Cured of Being

Yesterday afternoon, a part of my life which I thought I'd fixed began to malfunction again. Our church was having a get together at someone's house, and I'd just finished a hotdog and bowl of extremely mild chilly. I was relaxing in an exceedingly comfortable chair - the perfect end to a great weekend. Then this man came over to me to announce to everyone within earshot (including our potential future pastors) that while I wanted to see, I believed being autistic was okay. He began to explain that God wants us all to be whole people, without any illness or infirmity in our brains or bodies. He then suggested that asking God for eyesight and then telling Him I did not want anything else healed was a bad thing. He might have said that it would harm my relationship with God, but I don't remember for sure. We got into a discussion where I could not get any of my logical points across and our words kept overlapping each other. I ended the discussion by telling him to leave it up to God and agreeing to email him something I'd written on this subject a couple of months earlier. He will probably misinterpret it.
Thankfully, a few minutes later I was across the room (in a not so comfortable chair) with The Engineer, who was intent on establishing a conection between a bluetooth headset and my netbook.

I do not have the words to explain why the suggestion of a cure affects me the way it does. More than a year ago, I read a book called The Speed of Dark. An excellent book review posted by the Quixotic Autistic can be found here.
In her review, Leah Jane writes:

"Immediately after finishing The Speed of Dark, I was forced to sit down in a quiet corner for a few minutes and cry, shivering and trying to bring myself "back to planet earth" so to speak. That's how upset I was, as an autistic person, by Lou, the protagonist, meeting such a fate. There are very few adult autistic protagonists out there for me to relate to. The one I have been most strongly influenced by is Lisbeth Salander, of the Millennium Trilogy. Lou Arrendale, of The Speed of Dark, had great promise as another one that I could relate to. But, by the end of the novel, he is no longer Lou as I knew him in the rest of the novel. He had completely transformed into an unrecognisable neurotypical, because he had elected to have a new treatment which made him "normal", in the words of the book."

I still remember feeling sick after reading the book and telling myself aloud, over and over, "It's not real." My brain was temporarily reduced to a quivering, misfiring mass. I would not react in this way if Lou had simply died, but something much worse had happened. Unlike the book, yesterday's talk of a "cure" was aimed at me personally. This man sought to draw a comparison between a pair of eyes which do not function at all and a brain and nervous system which function correctly, but differently from his own. He categorized the thing I hate, a scourge I use all my technology and brains to fight against, as being similar to the thing I am - an autistic person. I was not diagnosed until I was 22. Before I was Aspie or autistic I just was. I still am. If you cure a person who is, you end up with a person who is not. That is not the same as being "afraid of losing your uniqueness," as he so put it. For most of the remainder of the party, I retreated further into the other room - a mental place where others seem distant, but I can still interact with them. Many signals were being fired as a result of hearing and meditating on those words. It felt as though something sharp and deadly were being forced up under my rib cage near the left side. I wanted to cry but couldn't. From my distant vantage point, I knew that no one was likely to have any idea of the hurt I was feeling. It was almost time to go. My second mom approached and said to me, "I don't know why I'm telling you this, but I love you. Call if you need anything."