Don't Focus on How He Says It — Wentworth Miller's Story About Understanding

Wentworth Miller was 49 when he said publicly that he is autistic. He didn't want to stand in front of autistic people as a role model, and he didn't want to tell anyone what being autistic is like. Instead, he started getting to know himself and looking at his own life again. Reading his story, I thought of something I have been learning from my own son for years. Sometimes it's not the other person who needs to change. First, we need to learn to listen better.

A familiar face, a less familiar story

Most of us know Wentworth Miller as Michael Scofield.

In Prison Break, he played a man with the prison's blueprint tattooed on his body, trying to break his brother out before his execution. The show made him famous around the world, and the role earned him a Golden Globe nomination.

In the summer of 2021, he spoke publicly for the first time about being autistic.

He was 49. He wrote that he had received his diagnosis a year earlier, and that he had recognised it in himself before that. He called the process long and flawed, and he pointed out that many people sadly can't get a diagnosis at all.

About the diagnosis itself, he only said this:

Maybe there is more in those few words than it first seems.

The same life, from a different angle

He didn't write that the diagnosis suddenly answered everything and made it all make sense.

Quite the opposite.

He said he still had a lot to learn about autism. He described his job at that point as growing his own understanding and looking back at five decades of life with new eyes.

This is where I stopped and thought for a moment.

Because as parents, we go through something similar. We just don't look back fifty years. Sometimes only a few.

A day at kindergarten. Something our child said that we didn't understand. Something they did that we wanted to change.

Then time passes. We learn, we become more open, we get to know our own child better, and one day we look at that same memory in a completely different way.

Not because the past has changed, but because our understanding has.

Rectangle

Many of my son's first words were in English. He was about a year old when he started naming shapes in English.

For example, I learned from him that rectangle is the English word for téglalap.

Of course, it's just one word.

Still, I love this memory, because today it reminds me of something else. As parents, we take it for granted that we will be the ones teaching our children. And then one day we realise they are the ones teaching us.

I learn so much from my son every single day.

But not everyone was happy about the English. At kindergarten, they once told us it was a problem that he spoke English.

I answered something like this:

But to be honest, we also spent a long time trying to steer him towards Hungarian.

We still sometimes ask him if he knows the Hungarian word. But if he doesn't, we don't push.

Because along the way, we realised something.

What matters much more is finding a shared voice he can use to tell us how he feels and what is going on inside him.

English isn't the problem

Here it's important to keep our own family's experience separate from what we know in general.

Our story is the story of one child. You can't draw conclusions about every autistic child from it.

That said, research on autistic children who grow up with more than one language shows an interesting picture. A 2023 review that looked at 22 studies found no evidence that hearing more than one language, on its own, harms autistic children's language or communication skills. The researchers also say that some groups of children haven't been studied much yet, so the results shouldn't simply be applied to every child.

But as a parent, I didn't need a scientific study to understand the most important thing.

I needed time.

Change them, or understand them?

For me, this may be the most important part of Wentworth Miller's story.

When he shared his diagnosis, he didn't start talking about autism like an expert.

Quite the opposite.

He wrote clearly that he didn't want to be one more loud, ill-informed voice in the room. He also pointed out that, for a long time, other people have spoken for autistic people instead of letting them speak. So he didn't want to tell everyone else what being autistic is like.

He just raised his hand:

I love this attitude. There is humility in it, and something very human. He isn't looking for quick answers. First, he wants to understand himself.

Maybe we parents can learn something from that too.

The space someone gives you

At the end of his post, Miller thanked the people who, over the years, knowingly or not, gave him a little extra patience and space.

The people who let him move through the world in the way that worked for him, even when it didn't make sense to them.

When I read this, something tightened inside me. Because it didn't come that easily for us.

For a long time, nobody told us it might help to look at certain things differently. We also needed time to learn what our little boy needs.

And we are still learning – and we probably always will be.

Because for me, acceptance no longer means sitting back and saying: everything is fine the way it is.

We ask for help, we learn, and we use the tools and methods that really help him. And more and more often, we ask ourselves:

Do I want to change this because it's hard for him, or because it's unusual for us?

Those two aren't always the same thing.

Sometimes he is the freer one

There is one more thing I'm learning from my son.

How to be free.

I have written before about the fireworks on 20 August, when he laughed, cheered and danced, while someone nearby was bothered that he was loud.

And I stood next to him and saw that he was happy.

He wasn't thinking about what strangers thought of him. He wasn't trying to work out how to behave so nobody would look at him strangely. He was simply happy.

And sometimes I envy him for that.

We adults can spend an incredible amount of energy worrying about what other people think of us. Do we look successful enough, smart enough, or normal enough?

And sometimes he is simply himself.

I'm not saying this is true for every autistic person, and I'm not saying autism is some kind of special freedom. Autism can come with real difficulties and very different support needs.

I'm only saying this: this is what I'm learning from my own son.

Five decades with new eyes

So in the end, what really stayed with me in Wentworth Miller's story wasn't that a world-famous actor is autistic. It wasn't that he was diagnosed at nearly fifty, either. It was what he did next.

He didn't try to explain himself in a few sentences, and he didn't start speaking for every autistic person.

He started learning, looking inward, and trying to understand himself.

He also said clearly that autism isn't something he would change. Being autistic is central to who he is, and to everything he has achieved and put into words.

Maybe that's why this story feels so close to me. Because our whole life is a process.

Understanding helps acceptance. And acceptance helped us dare to ask for help, use tools, keep learning – and, bit by bit, stop trying to fit the person in front of us into our own picture of who they should be.

And if I could go back in time to that dad who was still wondering why his son wouldn't say something in Hungarian, I would know exactly what to tell him:

Don't focus on how he says it.

Try to hear what he's saying.

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📚 Sources

• Wentworth Miller (July 2021) — the actor's Instagram post in which he spoke publicly about his autism diagnosis: instagram.com/wentworthmiller
• The Advocate (August 2021) — a summary of Miller's post, with quotes: advocate.com
• Gilhuber, Raulston and Galley (2023) — Language and communication skills in multilingual children on the autism spectrum: A systematic review, Autism. This review of 22 studies found that growing up with more than one language does not, on its own, harm autistic children's language and communication development: ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

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