I should clarify: I don't think living in society as an autistic person is easy by any means. Nor is being autistic necessarily 'easy' by itself (my wording here wasn't very good). I can't personally speak to deaf experiences, but I misspoke in implying that it's 'easy.'

I think I was more reacting to the vibe in the comments section a la "being autistic (or deaf) sucks" or is bad, a disease, etc. Your mileage may vary, but many autistic people have incorporated disability activism viewpoints into our understanding of our experiences, and that's a viewpoint I've found personally helpful. It's a complex set of theories, but a lot of it boils down to something like:

>Disabilities aren't easy and can have impacts on our abilities to interact with the world. However, much of our struggles come from a world that isn't built for us, not from an inherent problem with being disabled.

(Important note that many deaf people do not consider deafness a disability, but, to my understanding, they have also used these frameworks to a great degree.)

This is called the social model of disability. It's often mistaken (or mistakenly used) to imply that there is no physical or mental 'difference' because of disabilities, which I don't think it does say. God knows that, without autism, I wouldn't have the severe eating disorder that severely limits my diet (and I certainly hate sensory overload, lol).

At the same time, many of this could be best understood as problems that might be best approached by changing the environment or giving me the tools I need to approach it. Places can include sensory-friendly rooms, autistic people can be given access to sensory tools, etc. Same goes for the "social problems" autistic people have, which more often than not result from differences in autistic and non-autistic communication, not inherent 'flaws' in autistic communication.

Again, I'm not an expert on deaf people (or deaf myself), but from my education around deaf spaces, many people feel that the majority of the problems they experience are from inaccessible spaces, not some sort of 'problem' with being deaf. Greater access to sign languages, captions, and interpreters would do a lot, but unfortunately many deaf people have instead had their languages forcefully stripped from them under threats of physical harm (or, more recently, social control methods). There's a long and fascinating history of deaf people's cultures and communities that is worth looking into and has also inspired autistic activism.

I'm not good at being concise with my words, lol, but I hope this makes sense. I'm sorry if I came off as dismissive. I think I was genuinely a little tense at some of the comments in this comments section being overly pitying or assuming that to be autistic or deaf (or, gasp, both!) is the worst fate imaginable, and yours was the one I happened to sort of feel the need to comment on, but I don't think you're really wrong. The world makes shit hard for us.