Stubbornness

Autistic people have a reputation for being stubborn. I have problems with this word. Firstly it a judgement one person makes on another person. Nobody ever describes themselves as stubborn. Secondly I have difficulty defining what it means exactly. I don’t know what a stubborn person is like, I can’t picture them in my mind and I don’t think I’ve ever described another person as being stubborn.

If I was pushed I would say someone is being stubborn if they refuse to change their mind about something when the evidence is that they are in the wrong. But it still seems like a bizarre idea. I only believe things I think are true, I’m not going to purposefully be obstructive and pretend to believe something I know isn’t true. Maybe being stubborn is simply having different beliefs to other people, and what’s wrong with that? We all have to find the truth for ourselves.

I’ve been told by my family I’m stubborn many times. Most of the occasions though, which they would describe as examples of me being stubborn, are in fact examples of their inability to see where I’m coming from. Being fussy about my food, not wanting to wear particular items of clothing, these were all times when they were misinterpreting my sensory problems. This wasn’t me being obstructive, this was me being misunderstood.

There were other occasions when I just wouldn’t believe my parents were telling me the truth. I believed something else and nobody was going to persuade me to think anything else. My arguments may have sounded very strange to an NT person, but their logic was faultless according to my autistic brain. However, I have come to accept that I live in a world created by NT people, a world that doesn’t abide by set of rules, and there will be times when logic can’t help you!

I remember one instance when I was about six. My Mum and Dad told me I had a middle name that was ‘Ann’. But I didn’t believe them. Up to that point in time I had thought I had two names; Victoria Beeching. So when they tried to tell me my name was Victoria Ann Beeching, I was very dubious. How could I have not known my name for so long? I was convinced that what my family was saying was my middle name, was in fact just the word ’and’. I thought they must have misheard someone who had said my names where Victoria and Beeching.

At the time I was having elocution lessons because of my speech problems; I missed the ends and beginnings off words. Most of my lessons where spent repeating words and being told off for missing the ends off them. If your autistic you learn things by repeating them many times, the downside to this way of learning is that once you’ve got it entrenched it’s very difficult to undo it. So when my parents told me I had a middle name that was ‘Ann’, I thought they’d missed the end off the word ‘And’. I’d spent so many lessons being told off for not saying that word correctly my brain found it difficult to get away from this.

This is best example I can think of my stubbornness, and yet I don’t really think I was being stubborn. I can still remember how I felt at the time, and the logic I applied still seems reasonable for my age and understanding. Stubbornness isn’t just about believing you’re right, it’s about trusting other people to tell you the truth. And in my black and white world, either you trust someone or you don’t. You can’t trust people some of the time, and not at other times. You have to make a choice. An autistic person doesn’t have the ability to tell the difference between a person who is lying and a person who is telling the truth. If my family had been consistent and understanding of me maybe I’d have had an easier time trusting them.