This is likely above the 95th percentile writing skills for neurotypical twelve-year-olds, and uses anachronistic language to boot. When's the last time you heard a twelve-year-olds using words like "I am weary", or" for causing so much hardship.", or idiomatic abstracts like "another way of being".
If you took a neurotypical kid and duct-taped their mouth shut up to age 12, you would be robbing them of the vast majority of reinforcement learning on grammar and wording that we receive as children, and it would knock them down several standard deviations in skill level relative to their peers in constructing sentences, paragraphs, and essays.
On top of all this is the blatant wish-fulfillment. Socialized kids, at least, have a some degree of ego, and don't often express sincere thanks for their parents, their disorders, that their "school values them", or describe their behavior as "Then I would have meltdowns.". These are forced reflections that just don't occur naturally.
On top of all this is the core of autism: Deficits in the theory of mind. Normal kids start to master deception, pretending, prediction of behavior, and empathizing somewhere between 2 and 5, and get gradually better at it as they get older. Autistics have marked problems in these areas. What they don't do is clearly model their audience, model their audience's ignorance of their own mind, then tell their audience to walk a mile in their own shoes, and describe the novel aspects of their mind from the perspective of a neurotypical outsider. There are recursive layers of social intrigue in this paragraph that people with autism would have a great deal of trouble understanding, much less writing:
"Let’s pretend you are like me. You can’t talk, but you have a well-functioning mind and can understand people. Imagine you answer everyone who says something to you, but only you can hear it. Others hear your voice saying things you don’t necessarily mean. They think that’s all you are capable of thinking. People see your repetitive flapping or tapping and they think it serves no purpose. They don’t understand that the minute you stop, the moment is flooded with lights that hum, loud sounds that echo, kids moving too fast for you to keep up with and people trying to engage with you. It is hard on me to put my stimming away, but I try."
> There are recursive layers of social intrigue in this paragraph that people with autism would have a great deal of trouble understanding, much less writing
That's a bit sweeping. Many doubtless would; but there are autistic people who are capable of self-reflection.
A somewhat exceptional example: Temple Grandin, PhD, who has extrapolated from her experience of having autism, specifically the sense of constantly being under threat from her surroundings, to advise on more humane ways of handling livestock: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_Grandin#Career
Absolutely. If you've met one autistic person you've met one autistic person. Basically any reference to autism has the problem of overgeneralizing, especially now that we expanded the spectrum to cover several percent of the population, and started using "autism" for the whole spectrum colloquially instead of a particular subset of the spectrum.
But even so - we do on occasion need to talk about autism generically. Referring to a classical profile[1] of autistic symptoms, an abstract-concept-of-autism, is simply a necessary shorthand, because the changes in perception & diagnosis of autism have stolen the language I was taught growing up to describe and classify, and sprayed them over a broad swath of behavioral and cognitive problems. It's also quite a bit more appropriate to use the stereotype (while remaining conscious that it's a stereotype, usually correct but not always) when referring specifically to low-functioning minimally-verbal autistics, I suspect.
Take this passage from the blog and consider the tone and language, and ask yourself whether it could come from a twelve year old, much less an autistic twelve year old who'd only been communicating for three years, and presumably had never done things like read novels for fun (which I consider central to my own language skills relative to my peers):
"I love to flap my hands. I flap to feel my body in space. No one goes through the trouble I have to feel my body well. Dare to feel each moment floating weightless in space. I am light and my movement is erratic without gravity making my movement steady. Each day I go crazy not knowing how my body will act. Most people have portly muscle mass to feel their own weight. I do not. I often feel like a bird about to take flight and it makes me flap. I love the sensation of my hands flapping. My hands flap when I am happy. They flap when I am momentarily stressed. They also flap to music. Flapping is important to me. I flap like a bird to feel free from my body. My body is naughty. It acts on impulse too much. No one can discipline it. It has a mind of its own. It makes messes. It acts like a jerk. My body feels tension from stress. Many times I can't feel my body. I am unable to do many things people do without thinking. Lastly, my weary lament for my Autistic friends who can’t communicate kills my soul. Living with autism is hard. I sometimes would like to try living without it but I can't. Living peacefully requires me to accept myself, autism included. I mean to make the most of what I have been given. I have been given a strong mind. I have a mission from God. I am trying to educate the world about autism. No meaning comes from being negative about autism. My slavery to negative stereotypes is over. I am free peacefully pursuing my dreams. Moments are still very challenging but I know I can persevere and someday peacefully make a beautiful life for myself."
"My weary lament"
"I have a mission from God. I am trying to educate the world about autism."
"My slavery to negative stereotypes is over."
I have trouble understanding how anyone could convince themselves this was legitimately a child communicating. It reads a bit like someone trying to make poetic reflections from the point of view of their dog, imagining what it must be thinking and inserting their own florid prose for laughs. If this woman really believes she's speaking with her son, rather than speaking for her son, that's heartbreaking. It reads more like a cruel satire of people who've found themselves in this situation, but to what end I could not guess.
I would have been happy enough having my sister be able to explain that she was screaming because she heard an irritating noise, or tell us what she was getting out of tearing her clothes off, or say she was feeling sad the cat died, or ask us for basic things like not to have to go to the dentist. If we found a way to communicate with her using a vocabulary of ~500 words with simple grammar rather than 5-50 nouns based on immediate wants("cookie", "bathroom", "cheese", "tickle"), all of our lives would have been improved immeasurably... but I wouldn't expect her to start spouting Shakespeare references or Bible verse, and seeing that would cast immediate doubt on whatever method was being used.
My autistic five year old does things that you wouldn't think possible for a five year old. I've watched over his shoulder as he gets to 8192 in a game of 2048 (original rules, no "undo".) He understands exponents and logarithms. He can tell you that 9007199254740992 is 2^53, and that the base 2 logarithm of 4000000000 is between 31 and 32.
If all you knew about him was that he's 5 years old, autistic, and still hasn't figured out the toilet, you might be skeptical of the above paragraph. You'd be prone to evaluate my son based on something other than his actual capabilities.
One thing I've observed with him is that he tends to go from zero to awesome almost overnight. We had the hardest time getting him to speak, and then at around age 2 and a half he ballooned from a 10 word vocabulary to 250+ words in just over a month, and then quickly to complete sentences that were atypically advanced for his age. This sort of thing is normal for at least some subset of the autistic.
Could this have come from an "autistic twelve year old who'd only been communicating for three years"? Absolutely -- if he began communicating, and then obsessed about it the way my son obsesses about numbers. Sure, there's reason to be skeptical regarding the methodology described in one of the comments, but "this could not possibly be a child communicating" is going too far in the skeptical direction.
If you took a neurotypical kid and duct-taped their mouth shut up to age 12, you would be robbing them of the vast majority of reinforcement learning on grammar and wording that we receive as children, and it would knock them down several standard deviations in skill level relative to their peers in constructing sentences, paragraphs, and essays.
On top of all this is the blatant wish-fulfillment. Socialized kids, at least, have a some degree of ego, and don't often express sincere thanks for their parents, their disorders, that their "school values them", or describe their behavior as "Then I would have meltdowns.". These are forced reflections that just don't occur naturally.
On top of all this is the core of autism: Deficits in the theory of mind. Normal kids start to master deception, pretending, prediction of behavior, and empathizing somewhere between 2 and 5, and get gradually better at it as they get older. Autistics have marked problems in these areas. What they don't do is clearly model their audience, model their audience's ignorance of their own mind, then tell their audience to walk a mile in their own shoes, and describe the novel aspects of their mind from the perspective of a neurotypical outsider. There are recursive layers of social intrigue in this paragraph that people with autism would have a great deal of trouble understanding, much less writing:
"Let’s pretend you are like me. You can’t talk, but you have a well-functioning mind and can understand people. Imagine you answer everyone who says something to you, but only you can hear it. Others hear your voice saying things you don’t necessarily mean. They think that’s all you are capable of thinking. People see your repetitive flapping or tapping and they think it serves no purpose. They don’t understand that the minute you stop, the moment is flooded with lights that hum, loud sounds that echo, kids moving too fast for you to keep up with and people trying to engage with you. It is hard on me to put my stimming away, but I try."