent. Discrimination and failure from others to understand me did. (And of course, the manic depressive swings didn't help much, but that's another story.)