Happy Autistic Pride Day!

I started the party last night, and stayed up the whole night. Didn't really have much to do, so I took an online Raven's IQ test around 4:30 this morning.

It was fun, but I must've been so wired on my imaginary coffee, because I got through the first three quarters of the thing in five minutes. Got a 104 (not a high fever though). Not bad - though I still feel foolish for having zipped through it, thinking I was getting everything right. Ah, well. Good to put arrogance to bed, even if the rest of me failed to nod off.

Another way to celebrate: I figured out how to do a makeshift version of smores involving my microwave. I learned from the last time my lesson about plastic in the microwave, and the WRONG way to melt chocolate, so I did some research, and heated up some water, then put the chocolate I wanted melted in a measuring cup and let the heat energy transfer from the hot water to the plastic to the chocolate.

It was a good experiment. One I'm sure any self-respecting hungry chemist would be glad to review. ;-)

Still working on a couple video projects so far. One is part of a thread on AFF, which will involve me talking about various experiences as an autistic person.

Another one is more of a self-contained, mini-documentary (mini both for time length and because of a limited selection of subjects). Also am working on the planning stages for another video project to submit to the possibility of being included in a...er, a London something, I can't remember, except that I'm excited to submit my contribution as soon as it's ready.

Gay marriage! Not htat it's new news, just, yeah, they talked about it more on the news because the licenses are getting issued. Ah. Gotta love California. I wonder sometimes what would be the social-political analogue of the legalization of same-sex marriage to autistic rights.

*shrugs*

Well, don't think it really matters. There wouldn't be an exact equivalent anyway, in terms of nature of it. Though I do sometimes worry about the threat of people who claim that autistics would make lesser parents, which particularly strikes a nerve with me as the daughter of a spectrum dad and me, with hopes to raise (a) child(ren) at some future time.

Watch this page for pics! I will edit them into my post as soon as I get them.

Oh! Boredom has it's better edges. Apparently I'm a chiuwuwa:

You Are a Chihuahua Puppy

Small, high strung, and loyal. You do best in the city with a adults - young kids could crush you!

What Breed of Puppy Are You?

ON Growing Up One Arm in the Straitjacket

There is a spiral, a pattern that embeds itself into the order of the natural world. A mathematical oddity. An improbability. The Greeks saw in it truth and beauty. Today it has applications in the stock market. To most, it is just a pattern unfolding in a patch of dead, scattered sand.

The sand is what gets me. It’s what draws my attention, as does the lone paperclip that catches a small bit of light as it rests in the slight shadow of the nearby desk. The pattern, the golden spiral, is to me the ripple of an ocean wave transposed to a dream. A pure expression unbound by linguistic ambiguities, one that transcends definition and yields to unadulterated communication.

I spent most of my childhood afternoons in class gazing in various directions. Sometimes up the front of the classroom, sometimes the window. Sometimes a wall. Didn’t matter, really. It was the gazing - the thinking - that was the point. However I managed to elude the misperception that I was disengaged from reality as long as I did remains as mysterious to me as is the hidden meaning I am supposed to extract from such written expression as “;)”.

If my teachers didn’t notice anything unusual, my sisters sure did. And while not saying so outright, my mom certainly must have noticed, for all of her exasperated attempts to understand why “simple” things were so much more difficult for me than other things, things that would typically be considered complicated and challenging. I quickly ascertained that I was some different kind of person, a foreign person within the only home I’d ever known. Culture clashes were inevitable, but it was hard for either party to not feel personally targeted, as there was no clear physical indicator that my culture even existed.

Before anyone ever uttered the word “autism”, I was keenly aware that people like me were routinely shoved into institutions under the premise that their lives were not worth the trouble of accommodating them independently, and that such effort would be wasted on individuals perceived to be clearly incapable of enjoying it. I still remember watching a program on TV in the early 1990s, and all the gloom and doom predictions people made for the people featured, the people I pointed at and said, “They’re like me!” with childlike enthusiasm. My mom corrected me, said that I wasn’t like them, as they were severely disabled and would bang their heads. I wondered what made me so different from them.

Whatever my perceptions, the message was clear: there is a set pattern of development that typical children follow like a map with only one road. And if these milestones are not met within given ranges, then that is sign of disease process. Not a sign of having a different sort of body than people expected, not a sign of having a different sort of mind. Not a sign of difference or disability, but of disease.

This as the backdrop of my childhood, I made the unconscious yet purposeful effort to watch myself every second of my life that I was in public. Make eye contact, no matter how much it hurts, just do it. Explaining that the lack of eye contact means you’re paying attention isn’t good enough. No hand gestures, either. And don’t rock, but talk even if it pains you. You have to walk a certain way that is unnatural and difficult, you must keep your head at a proper, normal angle, and don’t let your mouth hang open. If you don’t keep this up, you look retarded, and you know how much your peers belittle the mentally retarded, as if they’re somehow lesser. If a loud noise scares you, or an offending touch hurts you, you cannot shout or move away. You must bear all intrusions, no matter how violent, with silence and good behavior.

I like to try this thought experiment with people who don’t understand how stressful this can be, people who think that if someone is capable of imitating “normal” behavior, that they should act that way all the time. Now imagine that you are a child, and I am a doctor. A teacher. A parent. I tell you that it is absolutely imperative to rock back and forth for most of your waking life, despite your never having had the inclination or the thought to do so. Although too much is forbidden, you may talk sometimes. But only on one subject, and you must never look at someone’s eyes, or even their face. If you do, you must stare “through” and not “at” – whether or not you actually understand this distinction. And whenever you screw up, I am going to correct you, and withhold rewards. After all, these things are good behavior. Only good behavior gets rewards. Bad behavior never gets a reward, because we don’t really want to see that anymore.

When I advanced to seventh grade, the reward for good behavior changed from approval to safety, as if the junior high were operating as a miniature institution. While the total population of the institution was about 500, only a small handful of us were held captive to its most prized tenet of conformity beyond possibility. If someone threatened my life, it was because I could not afford designer jeans. If someone stole from me, it was because I look strange when having a seizure. If someone beat me up, it was because I failed to acquiesce to the moral superiority of my verbally abusive peers, but rather entertained the foolish thought of defending my dignity.

I sometimes like to think I have permanently overcome the flashbacks I still from time to time experience, that I am strong enough to stare my memories in the face as they creep along at my heels and to say “no more.” I sometimes like to think that once these personal emotions are resolved that I have defeated the problem. I sometimes like to think that my experiences were aberrations. As I face school, public transportation, job interviews, dating, adoption and parenting, though, I cannot ever ignore the fact that what has happened to me is a mere appendage of a wider phenomenon. Regardless of my own circumstances, through the collective experiences of the autistic community, I will always have one arm tucked firmly out of sight in the straitjacket.

Tact and Advocacy

I sincerely would like to apologize about some of the insensitive people who claim to speak for the autistic community but in truth don't.

I am not strictly describing pro-cure NTs. There are also autistics who get on my nerves because not only are they narrow-minded, but they show no interest in expanding their understanding and perspective.

Of course these people are in the minority. It is unfortunate, however, that Alison Tepper Singer can be put on a video claiming to raise "awareness" as she describes the only reason she didn't kill her autistic daughter was because she had a normal daughter too and even be praised for her "courage", while a few narrow-minded autistics who state their views without presenting them in any kind of logically comprehensible OR emotionally sensitive way are demonized as "nasty self-advocates who want to take our kids' services away."

Like extreme views of anything, people are far too prone to get rigid and nasty about them, autistic or NT. I do not consider myself a "radical" or "extremist" for opposing the idea of cure. I tend to define these terms by the way a group or individual goes about achieving their goals. Of course, there are cases when the goals themselves are extremist and dangerous: who would argue that the advocacy for genocide, racist Social Darwinism, or war-mongering are not of themselves dangerous? Likewise, just because there are dangers to the ways that religious fundamentalists, such as of Christian and Islamic denominations, doesn't mean that everybody who is Christian or Muslim advocates for death to America or persecuting gays.

I hate it when autistics who don't have much of any of the disability aspect try to speak for everybody just as much as I hate it when non-autistic people try to speak for us. It's just no use.

On the Internet, I have encountered many pro-cure people who viciously attacked me even when I wrote about understanding that it can be very difficult for parents; my NT mother has had much trouble with me, and I do not have as many special needs as some others (such as, I can't brush my hair, but I can do toileting; I can speak, but often get overloaded and can't).

Remember everyone: assholes are assholes. Some of them happen to be autistic, some of them happen to be NT. It doesn't mean that either group is more prone to such attitudes.

Autism, while a disability that should receive supports, accommodations, and adaptive skills, should not be eradicated or looked at as wholly negative. I don't want a cure, but I also don't assume that the people who say they want one are bad parents/hate their kids/insert other stereotype.

I believe in diplomacy. This doesn't mean we have to be wishy-washy, roll-over-and-do-what-the-NTs-all-tell-us autistics. We can criticize the foundations of the ideas in favor of cure without resorting to ad hominem attacks on those who support it. Especially this is true since the word "cure" is often used to describe developing adaptive skills (such as speech and toileting), which I do not believe is cure.

While it is still very important that we not concede on helping parents to understand that being nonverbal is not a jail sentence, if the individual is capable and willing, some of these things are useful skills. We should focus more on the WAY the skills are taught, to see that they are not being coerced, that the individual is not made to feel inferior for "autistic behaviors." These, after all, are requisite to human equality, and I have no intention of conceding these goals, which need not be compromised by employing some empathy.

As to the divisions. They are Everywhere.

HFA, LFA, AS? Touch of AS? ND or curebie? Retards and computer geeks. I get pretty sick of it. Especially it annoys me when people use the word 'retard' as an insult. It is to me like using the word 'gay' as an insult. When I was in elementary school, I heard people say, "That is SO GAY - you're so GAY" so much that I preferred the word homosexual. It surprised me much when this summer I got my hands on a copy of The Advocate and some books about the gay rights movement, and I learned that the preferred term in the gay community is just that - gay. Why? Because 'homosexual' was too medicalized a term, one used often when it was a diagnosable disorder voted in by the APA and voted out again in 1973.

Why did I bring this up?

I am not sure at this point if I really forgot my topic or if I was trying to utilise a rhetorical strategy. In any case, the existence of a word alone does not make it offensive or acceptable. In fact, devoid of the usage and origin and other available context, a word has absolutlely no meaning, and is merely a string of the shapes of the letters to form it, and the sounds it would make if one were to produce it.

The problem lies with kids growing up thinking that if someone is gay or retarded, then they are less valuable and worth mocking. Growing up, I frequently got called both. I wonder how many grade-school kids get called "retarded lesbo?"

The fact is, whatever category people try to group me (or anybody else) into, to force-fit like the puzzle piece so many seem to think goes well with autistics into the narrow configuration so many would like to see me fit, I just can't, and I won't. Even though on the surface I resemble the math-and-science-obsessed Aspie stereotype, and that aspect of it is true, it is impossible to put someone in so narrow a box without losing a few chunks of the individual.

I tend to relate more to nonverbal auties who use a speech device than to the highly verbal aspie who has trouble with social skills. My social skills are actually pretty good; though eye contact and body language for me are atypical (in the case of eye contact, virtually nonexistent), and these are not instruments I use to augment my social understanding. Fortunately, the high school I attend is generally accepting of different people, so the fact that I spend 90%+ of my time at school rocking and moving my hands and occasionally getting up to pace, or those days in tae kwon do that I just can't speak at all, these don't affect friendships adversely for me. At my other school, where I repressed most of these behaviors to the best of my ability out of fear, I had the understanding of a select few, the sympathy of a few more onlookers who recognized injustice - most of whom did nothing to support my efforts, however.

So as we recognize that these labels are often used as dividing lines and demeaning labels, that we are not so simplistic as to fit them - no one is - we must also consider that not everybody is being a big NT meanie who wants to take away our rights and abort us. True, we cannot be weak and submissive, or we will only be worse than ignored, but being rude will work to this unfavourable end as well.

So please, I urge all budding activists, who seek to impact the posautive change that I have begun my journey to realize, to employ tact wherever it is necessary. Of course someone who outright insults you with an ad hominem attack loses that privilege, but where the individual is not making a direct attack that is meant to villify, then please employ this tact. It is difficult at times, and what helps me is to write my angry, emotional stuff down on a separate file, then post a logical, tactful reply. (Not that I always succeed - I am sure that I have slipped up. My crowning achievement in this area is when in response to a YouTube video in which a parent referred to the autism "epidemic" as a "slaughter" I kept my cool for a 500 word response limit.)