This I Believe About Autism: Living in Truth

An essay by Jaz C

Welcome to This I Believe, a series in which members of the Embrace Autism community share the beliefs that have shaped their lives.

Today’s essay is by Jaz C, who reflects on seeing the world through observation rather than performance, and on finding beauty in truth, authenticity, and the quiet places where nothing needs to be rehearsed.

Living in Truth

When I was a child, people said I had a gift for drawing what was real.

But I wasn’t gifted; I was paying attention.

“You make it look so real,” they’d say, amazed.

And I’d think, you could too, if only you looked.

Can’t you see how the lines connect?

The others in art class drew what they thought faces should look like.

Big eyelashes, cartoon smiles, skin smoothed out like plastic.

They were praised for imagination. I was praised for accuracy.

I never understood why it was so unusual to simply draw what you see, not what you wish others to see.

That was my first lesson in being autistic: real seeing can set you apart.

My second lesson was that the social world is a stage.

People learn their lines, bow in unison, and recite the script of what’s expected.

They sparkle to each other under artificial lights.

They speak polished lies of ego and politeness, and call it reality.

I can admire the choreography, the rhythm, the shared dance, but I can’t lose myself in the play.

My eyes drift, to the cracks in the paint, to the wires that hold the scenery up.

When I try to join, my voice catches on rehearsed laughter, my lines come out wrong.

Eyebrows rise, a silent thought flickers: she hasn’t learned her part; she doesn’t dance as we do.

I slip through the side door, stage left, out into the hush of nature.

The woods.

Where there’s no stage, no spotlight, only the world breathing on its own.

Unscripted.

There the air smells of rain and soil.

The colours aren’t painted; they’re alive.

The rainbow isn’t glitter; it is sunlight refracting through water, fleeting and unposed.

When I bring others there, they grow restless.

“There’s nothing here,” they say.

No audience. No applause. No sparkle.

They long for the safety and comfort of the stage.

To me, that quiet space away from the stage is everything, enabling the same kind of seeing

that guided my pencil as a child:

the way light reflects in an eye,

the shadow cast beneath a nose,

the freckle the subject hates, but that gives them beauty.

Because beauty isn’t in embellishment or reduction; it’s in truth.

Autism, for me, is living in that truth.

I don’t soften or decorate what I see to make it easier for others.

Sometimes that honesty is mistaken for bluntness or coldness, but it’s really reverence.

I see the world as it is, how the lines connect, and I ache when others can’t.

People think I fail to see the bigger picture, that I don’t see the beauty in the play.

But I think it’s the opposite.

I see the grain of the wood beneath the paint,

the raw sky behind the backdrop.

Both worlds have beauty, the stage with its shimmer and the woods with its quiet truth.

But I know where I belong.

I live in the dappled sunlight, not the spotlight.

Because life isn’t about performing beauty,

it’s about witnessing it.

Not painting false rainbows,

but standing in the rain long enough to see one appear.

About

This essay was awarded Second Place in the Embrace Autism This I Believe Essay Competition. Congratulations, Jaz!