Alphabet Soup

“Alphabet soup” is delicious vegetable soup with little noodles shaped like letters from the alphabet.  I’ve always enjoyed alphabet soup because I like words and names, and the way the letters exist randomly and yet occasionally, entropy will bring them spontaneously together and create beautiful creations out of nothing.  Words and names.  I love finding them in life, and in alphabet soup.

I recently read about diagnoses as a type of alphabet soup.  Not literal alphabet soup, of course, but a figurative alphabet soup. Sometimes, the seemingly endless diagnoses common in the ASD community seem like they were scooped out of a bowl of alphabet soup.  These acronyms and initialisms can be so numerous that one’s description of oneself becomes “alphabet soup.” 

ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder)

OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder)

?SID (Sensory Integration Disorder)

?ODD (Oppositional Defiant Disorder)

I am alphabet soup.  I have always been alphabet soup.  I’m not sure how I feel about that.

I am proud of myself.  It has taken me a long time to be proud of myself and proud of my autism.  It has taken me a long time to be willing to be social at all, let alone to share my autism.  And yet, I’m not quite sure how comfortable I am, just to be known as this alphabet soup.  These letters are so much of me, I am all together more than these letters.