What people think of when you say ‘the autism spectrum’:
What the spectrum actually looks like:
The black and white dots represent a random autistic person’s particular combination of abilities on any given day. Everything is really convoluted and blurred because all of those major groups I put on there kind of bleed into one another at times. And none of these points are necessarily negative.
Point is, the spectrum is not a line on which a person is born onto and remains at a certain position. It is a complex group of abilities and issues which change for every autistic person, every day, multiple times per day, depending on the situation they’re in. There is no such thing as ‘mild autism’ or ‘high-functioning’ autism, and those labels are actually inherently ableist.
(Also please note that all instances of ‘normal/correct/incorrect’ are to be taken with a grain of salt as what neurotypicals consider to be ‘normal’ is often a very narrow amount of what they consider to be ‘acceptable’ interactions or behaviours)
