Reclaiming Love

I want to take a moment when others might be quiet to tell you something. I want to tell you about love. I want you to understand. I want you to be able to feel what it means to me to fall in love. I wish you could experience with me how deep and powerful loving another is for me. I wish I could share the happiness and joy love brings to my life. I wish I could share these things so you might understand.

I want you to understand that I fall in love.

I want you to be able to see my love for what it is. I want to challenge the stereotype that people like me are incapable of feelings like mine, that when we talk about love we merely mean horny. I want to share with you so you will understand.

They say it is different for us. More often, I feel they simply believe it so. They see our feelings as alien and because they can not understand nor identify with it they fail to recognize it for what it is: love.

I want to share my heart with you because I want you to understand so you will be able to comprehend as I do. I want you to be able to know my love like I know it.

When you look at me, when you think of me I want you to know me as a woman who falls in love.

~~

I felt I had to write this. It's a terrible thing that I should have to feel that I need to reclaim and defend something so basic and fundamental to my humanity as the ability to love another. Nonetheless, I do feel the need.

Sometimes when I think about the way we are thought of as tragedy I think of what they say about how we cannot love like they can love. So much their perception of our worth is tied with our ability to love. When I think of this and imagine how we are tragic because we do not love like they love I feel -- I remember falling in love and I remember sharing my heart and becoming one. If this is what they mean when they talk about tragedy -- if this is what they mean to destroy when they talk about wiping out autism it scares me. It scares me because what I see is the desire to destroy something beautiful: our love.

I want to love, I want all of my brothers and sisters to love. I want generations of my people to be able to experience and to feel as I do.

That is why I fight.

This entry is part of Autistics Speaking Day.