The Particles of Oppression

This post is in response to this post by ballastexistenz.

I don't remember the specific moment when I realized the pattern of what was going on. It's mostly consisting of a lot of little realizations, which have been incrementally coalescing into a broader understanding of discrimination, how it applies to me and to others.

One thing I remember real clearly, though, was when I was in grade 7, unsuccessfully pleading to the counselor to let me write an incident report or to discipline the bullies for yet another assault, after all this time of it being blamed on my "odd" appearance, resulting from everything from autism to seizures to lacking designer jeans. And as she started lecturing me on the importance of attending class, I saw in the adjacent room that a girl, one of the very social, non-disabled, girls, was entering the office and asking for an incident report, and handed one right away. Being given the not-so-subtle threat of institutionalization, I saw very clearly that I was fighting in the ring with my hands tied behind my back.

Also that year, around the same time, I was in the office while the counselor talked to a teacher about a student they suspected to be autistic. I had been shading the windows of a building on newsprint, and they talked about his main interest and how they were hesitant of how to approach the parents (they also used his name, though I don't remember and wouldn't breach confidence anyway, unlike the counselor), and I remember stopping what I was doing, and saying "Autistic - that's like what I am" and they continued talking, as if I weren't there or neither of us mattered. I suspected it was the latter.

That year I got the distinct impression, that to them I was naught but a test score, a number whose value had suddenly dropped. It shook me to realize, how they were concerned far more about the financial impact of my absence from school, yet were perfectly content to have me warehoused in offices, and when in class or outside, to be constantly attacked physically and emotionally, and then blamed me for my behavior, both what was naturally my behavior and that which was induced by the circumstances, and say that this was justification enough to exclude me not only from school, but potentially permanently from society.

My parents got calls, day in, day out, about my "bizarre" behavior - mostly autistic behavior and catatonic-type stuff, with sporadic seizures, and talk of medication and institutions pulling on my mind and leading me to pace the floor more vigorously and at later advancing hours with each passing day.

I don't think I told anybody yet about how often I was just sitting in this office or that room the whole school day, or most of it. It wasn't a place for me to "calm down" or anything, and basically had a consistently elevated level of stress, which would spike at particular points, such as pending assault or the talk of the counselor.

At that point, I had little insight as to what exactly about me constituted something "autistic", but I had a definite sense that I was being treated unfairly for these things, even if I couldn't pinpoint them with words, and thus couldn't communicate well about them.

That is something that has been highly deceptive about me - my use of large vocabulary, writing skills, and the fact that I didn't have significant speech delay, hides the fact that I do often have difficulty finding the words and being able to describe important things, even when these fall under the category of what is usually considered simple. "I need a pencil", for instance, at age 10 was a phrase I needed a lot of time to be able to get out, but at another moment I could recite a 10-minute rant about things that happened during the school day, because I had spent the time during the school day to come up with and memorize the words to make this rant.

This is what I think has to do with the decreased reliability of speech for me over the last 10 years, even though communication is much better for me now. When I was 7, or 9, for instance, I knew most of the academic material being taught in class, so for one thing I could afford to "zone out" while constructing scripts and mapping out potential replies and replies to replies and replies to replies to replies, but not only that, I could also come up with the words and then memorize them.

One thing very different between 10 years ago and now: then - rote memory was good, maybe even excellent; now - rote memory is very unreliable.

That, and being in high school and college classes, even for classes I considered relatively easy and familiar in terms of the material taught, rarely was I so familiar with the content that I could afford to not pay attention to four hours of instruction (really, in first grade I really couldn't afford it either, but at that time I didn't care about my grades).

In fact, the only time that I had the luxury to "zone out" to the degree that I did in elementary school, was in high school chemistry, which for me was a review, as 2 years earlier I had studied AP Chemistry books and learned the material for the whole year in 2 weeks - though unfortunately the chemistry class did not cover thermodynamics much at all, which was a topic that I hadn't studied on my own).

In that year I took chemistry, I had been absent a lot (as with most years of public school), and when I got back to school (after weeks, almost a month being absent), there was a chemistry test. We had a substitute that day, so as he handed out the tests, I used my alphasmart to type that I had been absent for the whole chapter (which, while all the material up to that point had been stuff I'd already covered, I didn't know that for sure as I hadn't been in class to know what the test was about).

The substitute said, "Take it anyway".

Now this was quite the predicament. While I could theoretically take it anyway, and had a fair chance of doing well on it, what if it was all stuff I'd never covered before? Then, the teacher would have to make up an entirely new test for me to make up. I started typing on the alphasmart, to clarify this point, and also the fact that I had been absent the whole duration that the chapter was being taught, and the other students (as well as my absence record on the attendance sheet) verified this.

He told took the test back and told me to  write an e-mail to the teacher. So I started writing it. He told me to stop typing, and I froze for a minute, then started typing an explanation of why I was typing.

After a couple minutes he called me to his desk (which I didn't notice he was talking to me until some students around me pointed it out, as he hadn't used my name).

I went up and showed him what I typed. He asked me to spell my name. I did. Then I did some typing, and asked why.

He said it was a detention slip for disrespecting a teacher. I typed "If I may ask, in what way did I disrespect you?" and he said "you didn't listen." I typed about how I am autistic and often don't respond when my name is called, much less when my name isn't used, and that sometimes I need to type things, or I can't get words out, and that when I typed after he told me not to that it was to type this explanation of why it's necessary for me to type.

(Also keep in mind that this was my first year having an alphasmart, so I was not used to defending my right to communicate, whereas most times before this I had had no choice but to remain silent.)

Then at lunch I started writing my frustration about this, and asked a friend in AP European History about the iternerary for the day, and she said that we had a unit test, and a substitute, but she named the substitute she'd had, who was a lady most agreed to be nice.

I walked into AP European History next and guess who was sitting at the desk with the pile of tests?

You guessed it. The same guy as from chemistry.

There are lots of forms that oppression can take, and to those who are so accustomed to it that it is sewed into the daily fabric of their lives it can, at its mildest forms, be taken as annoyance, at its serverer forms, be taken as a "bad day".

The most important lesson to be taken away from the observation of these particles of oppression, though, is that each of them, regardless of size or impact, constitutes an increment of oppression coalescing with the other particles of injustice, however major or minor.

Degraded or Just Degrading?

This is something I typed up at school following a frustrating series of events involving the school psychologist.

Today I got to school late, arriving in time for my second class.

Last week.

I had finished up the IQ testing from the psychologist, and he told me that the following Wednesday during 5th block, that I would be in that room with some other people for further testing, and he asked if I liked donuts. I said no (actually I shook my head). They're okay, but I'm trying to get myself off of sweets for awhile. He asked what I wanted, and after long while, I said, "Goldfish". He said, "Nah, we're not going to bring goldfish." I wondered if he thought I'd meant actual fish, but I doubted it by the way he was acting. I guess he had been thinking in terms of sweets. Never mind the fact that I had no idea what they were for, except that it was supposed to be on Wednesday at fifth block (my second class of that day).

Wednesday fifth block I had a final exam scheduled. So I said this and he said he'd take care of it with my teacher. I was so busy double checking that this was going to get taken care of that I forgot to ask if I should come straight to the room or if I'd wait for a call slip. I told my instructor for that class and scheduled my final exam to take place on Monday instead of Wednesday.

So this Wednesday morning. I was still sick in the morning, and because of having part of my tongue chewed up (must've been overnight), it hurt a lot to eat breakfast, particularly as grains of rice would keep going to the side of my tongue that's sore and red and hurts a fair amount. It takes me quite awhile to get ready in the morning anyway, and my mom had to get to work (she was already running late), so I would take two buses to get to school, despite being tired, having a sore throat, and my tongue aching like heck, making it practically impossible to speak with my mom this morning. But I know I've got to get there by fifth block, which starts a few minutes after ten. So I struggle to keep awake and eat my food and leave for the bus, even rushing to catch the right connections so I could get to school by 10. It wasn't easy, considering that normally it takes two hours by bus to get to school, but if the first bus gets there on time (a very rare occurence) and the second bus happens to arrive less than five minutes after I leave the first bus, I can just make it to school in an hour and a half.

So things work out, and I get to school at 10:00 - the start of fifth block. I wasn't sure if I was supposed to wait for a call slip or just go there right away, so I went to his office to find out. As soon as I get there, without any other word or explanation, he looks away, gives a slight shake of the head, and says, "This is unacceptable" in what is clearly an angry tone. I'm utterly confused. I struggled and worked my hardest this morning to get ready, even without someone to help me brush my hair or prompt me to the things I need to do. Even when I was sick and really tired and had to fight most instincts of mine to get to school at all.

I'm about to get a "huh?" in, when he says, "Where were you? Did you just get here? They were here at 8:30. I just asked one thing, and you didn't do it."

At this point, I ascertain that there had been a miscommunication about when the testing thing was supposed to happen. I didn't even really know what it was, or how important it was (it had almost sounded like a mini-party or something when he'd last described it, and I'd speculated that there was about 50/50 chance that it'd be a "hooray for a graduating senior who's using special services" type thing to congratulate my hard efforts to make up so much work from my classes that I'd been sick during, and the other side of that probability was that it was some testing thing that they were trying to dress up by adding a sweet in it as a reward or something. It was very vague, not only the time, the way I'd get there, but also what exactly was going on or if it was important at all. I motivated myself this morning partially by wondering if it'd show how I did on the IQ test, and however much I question the validity of such a test (particularly using the WAIS on an autistic person with verbal difficulties), I have an affinity for data analysis and was highly curious. That was mainly what I thought was going to happen this morning.

So he is clearly mad, and I try to explain that I was told it was during fifth block, which is why I rescheduled my final exam with my instructor to be two days earlier and hadn't brought my taekwondo uniform with me that day, as I was told it'd last the whole block. He then proceeded to say, "I don't know why you did that."

The most frustrating thing was that I wasn't trying to put blame on something, but merely figure out what was going on, but he was very angry, and it was clear that I was stuck: I couldn't participate in class, but clearly I had nothing to do here.

I was upset and didn't want to start cursing or anything to make my situation worse, so I went into the bathroom and called my mom, who happened to be in a meeting, but I did not know what to do at all, and I felt that if I talked to the director of special services or the other teachers that I'd get more of the blame game, as had happened the last time I'd inquired about when the testing would happen, at a time when I was about to graduate in less than a month and nothing had begun and I had been told that it would start two days before, but no call slip came. Both the psychologist and the director of special services got quite noticeably upset that time, and seemed to think I was being too rigid and pushy, while meantime I was still drowning in mountains of homework packets that were finished with exceptions of some in-class notes but that I couldn't seem to organize, and no one responded to my requests for help with this.

Last year, when the blame game had been put so pointedly to me, it had escalated to a teacher berating me about unwillingness to complete a test which did not exist, and that I had been saying I didn't have a pencil with me, and that instance led me to being close to jumping off the second story balcony, mainly because I couldn't handle everything that's misunderstood always being put down to my being autistic because of course non-autistic people can't have communication problems, and my head felt like it was about to explode and I just needed to dull the emotional explosiveness of the verbal abuse that lasted for almost an hour. Fortunately I ran into the bathroom instead. If they can so easily misconstrue my lack of materials for stubborn unwillingness, then who knows how they would've misinterpreted such an act and put it down to being neurotic or psychotic or something?

So I knew I couldn't confront these staff-type people, not at the moment, so I called my mom while in the bathroom, tried to explain the situation, but it was exceedingly difficult, as the morning announcements were playing, my throat was sore, and the room was quite echoey, in addition to a bad connection and my frustrated emotional state. I really felt like I'd been f***d over.

My mom said that she had about ten more minutes to the meeting, then she'd come to the school and help me sort it out, so when I left her phone call, I called my dad at work and briefly explained some of this, though it was hard to get across over a bad reception. It helped a lot to explain the situation, though, as I could look at just what had happened and was right in front of me, rather than including all the past history of negativity, silencing, and ignoring of me that had gone on over the years in my list of "to take care of in the next hour".

She arrived shortly, and after I briefly appraised her of the situation, we went into his office.

He explained the situation in the context of my extended absences, and the fact that these people who came this morning were supposed to be autism specialists who are booked up from now to graduation, so that they couldn't complete the evaluations. He described me as, from teacher reports, having "degraded" - by which I could only assume was measured by outward behavior such as stims and how I act in crowds. Indeed, in the last four years, while I wouldn't describe the gain or loss of abilities as degradation, I have become more emotionally well, more accomodating of changes, and don't seem to have any more or less of difficulties with the comprehension and expression of communicative speech. While I was more vocal (to my impression) in the first couple year of high school, most of this was echoed from TV, or parts of programmed scripts that did not wholly or accurately reflect my attempts to communicate particular things. In the previous years of my life, I would mask my incomprehension of particular speech, or my inability at a particular time to produce non-echoed speech, by recycling a part of a script, or by echoing something, and masked my incomprehension by guesswork and maneuvering. It is only recently that I have come to shed the pretense that I can do more than in fact I can, and now seek help when I need it for instance in academic classes.

In fact, my increase of outward behaviors such as rocking, is a reflection of my increased ability to regulate my stress, and the fact that I no longer hide where my abilities may be less than other people expected them to be, does not mean that I have suddenly have lost those abilities (which I either never had in the first place or which have been tenuously in place).

It is no surprise that he is speculating that autism (by which I'm sure he means the diagnostic category of Autistic Disorder) fits me - I could've told him that when I was 13 and knew practically nothing about the autism spectrum or what it means to me as far as my ability and disability may be. There is significant overlap between the Asperger diagnosis and the Autistic diagnosis, and if the Asperger diagnosis didn't exist then there would not be sufficient differential diagnosis for them to avoid the Autistic Disorder diagnosis (though likely I would've been instead put in PDD-NOS, despite matching the other two diagnoses). It was confusing at first when he was talking, since I'm used to thinking of autism as referring to the commonality among autistics, rather than as a separate diagnostic subgroup. 

WHen asked if she'd noticed this "degratation" pattern, my mom responded that "well, I've been called to the school to pick her up more, than in the first two years". It is important to note that the primary reasons for getting taken home from the school have been: spinning during independent study, sitting under a desk during animation (this one specifically mentioned by the psychologist as an example of said "degradation"), and being sick. None of these things sound like degradation to me, aside from being sick, but that doesn't have to do with autism, so I find it highly unlikely that this might be what he's referring to.

The use of this term degradation (which occurred more than once) intrigued me, particularly as the medicalized term for being more obviously autistic is regression. Not that I agree with that term either (In fact my senior quote had to do with this), but it struck me as odd.

It is so difficult to talk to these people because it isn't just that they misinterpret things about me, which is to be expected in the human world, even amongst NTs. The problem is that these misinterpretations fall under and are condoned by the structural radar of the psychological and educational systems, and one must alter the structure in order to fully understand the context in which these objections arise.

In this context, objections are incredibly difficult. Online, when debating, even if the other person is so misinformed about autistic rights and neurodiversity that they think it means we want kids to bang their heads all day and sit in institutions all their lives, that still is far easier to correct misinterpretations and alter their understanding of the structures, for in this case the other person acknowledges my position exists, even if they deny the existence of my culture and its framework for interpreting the world. In the case of the psychological and educational systems, however, theirs is default and yours doesn't even exist, and it would take too long to explain it, and most are unwilling to hear such a lengthy introduction to my existence and perspectives, whereas I am supposed to take for granted their perspectives and the alleged fact that theirs are superior and that I am to conform to them.

People who are high school students at my high school, whether they're ADD, NVLD, or NT, they are much better on average to understand and be  willing to listen to my understanding of myself, which is far greater than could be the perspectives of a leading autism researcher, for even such a person has such grand misunderstanding of several key areas of understanding autistic people in  general, much less for this to be applied to an individual.

Perhaps it is that people whose temperaments are more inclined to not reach into another person's perspectives, but are rather much more socially adept when among those whose brains work roughly similarly with regard to social perception, are gravitated toward this field. Certainly the structure of the psychological/educational fields encourages this thinking, and if it was not before present, then surely during this stage it becomes cultivated. One cannot work within such a restrictive system without being altered somewhat by the experience in their perceptions of the individuals with whom they work, particularly if their first acquantaince with such individuals is through this course of study and practice.

This is what is unacceptable.

Note: When transferring this file to the computer, I also got this weird little malfunction:

esrucues,oni asetheot sackowlge mypostiet,ee ifthed e xsece f mculuaditsfraw  ierpeti t lInthecasethe psychologica aneatnlsysmshv irs euays desnt eni, n iwoud k to l eainit,andoaullig th hlenthyintdity eisnen erpev rea mppoed o erantd teireevandthealeata thisresperorda torm o temPeplewhrischol tudtwhertherAD,ND,o noe otae heae mhtr on aerae turn nd e  ilg tento y ueadinfs,wichis r ern old   eetivs o a agts reearerfe suh apron as ucran idertndi srlky aeasfdtingauttpln  enel,ules f s t e aplidto individual.

I think I will use it as the basis for a language I make up. :)

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The Penny Looks Sad

I don't know how common this is among autistics, but for many inanimate objects, I feel very emotionally connected to. Not as emotionally connected as with other people, but I seem to be able to express it much more clearly for non-human things and objects.

Today I apologized to a window decoration because I tore it. It was out of curiosity, as to how it would look and feel if I tore it, and it was a conscious decision I made to tear it. It made me feel sad, though.

I feel more sadness for people, when other people are hurt (either by me, other people, or other things, such as natural disasters). However, I don't show it in the ways other people seem to do, or expect me to do.

I'm not sure exactly in what ways my external appearance indicates to others that I am not emotionally connected, but I do know that these assessments are usually wrong (the exceptions being when I defended myself against someone attacking me, or if I do not feel sorry for someone who has done something awful and I feel they deserve it.

However, simply not liking someone is rarely grounds for me to feel that they "deserve what they get". I will still feel sorry for that chatty, materialistic girl who entered my class in sixth grade and made fun of me even though I told the boys, who criticized that she wore too much makeup, to give her a chance, when her next boyfriend treats her badly.

Unfortunately, because we express things differently, we are rarely listened to when we say that yes, indeed, we do care.

After only a few short years from when I was diagnosed at age 10, though, I had heard enough of the misconceptions about autism that by age 15 I was parroting back that I was practically emotionless, like a robot. I insisted that I had no empathy, that I was a strictly logical being, and that I had excellent rote memory.

None of these were true.

So I would caution anyone against taking the assumptions found in the medical literature as a factual representation of how all (or most) autistics are. This goes for any autistic person reading just as much as any non-autistic person.