Sensory Issues

Something like this happens:

1. I'm in college, in a psychology class, where the professor tells us that Autistic people don't care about other people. We only see them as objects to get something from. (She knows I'm Autistic and she's taught Autistic students before.)

2. A friend of my friend informs her that I will never care about her because I'm Autistic.

3. One of the most popular books in the world is about an Autistic character who doesn't care about people and wishes that everyone else in the world would die. I see people reading this book all the time, including people I'm close to, and it has been recommended to me so I can learn more about autism.

4. After a mass murder, I hear people speculating that the murderer must have been Autistic.

Something like this happens: my feathers are ruffled. I feel hopeless about life; I feel like I can't trust anyone. I want to confront the person who said something. I don't want to feel obligated to be nice to them. I feel betrayed if the person was someone I liked and trusted.

If I talk to anyone about this, most people respond calmly and cheerfully. Even close friends and family aren't hurt or angry on my behalf. They have no emotional reaction--they often seem a little bored that I've brought up something so trivial--and if they even intellectually condemn what happened, their focus is on telling me that it isn't so bad.

The person didn't mean it like that.

Well, a lot of people have that misconception about Autistic people. They just don't know any better.

I shouldn't be so sensitive. I should get over it.

They wouldn't think that if they got to know me.

Mysteriously, the last statement--a compliment--is the one that bothers me the most.

Why be modest? No one else is going to say anything good about me once they know I'm Autistic. So I'll admit that I'm a kind, caring person. It's certainly the way I am most often described by people who don't know I'm Autistic. As I leave a room I sometimes hear people exclaiming, "She is so sweet!" I always do my best to be kind and polite to everyone, I volunteer, and I've chosen to take care of other people for a living.

I'm pretty much as far from the Autistic stereotype as I could get. So yes, it is probably true that if certain people were forced to spend time with me, they would eventually have to admit that I care about other people, and maybe they'd even start to wonder if this is true for other Autistic people (but I doubt it; exceptionalism is a hell of a drug). Yet somehow this fact is completely inadequate and unsatisfying to me in every way.

For many people, there's a duality between disabled people--an abstract group--and the disabled person you know. People just cannot get their heads around the idea that ableism really does affect their disabled friend or family member. How can a nice pink-collar Manic Pixie Dream Girl like me possibly be affected by the idea that Autistic people are serial killers? I'm obviously not a serial killer if you get to know me!

The rub is obviously that most people don't know each other and that most acts of discrimination aren't committed between close friends or family members. I'm supposed to be comforted by the idea that my friends and family members know I care about other people, and completely desensitized to the fact that doctors, therapists, potential employers, police, judges, or jurors might think I don't.

Even if you put aside situations where I could be concretely hurt or disadvantaged because of those stereotypes, there's still the daunting task of having to convince new people in my life that I care whether they live or die. Specifically, the fact that it's completely horrible to assume I don't care about that; and the fact that I shouldn't have to prove something so simple; and the question of how, having proved I meet a minimum standard for decency, I'm supposed to settle down and be friends with someone who assumed I didn't.

I've been thinking about this whole thing a lot lately, and I do feel a lot more friendly toward these responses than I once did. I think, if people care about me, they think it is kinder and more comforting to believe that these things don't matter; that I'm just a cuddly Autistic snowflake floating around and those kind of ideas can't ever really hurt me. I am their friend, their family member. They know I'm a nice person (even if their ideas about Autistic people in general are negative) so everyone must know that I'm a nice person (even if their ideas about Autistic people in general are negative). I must be safe and equal; if someone cares about me, it feels nicer to think that I am just silly and oversensitive, than that I could actually face discrimination for being Autistic.

Breakupversary

It's Autistics Speaking Day. I think I only completed an ASDay post on the first year, 2010, and since I don't blog very often, I'm not sure if I would have decided to write one this year. As it turns out, I didn't even remember November 1 was Autistics Speaking Day, even though I've been watching November 1 coming for quite a while. That's because November 1, 2013, was the day I stopped being in an abusive relationship.

That was your trigger warning. I'm not sure if this counts as an ASDay post or not. It's aimed at Autistic people, disabled people, and to some extent, anyone who is part of a marginalized group and sees that as an important part of their identity.

I have written about my abusive relationship, and I have more to say in the future. What I have to say today is: I didn't know that an abusive relationship could feel the way mine did. I generally didn't feel scared of my abuser or like I was being hurt; instead, from the beginning of the relationship, I was afraid that I was abusing and hurting her. I saw her as a very weak, vulnerable person who I was obligated to protect, and even when I was really unhappy and wanted out, I didn't see it that way. I saw myself as being stressed because my girlfriend needed more help than I could consistently provide. Or, towards the end, I thought that I just was too disabled, or too selfish, or not disciplined enough, to do everything she needed.

It wasn't until after the relationship ended that I became afraid of her. When we were together, my perception of the world was so absorbed into hers that I didn't realize how little control I had over my choices, how afraid I was of displeasing her, and how little she cared about my well-being. It's pretty scary that her thoughts and opinions became mine, that even disagreeing with her in my head was really difficult; but naturally, I wasn't scared at the time, because I didn't have enough control over my mind to be scared.

A few times I cried uncontrollably for hours; I felt hopeless; I got sick. But I always traced it to sources other than my relationship. The closest I ever got was thinking that really bad things happened because I didn't respond to her the right way, and if I just did it better next time, things would be okay. I could handle her.

To be clear, my ex was also Autistic, and had various other disabilities. Her disabilities played a major role in why I stayed with her and was afraid to question the nature of our relationship. At the time, I had a few rationalizations for it:

1. It would be wrong to think that she might be exaggerating or lying about certain needs, or using her disabilities as an excuse for her behavior--even though that was clearly happening sometimes, I refused to consider it.
2. I should be loyal to her because she was disabled. It was right for me to stay with her and help her because disabled people should look out for each other.
3. If I didn't stay with her, she would be alone because other people didn't understand her disabilities and discriminated against her. She wouldn't get the help she needed, and she might even die. A few times she told me that because I had upset her, she might get institutionalized and they would kill her.

As comforting as it might be to imagine that she was faking or lying about her disabilities, that the person who did this to me wasn't Autistic--well, I knew her well enough to know she definitely is Autistic. I also know that it doesn't matter, that if she wasn't really Autistic, or wasn't really disabled, that wouldn't make this any better.

This is a friendly reminder that marginalized people can be abusive or dangerous just like everyone else; and that some social justice ideas are right most of the time, but have exceptions. You don't have to always agree with someone just because they are marginalized. If someone is obviously lying, you shouldn't just accept it because they are marginalized. Disabled people aren't usually lying about their disabilities or using them as an excuse, but it does happen, and you don't have to put up with it if it's hurting you.

Maybe most importantly, not everyone who shares an experience with you is trustworthy. Making Autistic friends was very important to me and I'm now at a point where most of my close friends are Autistic. That does not mean all Autistic people are my friends or have my back, or that I should have their back. This sounds obvious, but it's a lesson I've had to learn a few times, and I hope (maybe unrealistically) that I'll never have to learn it again.

These are some links I find helpful.

The Pervocracy--"Why does she stay with that jerk?"

Myths About Abusers

Off the Rails by Abbey Wilson--particularly the "Why I Don't Believe in God" series--one, two, three, four, five. Additional warning, this is about being in a cult as well as an abusive relationship. It's very different from my experience but for whatever reason, it was the first thing I read that I related to.

Trigger Warning: Breakfast

I like the writing of Lundy Bancroft (like this for example, and that whole tumblr has a lot of good stuff), but the big warning is that he basically doesn't believe women can abuse men. This is ridiculous and makes me uncomfortable.

Also, if you are in my situation, there might come a point when you should take a break from reading and writing about abuse, even if you think it's a good thing to do. It can upset you and make you paranoid; at least, it can for me. When that happens I make an effort to focus on other subjects for a while.

If you don't know who I am

When I graduated from Oberlin in 2011, I had an idea to make a post called "Is Oberlin a good college for students with mental disabilities?" so that prospective students with mental disabilities could get an impression of what it was like. I didn't get around to it in the first two years after college, and I already feel like it's been long enough that I can't really act like an expert on Oberlin. For one thing, there's a nonspeaking Autistic guy going there now and his presence may have changed things.

I do want to talk about a particular phenomenon though and I think it might be something to think about when it comes to any college that has a reputation like Oberlin's. It's from a comment I saw on Oberlin Confessional or ObieTalk, which were anonymous forums where students gossiped, trolled, and tried to find people to have sex with. Some of the discussions were more cerebral than others and this time, people were talking about whether Oberlin was as tolerant as people thought it was.

The comment was something like, "Most people at Oberlin don't understand my experiences or my background, and don't seem motivated to learn. They say they accept everyone, but you can't accept me if you don't know who I am."

It was better written than this and it really struck me. It also reminded me of some of my own experiences as an Autistic student.

I'm not afraid to say that the director of disability services at Oberlin was unhelpful to me. I've heard she did a lot of good things for mobility impaired students, but when it came to me she wasn't very willing to help me and often implied that my disability wasn't real. One time when she was telling me why she had taken away my priority registration, I mentioned that I was going to be a classics major and she said like I was proving her point, "Well the whole classics department practically has Asperger's, you'll be fine there!"

When I got a little older and was more political about things I started getting annoyed by the whole verbal-Autistic-person = geek stereotype, but even aside from the stereotype, there's this idea that as long as an environment is "geeky" or "awkward," it's automatically an accepting environment for Autistic people. We don't need accommodations, we just need geeks.

For me, being around "awkward" people is not that helpful. Sure I might have more to talk about with people who are really into pop culture and I might have a more similar sense of humor to people who identify as geeky or awkward. So on a superficial level, it's easier for me to be roommates with people like that or be seated next to people like that on a cross-country bus trip. Things will go smoothly, conversation-wise.

I'll even go further than that and say that sometimes, geeky or awkward environments can be more accepting places for people who are visibly different because of autism, mental health problems, or learning disabilities and they have often been more comfortable for me than environments that aren't oriented that way.

But:

1. In an academic setting, the teacher and other students being "awkward" doesn't have anything to do with whether the student will be accommodated for learning disabilities, auditory processing disabilities, anxiety, etc; or how the teacher will respond if the student is unable to complete work as fast as other students or in a standard way because of her disability. (This really depended--one thing about Oberlin is that the professors have a lot of freedom about how they do stuff so my professors were able to excuse things or let me do things differently if they wanted to. Obviously, some didn't want to.)

2. When it comes to forming close friendships or close relationships, whether someone is "awkward" doesn't have anything to do with whether they understand what it's like to have a disability and whether they have empathy and respect for someone who's not able to do the things they consider normal. I've had some friends I really got along with on a doing-stuff-together-and-talking-about-stuff level, but who I wouldn't be able to have a really deep friendship with because there are parts of my life that will be a problem or just incomprehensible to them.

3. In both settings, "awkwardness" doesn't prevent non-disabled people from using the r-word or saying fucked up things about Autistic people or disabled people in general, or non-disabled professors teaching Disability Studies classes to mostly non-disabled people without anyone ever acknowledging their privilege, or groups for disabled students never really getting off the ground, or disability not being included when people are talking about marginalized identities.

So that's pretty much what I have to say about Oberlin. And I actually really liked going to Oberlin! But there are limits to "awkwardness."

good brains wearing clothes

1. I can wear clothes that don't match (mismatched patterns, sneakers with a dress, pajamas in the daytime) and people will perceive this as an expression of my style rather than thinking that I don't know any better, or that my parents or guardians aren't taking good care of me.

2. I can go outside with messy hair, messy clothes, or a half-grown beard, and people will perceive this as an expression of my style, or lack of caring, rather than thinking that I don't know any better, or that my parents or guardians aren't taking good care of me.

3. If I am perceived as female and I don't shave, people will perceive this as an expression of my politics, or lack of caring, or gender expression, rather than thinking that I don't know any better, or that my parents or guardians aren't taking good care of me.

4. If I have a "childish" hairstyle (pigtails or braids, very long hair, a big cloud of curly hair) or if I wear clothes with children's cartoons on them, people will perceive this as an expression of my sense of humor, aesthetics, or interests, rather than thinking that I am like a child, or that my parents or guardians want me to be a child.

5. If I dress extremely nicely and formally, I don't feel like this is something I have to do to compensate for my disability.

(ETA: can someone explain lol_meme to me? I'm so confused right now.)

some complaints about being same-sex-attracted and not adapting well

(totally switched into my old anti-"queer culture" whining mode while writing this, and I apologize tenfold, I really am better now in this area at least. But I'm just posting this without reading it over because if I don't I will never post anything like it at all.)

I guess this is probably bad, but I'm not making an It Gets Better video because I'm not better.

I was working on a long post about this, since August, but it never really solidified.

When I was in high school, someone who wasn't my friend said this to my (secret, closeted) friend, who then told me: "Everyone could see there was something different about Amanda, and then when they found out she was gay, they had an answer."

When I was in high school, the word dyke or lesbian was a way to easily quantify all the things about me that didn't seem right. When I was in high school I felt very alone.

When I was in ninth and tenth grade, I actually brought all this on myself by not denying that I was gay or bisexual, and presenting in a masculine way. I felt that this was an important thing to do because other kids needed to see that queer people were just regular people. The problem with this idea is, in hindsight, obvious: I am not a regular person. Being openly queer in a heteronormative environment is a noble thing to do, but maybe not if you have anxiety about pretty much everything and have trouble talking to people.

A lot of my coming-out process happened when I was on a lot of medication and overwhelmed by the relationships I was in. By the time I was in eleventh grade, I was more able to clearly see what was going on, and I knew that I'd made a mistake by not being closeted. My school was very small, some people were genuinely afraid to be friends with me in case someone said they were having sex with me, and I wasn't a person who could charm my way out of this stigma. But my school wasn't violently homophobic and I feel like a more normal person could have made a difference. It would have to be a person who fit in every way, except one.

I think this is something that's always been hard for me to conceptualize--I've been in situations that other people would have been able to handle, but I haven't been. I feel like there's an attitude of, "It's not that bad for queer people to be under a little more pressure, if it's an amount of pressure that a normal person can handle, if they have nothing else on their plate."

At my college being same-sex-attracted is a non-issue; I remember the first time I told someone at college I was gay, and how hard that was for me. When I was in high school, I had huge problems saying the word and wouldn't be able to finish sentences if they contained it. In the first semester or two of college, I felt afraid of hugging my female friends or even sitting close to them while watching TV. I don't feel that way anymore. I don't feel separate from my friends because I am not straight. And that is a really big thing that means a lot to me, but it's all I'd be able to say in an "it gets better" video, and on paper, it doesn't sound that great.

I'm incel (don't know this word very well, and if it's associated with a subculture of assholes I take back my identification). I've never had a serious relationship with anyone.

[Edit from 2018: Even though someone tried to explain to me in the comments, I did not understand the depths of the "incel" community at the time I wrote this post and would NEVER use that word to describe myself now. I don't know if "ace spectrum" would be a better word to use, but it was and is the case that I'm rarely attracted to people, and my needs in a relationship are somewhat unusual; so it's not very common for me to be attracted to someone who's both attracted to me and compatible with me. I think a lot of my early-20s complaints about lesbians not being up to my standards were really a way to avoid admitting that relationships and dating don't usually work for me because of how I am.]

I have always wanted to get married and have a big family (big by liberal not conservative standards, so 3-5 kids). But I have never really thought this will happen. For a while I used to think that I might end up marrying one of my male friends and raising kids together, but I'm no longer okay with that prospect; it would just make me too depressed.

Even though my school is ssa-positive, most of the people at my school are straight just like most of the people in the world. I have enough friends that I never feel lonely, but I don't belong to a group of friends (partly because I don't like groups), and I know very few ssa people because I don't have stereotypical queer interests.

A few years ago I posted on a lesbian advice forum saying I was depressed and stressed because I wanted to believe I would someday get married and have kids, but that I had never been in a relationship and didn't think I ever would be. People responded telling me that if I was on a date with a girl, I shouldn't tell her I wanted to have kids, because she would think I was creepy. One person went to my livejournal, saw where I went to school, and told me that my school wasn't any place to complain about and that I should "stop whining." She provided a list of various social groups and activities that would help me to meet "dykes," including eating in a co-op (which would mean being organized enough to eat at the same time every day, taking up a lot of executive function cooking and cleaning, and constantly interacting with a large group of people I didn't know).

I try not to think about any of this.

I used to have a political problem with the way other ssa people behaved. Whenever I thought about it I got so upset that I didn't know what to do. The way I saw it, there were two kinds of ssa people:

1. "gay" people (such as people involved in the HRC) who were very normal and wanted to have normal jobs and normal families. They didn't think much about trans people, non-homosexual sexual minorities, or anyone who wasn't normal.

2. "queer" people (such as a lot of people at my school) who were very into not being normal, playing rugby, performance art, co-ops, and so on. Many of them identified as trans but didn't seem to understand that some trans people actually take hormones and get surgery and are poor, and are not students at a liberal arts college who change their pronouns every week.

(Part of the focus of #2 arose because my only good lesbian friend, and one of my only non-straight-and-cis friends, was a person who was transitioning in college and had before transitioning fit squarely into the category of "very serious person who likes obscure music, old movies, and complaining." This was not such a bad personality for a straight guy, but it just added to the awkwardness she already felt whenever she tried to go to any kind of trans-related group or event at school, since most of the people were female-assigned and also just acted super "queer"--i.e. running around being spontaneous and talking about how we just need to break down all the labels and categories and let people be themselves, man! [Seriously, once I asked a very annoying queer-identified guy, who had previously been a pretty cool gay-identified guy who hated queers, but I think they stole his brain or something, "Well, what do you actually think we should be doing if everything 'gay' people are doing is so racist and classist and normative?" to which he replied that "trans issues are important, like we shouldn't have male and female bathrooms," at which point I couldn't take it anymore and said "Well what about fucking HEALTH CARE COVERAGE FOR TRANSITION" and he said he didn't really know what he thought we should be doing but we'd discuss it later and I should read Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore.]

Anyway, it was just pretty annoying for my friend and me, and we used to kind of feed into each other, and one time a queer feminist girl called out my friend in a filmmaking class for making a film about a female character when [the queer feminist thought] my friend wasn't a woman. [The person wasn't intentionally being transphobic--my friend was still using her birth name at the time and maybe still looked ambiguous--but I still think it's not okay to say something as harsh as what she said to my friend, on the basis of the assumption that someone isn't a woman.])

I just got really upset because I still felt alone/depressed about my future as an ssa person, and I also could see that trans people were in genuine financial/physical danger, but I felt like no one cared about just Making Things Better For Everyone. They wanted to either make things better for a small group of normal people, or go totally abstract and just "queer everything" and "break down all the categories and walls," which meant fuck all in the short term for real people.

I felt weird because I wanted to get married but I wasn't normal and I felt like "gay" people wanted to help normal people get married and "queer" people were anti-marriage so neither one included me.

For quite a while when I was nineteen and twenty I insisted on being referred to only as "homosexual" and "same-sex-attracted" because I didn't want to be associated with any cultural groups. A straight friend-of-a-friend referred to me as queer, and was a bit surprised when I spat out, "I'm not queer, I'm gay." In the past year I have started calling myself queer just because I like the word and I don't really give a fuck about how alienated I feel from most people who identify with it.

The only reason I stopped being so upset about being ssa was just because in the last year I started getting into Autistic/disabled stuff and I actually feel like I share the values and am included and not ignored because I'm too weird or not radical enough. So now I feel like I can actually work on stuff that's important, by working on disability stuff, and not feel like I'm alone in what I care about.

But when I go back to thinking about being ssa, I never feel better.

the calmness checklist of a lot of people at my school

I don't want to call this "non-ASD privilege" or anything. There's already a checklist sort of like that. But I have been thinking and observing my particular situation, which is to say: grew up being stigmatized as disabled in my family, have always kind of known there is shit wrong that I have to manage (although I haven't thought about it as concretely as I do now), but have pretty much done the things that other kids with a lot of class privilege do when they are growing up. I haven't gone to a segregated school, I currently attend college, I don't see any reason to think that I will ever be in any kind of (good or bad) supported employment as people with more severe DD may be. And I don't think I will ever be in any danger of being forced to live in an institution, no matter what.

A little more than a year ago I made a YouTube video where I compared myself to a wheelchair user who when asked to describe her daily journey describes a series of places that any non-disabled person might go to. That is--the places she could go might be highly limited by which spaces are wheelchair accessible. A person can move through a bunch of places and situations that seem "normal" and are not identified as being for disabled people, but actually the person might be disabled and be quite affected in the number of options she has.

Although I think I have a ton of privilege just because I haven't always felt this trapped, I feel really trapped now (senior year). And I am surrounded by people who don't have disabilities and don't feel the same intense need to start planning their futures now for the sake of being safe. But on the surface we don't look all that different.

In fact I like my college partly because it is a very stoner/experimental/hipster/hippie/radical environment. I don't identify as any of those things, but the social environment is very comfortable for me because there's so much diversity of acceptable behavior. But this very social environment is something that really pisses me off right now. I mean, a lot of the people at my school who behave "unacceptably" do so because they think it's an interesting thing to do. They can quit any time and they don't have to structure their lives around it. Similarly, when they don't do things they are supposed to do, this is called relaxing and not worrying too much and giving themselves time. There are some things that I just can't do.

In my class where we work with kids and teenagers with DDs, we had some discussion about what a developmental delay is, and then what executive dysfunction/poor central coherence look like in people with ASD. This often degenerates into a good-humored discussion about how many people enter college and don't even know how to do their laundry, and how a bunch of guys still rely on their girlfriends to schedule everything for them, and how many friends of the person speaking don't even understand how to cook a meal. As a person who is really worried about the prospect of cooking meals and scheduling things for myself and completely wearing myself down to the bone because of how much emotional effort it takes, I don't think this is funny. And this article makes me spitting mad.

So, without further ado:

THE CALMNESS CHECKLIST OF A LOT OF PEOPLE AT MY SCHOOL
(this is very personal and kind of mean, and probably would not hold up in court)

1. I can ask for an extension without having to feel like a failure.
2. If I don't graduate on time, that's cool.
3. I can talk in class without feeling guilty for taking up people's time with my bad talking. I can even get off topic or say things that are totally stupid.
4. I can schedule meetings with my professors when I think I might be doing badly in class, because I don't worry that they will think I'm lazy or don't care about the class because of how I come off. I don't only schedule meetings in the event of being in danger of failing the class.
5. I can schedule meetings with professors just because I like them and want to become friendly with them, because I think that they'll like me too.

6. If someone expresses romantic interest in me, I don't worry how they will find out or if I should tell them.
7. If someone expresses romantic interest in me, I don't just end up avoiding them altogether because I don't want to deal with figuring out #6.
8. If someone expresses romantic interest in me, I can be pretty sure that it's not because they are academically interested in my lack of autism.

9. I'm never sitting in a class where everyone is ASD except me and someone says, "I'm really interested in not-Autistic-ness, it's so fascinating."
10. If I tell someone I'm not Autistic, they never immediately recommend that I read a book about a character who isn't Autistic written by an author who is Autistic.
11. I never have to try to figure out how to give feedback in a writing workshop to someone's story about how depressing, confusing, and annoying their sibling is because their sibling doesn't have autism.
12. Actually, I just never have to ever sit in any class where students or professors say anything about how much sympathy family members deserve for living with someone who doesn't have a disability.
13. But if someone ever did say something insulting or dehumanizing about people without disabilities, I could just say I was offended and explain why. I wouldn't have to feel like people would think I was overreacting. And I definitely wouldn't have to feel like people might be thinking, "Wow, I guess people without autism have trouble understanding other people's points of view." Or, "I guess people without autism don't understand humor." Or, "I guess people without autism have to take over the conversation and make it all about their own interests just because someone made a little comment about something related."

14. I can intentionally vomit on the steps of the library, and that's just how I am, not a sign of how I don't understand social norms.
15. I can also wear pants with holes in them and no underwear so people can see my junk (same person). Again, this isn't because I don't understand the appropriate way to dress, it's just a personal choice.
16. I can never shower and it's not because I have problems with personal care. I just don't feel like it.
17. Being out of it or overfocusing on weird things or dissociating is so fun that I actually pay people for substances that can make me do those things.
18. When I'm in a less accepting environment I can start showering and stop throwing up on the library and showing my junk to everyone and smoking so much weed, and get a regular job.

19. I don't have to worry when I am in class and the professor is sitting across from me and I'm afraid he will be making eye contact and expecting me to say something and I won't react fast enough or I won't make the right expressions.

20. When I'm at home I don't do my laundry and I don't feel bad about it. My mom doesn't tell me that I need to practice doing laundry or I won't be able to live on my own. I don't feel bad that my parents make my doctors' appointments because I'm still young and I don't have to prove that I am normal and independent.
21. When I mess up tasks like cooking, packing for trips, and cleaning my room, or get them done late, my mom doesn't tell me that I might never be able to live on my own successfully because of this.
22. My parents don't make me balance a checkbook when no one else does because I need to learn to be organized and responsible.
23. My mom doesn't cry about me when I am not feeling good. My mom doesn't cry and make me feel guilty about how she was upset by bad things that happened to me in the past. If I am feeling upset, I can just tell my parents without feeling guilty.
24. As a young teenager, I didn't wish I had a sibling so my parents could have a kid who would actually do things besides make them upset.

25. When I am interacting with service people, for example when I am eating at the dining hall, I don't worry about whether I am inconveniencing them. I don't pay much attention to what they expect from me (for example if they have a policy of checking inside take-out boxes, I will always wait to be asked by the cashier; I will never open my take-out box knowing it will be quicker to do that; and I will often bury my meal card deep in my pocket and stand there rooting in my pocket as the cashier waits and a line of people grows behind me). [a/n: yes I am the cashier in question :)] I don't worry about whether other people can understand my speech. After all, if other people can't understand what I'm saying, or are offended or inconvenienced by my behavior, it doesn't really reflect on me that much. I'm observant because I believe I am and I have good social skills because I believe I do and people should understand what I'm saying because I believe they can.

25. I might just move to any city I want if I feel like it. I am not worried about how I will get a job. Maybe my parents will send me money, that's cool. I'll figure something out.
26. It's easy to make friends. I know people will like me so I just talk to anyone. I just ramble to people about whatever I'm interested in.
27. I haven't had a paid job in a while. Wait, should I be worried about that? I'm really busy with schoolwork and friends and performance art. Of course I can get a job when I want one.
28. No matter how old I was the first time I got a paid job, I didn't feel ashamed that it had taken me so long to do what I believed a teenager was supposed to accomplish.
29. I can take time off from school if I want. I can go to grad school for fun.
30. Whatever I'm doing, I am okay.

Having written this, I've removed the word privilege. It's very scary for me to have to think about how hard it sometimes is for me to take care of myself and how much I have to plan for the future (always living with a friend, probably; I don't think living alone is safe for me). And it makes me angry how much I feel trained to think of myself as a burden.

However, I was talking to a friend my age who also is disabled and is class/financially privileged. And we ended up thinking it was maybe kind of good that we felt way too self-conscious about being disabled to just noodle around and not worry and be failures to launch. (On the other hand, watch all those people eventually launch and be way more successful than me because they're so confident in the knowledge that they're normal and people like them. Well, we'll see. I have a little time yet.)