26 October, 2010

eyeballs to entrails

Loving another passing person is an intensely powerful experience.

By passing I don't just mean people who hide the fact that they're ASD, but people who may be identified as ASD but are considered to be "really high-functioning" or exceptions. What I'm thinking about as the primary characteristic of such people is calculation. Pretending to understand or not understand, trying to be charming, desperately trying to appear valuable in some area, or to remind someone of their disabled brother so they'll look out for you. Crying on purpose to get a break. Doing anything possible not to cry. Becoming comic relief. Dressing like you do drugs so you don't have to explain.

The feeling you experience is a feeling of sliding into home base constantly with nanoseconds to spare.

Getting what you need by sneaking around and manipulating it out of people; moving until you're about to drop dead; constant running commentary in your head about how much you're fucking up.

These people feel brilliant and veer between terror and immense arrogance. When you are constantly dissembling you feel like you could take on the world but you also feel incredibly alone. And you feel like you're made out of paper sometimes. You feel like you've borrowed someone else's momentum--like you're going really fast and that's really cool, but you could also smash into a brick wall and crack your head open, but it would be stupid to stop because it's possible you'd never be able to get moving again.

Loving another passing person is an intensely powerful experience, and if you know what I know you know what I mean. It's like being blood brothers. Not being blood brothers, but the act of pressing the inside of your arm against the inside of another person's arm. That's where we are now.

5 comments:

  1. I couldn't agree more. And I wouldn't restrict it to just romantic love. Consistently, I've always felt the closest to people who share my experience with autism. Also, people who are also transsexual like myself makes a big difference in how close and mutually belonging I feel... but that only works if they're autistic or at least autistic-like as well.

    Mostly, it's autism, though. If someone were to ask me who I love or who I have loved in my life I would consistently point to people who are also autistic like me.

    Also, if you've never tried collaborative stimming it's a real joy and has brought me closer to a couple really special people in my life. Rocking back and fourth while leaning on each other = <3

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  2. I am not in romantic love with the person in question--well, not exactly. It just feels like more than anything.

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  3. This is why I love you. <3

    So true. Every word.

    "Getting what you need by sneaking around and manipulating it out of people; moving until you're about to drop dead; constant running commentary in your head about how much you're fucking up.

    These people feel brilliant and veer between terror and immense arrogance. When you are constantly dissembling you feel like you could take on the world but you also feel incredibly alone. And you feel like you're made out of paper sometimes. You feel like you've borrowed someone else's momentum--like you're going really fast and that's really cool, but you could also smash into a brick wall and crack your head open, but it would be stupid to stop because it's possible you'd never be able to get moving again."

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  4. I've found that passing, when it's happened in my life, wasn't about anything I was doing. It was about other people. I call it "being passed off". There have been times in my life when I have been incredibly atypical-looking, and yet if people found other reasons to blame besides autism (and frankly when I was growing up nobody knew what autism was), then I "passed", even though I stood out like a sore thumb.

    Some of the things I've been passed off as. Often several at once:

    "Crazy"
    On drugs
    Doing things for attention
    Immature
    "Ret#rded"
    Uncaring
    Selfish
    Disorganized
    Eccentric
    Etc.

    And so I could literally be in such a blatantly autistic-looking mode that I could walk around flicking objects in front of my eyes back and forth, having obvious difficulty speaking (or speaking single words over and over, or making odd sounds), and moving in a very atypical way (what a friend described when we were 12 as "if you were in a room of 100 people you'd be the one person whose body wasn't synchronized with the others"), etc. And nobody would say "This person is autistic," because they could find zillions of other things to call me.

    That's "being passed off", and it's very different from "passing" because of actually "looking normal." The weirdest thing though is that once people have those other reasons in their minds for why you didn't look normal, they can claim you actually are/were normal. Which is very strange. I think it has to do with the fact that they don't remember your actual actions. They just remember "oh she was nuts" or "oh she was on drugs" so they don't remember actual obviously autistic behavior once they have an "alternate explanation" for it. They remember the explanation and not the behavior. Weird way to pass.

    These days I'm often passed off as purely physically disabled if I'm in my wheelchair. Outside of a wheelchair I've never passed as such a thing. Again, all about being passed off rather than passing.

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  5. I know. I was thinking of doing a post talking about different kinds of passing, which would lean heavily on your being passed off post, of course.

    When I think about passing the way I'm describing it in this post, I'm thinking about actually intentionally manipulating people's impressions. For example, it used to be that one reason I would dye my hair green and blue, and would act and talk in a certain way (I still dye my hair, but don't talk that way unless I want to), was to sort of finagle myself into the whole cute/spacey/quirky girl thing.

    One thing is just that for me, some supposedly easy interactions, like ordering a smoothie and paying for it and waiting for it to be made, were very very hard because I didn't know what expressions to make, etc. I would be asked if I was okay, and so on. When I was about 17 I actually faced this problem and came up with kind of a character to play while carrying out actions like that--what is my motivation? Well, I am excited to get a smoothie, so I'll act very chirpy and excited. Success. So when I talk about passing this way, in terms of calculation, I am thinking about this kind of thing.

    But of course many people who aren't read as disabled are not actually calculating, they're just being passed off.

    Now that I have dumped a lot of the old kind of passing (I still use it when buying stuff etc., but not so much when interacting with friends/potential friends, and speaking in class) I probably still am not read as disabled because everyone thinks disabled people can't go to college, talk, blahblah. But I feel different. I no longer have the same calculating/fdr feeling.

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