Timer Corner

Beep beep beep, it's time for...

TIMER CORNER!



So, if you have a disability, you might find that you need to use a timer. If you're wondering why a timer would help someone function better, congratulations! You don't have to think about some things that are a big part of my life.

(Yeah I should chill out and be nicer but sometimes I get tired of feeling like I can't talk about things like timers because they are too weird.)

I liked to use timers when I was little just because I would time myself while I was singing. My family had a classy timer with three different displays--one would count the time something was taking, one was a typical timer that counts down, and one was a clock. There wasn't really any reason for me to time myself singing but I guess even at that age I could tell that I was going to have a long love affair with timers and I liked being around them.

When I was in fifth grade I spent about half a year being pretty organized and independent about getting ready in the morning. Until then, I would always have trouble getting ready because I would start thinking, spacing out, or reading books in the middle of doing things. But in fifth grade, I decided to start getting up at a certain time and turned my morning routine into a race where I was supposed to take a certain amount of minutes to do every piece of the routine. There was a natural reward in that if I finished everything fast enough, I'd have a bunch of time to watch TV and eat before school. I did pretty well with this for the rest of fifth grade, but in middle school I had to catch the bus earlier so the motivation to work that hard wasn't there.

In the last two years of high school I started getting a bit better at these things again because I would use music and timers to do all kinds of things like getting ready for school, taking showers, and studying. At that point in my life I really didn't like to think of myself as Autistic or disabled so I didn't really think about what I was doing, and I didn't know that other disabled people used timers. When I went to college and started living in a dorm with a roommate, I stopped using timers and music as much, because I had to do so many activities of daily living with someone else in the room, and I felt self conscious about it. Obviously, I wasn't able to do things as well or quickly once I decreased my use of timers. But I never totally stopped using timers and when I would play guitar, I really enjoyed timing myself and playing my songs in 5- or 10-minute intervals.

About the time I started writing this blog, when I was 20, I started using TV shows in a similar way to the way I use timers and music. In the last two years of college, I used timers and timer equivalents more than in the first two years, and the year after college I probably used them more than I ever had since I was in high school. I wouldn't say I use any of my timers or timer equivalents as effectively as I should, but I'm continuing to develop new ways to use them and learning more about them, and so I'm going to write some timer reviews, which will take into account what something is good for and how well it fits into my life. These are the things on my list so far:

1. West Bend timers
2. Update International timers
3. online-stopwatch.com
4. alarms on my phone
5. listening to CDs
6. YouTube videos
7. TV shows
8. singing
9. trains and buses
10. people

Armchair Farmhouse #1: Clayton

I'm starting a podcast called Armchair Farmhouse and in it I interview people about why they do or don’t identify as disabled and what their history is with that identity. I only want to interview people in real life so I’m mostly going to stick to RL friends but if anyone reading this is near Cincinnati, you should totally let me interview you! I’m especially interested in talking to people who have diagnosed mental or physical health conditions but don’t consider themselves disabled.

My first interview is with my friend Clayton who has CP, ADHD, and general bad brains, and recently identifies as disabled but didn’t for a long time. You can listen to it here or read a transcript of it here.

oh yeah so part two--on being vicious about yourself

So my former professor and advisor, Phyllis, has ADHD or something like that. She was a very nice person to have a professor partly because she would always do things like losing her coat when we moved to a different classroom, scheduling meetings and forgetting to keep them, sending emails saying "here's your assignment" but forgetting to include the attachment.

I feel so lucky to have met her because at the same time I was in her class, I was in another class with a professor who hated my guts. These are some explanations he gave to me and other students in the class:

I was "really weird"
I didn't use body language that made me look interested in class
I forgot to turn in a paper once (I had done it and brought it to class; I literally forgot to turn it in)
I was late to the first class because I misremembered when it started
I talked as if I hadn't done the reading (for the record I don't talk about reading I haven't done; I'm not...there I go again)

I would have ended up feeling like I deserved all this just because I had on two occasions forgotten to do things--not because I didn't care about class but simply because my working memory is super poor. But Phyllis's class was a place where I could feel safe. Phyllis cared a ton about her subject and her students, but she forgot to do things. Her class was a place where it was understood that a person can work hard and care, but sometimes not be able to do what's expected.

She is the only professor I've ever become friends with and I still see her sometimes even though she's retired.

Anyway, the last time I saw her she told me out of the blue, "One time you wrote me an email that said, 'I'm so stupid, I forgot to do this.' And I thought that was wonderful! It was so freeing! Now I started saying, 'I'm so stupid.'"

I was really interested that Phyllis said this because usually I feel under a lot of pressure from non-disabled people to avoid saying things like, "Sorry," and "I'm stupid." Like, I guess that people think they're being nice, but it just feels like they're trying to silence you. For someone like me who feels really required to check that I'm doing things properly, if someone just tells me something like what my boss told me this summer--"The only problem with you is that you keep thinking you're doing something wrong and it makes me sad!"--that makes me feel like the person would rather I handle any anxiety or guilt completely on my own, which makes it much worse, rather than making it visible to them by asking them if I'm doing something wrong or apologizing for real or perceived mistakes.

Topic sentence-->mission statement

Of course I was reading about the DSM on Wikipedia, and found out about a new diagnosis called Sluggish Cognitive Tempo. This sounds pretty much like a description of the ways that I think ASD impairs my ability to get stuff done. I'm not saying that I was misdiagnosed with ASD and really have SCT; I have some ASD symptoms that aren't included in SCT. I guess SCT-ish stuff can be part of ASD, as with Sensory Processing Disorder.

As usual, it makes me feel weird. If this blog had a topic sentence it would be "I'm super high-functioning but not like those other high-functioning people." I know that saying high-functioning is considered really offensive etc., but I feel like I need to use a word to describe what I'm like, and I'm not saying it as a judgment on other people. I think that judging people for their "functioning level" is one of the most hateful things you can do. What I'm trying to say is that I currently get by without services for my ASD, and expect that I always will. I got some services when I was a kid but I would have gotten by without them. Things would have been worse but I think I would still have been able to go to college and eventually make friends, just slower. I feel like the worst thing that could have happened to me would have just been that my life up until the age of eighteen would have been shit and I would have entered college as a very frightened person who self-injured a lot. But I would have entered college, is what I'm trying to say. (By services I largely mean going to a small private school where a lot of kids had learning disabilities and outright bullying was rare. It's hard to explain to people if I was in special ed because I don't think of my high school as a special ed school, but it kind of was, and it helped me a lot in terms of learning some methods of doing homework and talking to people.)

Anyway, I feel alienated by the word "Asperger's," because as I've previously mentioned, I feel more comfortable with the labels developmentally disabled or developmentally delayed or PDD-NOS. I am more high-functioning than the stereotypical person with Asperger's; I can sometimes talk to people without them noticing anything, I have satisfying friendships, my special interests are not that intense and not at all apparent (I think--I manage this by reading blogs and forums about them instead of trying to have conversations about them). The areas in which I'm not high-functioning are not stereotypical Asperger's problems of being an obnoxious nerd.

This is why Francisco Hernandez Jr. has (somewhat creepily) become an iconic figure to me, sort of the mascot of this blog. What happened to him has to do with getting overwhelmed and retreating and fading out. This is what happened to me for the first few months that I was writing this blog. I just called it "I'm somewhere else" because I was studying abroad, but then it ended up being a description of my mental state while I was abroad. A persistent, sometimes fascinating, sometimes horrible absence. I can't remember if I posted this at the time, but at one point I kept wearing the same jeans long after they needed to be washed because I was too depressed to work up the energy to change them.

I'm not active and odd. I'm passive and odd. And I'm not really as odd as I used to be.

I am excited about the DSM V because I feel like they describe a kind of ASD that can actually fit me.

Because I feel so alienated from the mainstream face of Asperger's, the topic sentence of this blog can be further developed into a mission statement, which is "Just because a lot of people are making dumb movies about people with Asperger's, and just because someone thinks we're good at making rocket ships, or whatever, doesn't mean that we're actually that different from other developmentally disabled people, or that we don't owe them anything."

Like a person, part three

This is just messing around and may not be organized very well. But basically I'm thinking about the idea that if someone has a disability other people are supposed to be okay with them doing things that they wouldn't be okay with otherwise. This idea can be seen on the Internet, when people vigorously attack the strawman of "people who pretend to have Asperger's as an excuse to be assholes." The implication is that it's okay to act like an asshole if you really do have Asperger's but we have to be careful to keep people who don't have Asperger's from getting this special Asperger's right that non-Asperger's people don't deserve.

Last month when I went to an Edinburgh and Lothians Asperger's Society meeting, this idea was taken for granted again. We were talking about police harassment of ASD people. One guy shared how he walks around a lot at night, and was stopped by the police several times and questioned about his "suspicious behavior." He almost got in trouble because his answers to the questions were too literal and the police thought he was being rude. Everyone began talking about how police could be trained not to treat ASD people badly. Then another guy spoke up and said that in some areas people with ASDs have a badge that identifies them as ASD, and that they can produce the badge if they are in this kind of situation. He said he thought this was a good solution "because if someone looks suspicious and the police are questioning them, they might say they're autistic as an excuse." The implication is that if someone "looks suspicious" and their reason for looking that way is not a diagnosed disability, they must actually be suspicious.

I disagree. What if someone is a little odd, but doesn't have ASD? What if they look suspicious because their husband just died and they're in shock? What if they have undiagnosed ASD? I generally think that people are not very good at judging what "suspicious behavior" looks like, and while ASD people are one group that gets fucked over by this, we're not the only group. It's not necessary for the police to be harsh on people just because they look weird, and it's ridiculously medical-model to make people prove that they have a good reason for looking weird, instead of for the police to just approach weird-looking people in a gentle way instead of making snap judgments.

I think the reason there's all this guarding of ASD identity, and panic about people using it when they supposedly don't have a right to, is there's this idea that if someone has ASD it's okay for them to go around punching people in the nuts and robbing banks. At least, that's the way people act about it--that if we accepted a wider range of behavior, then we'd have TOTAL CHAOS. But I am not okay with anyone hurting other people and I don't care if they have a disability or not. I think a lot of people feel this way. Which is why the whole thing is stupid.

I'm not doing a good job explaining this and will maybe come back to it later, but I have two stories that I think are interesting:

1. When I was in ninth grade, I was friends/sort-of-girlfriends with a girl named "Joan" (not really). She frequently said and did things that were really mean and really rude, but it never, ever seemed to come out of malice, just from not thinking about what she was doing. Like me, Joan didn't really have a sense for what was hurtful and had to put in effort, and at that point, she didn't put in the effort very much. (She has a diagnosis of ADD and I'm hesitant to start armchair-diagnosing her with other stuff; she was under a lot of pressure at that age and that may account for how easily she got upset and how insensitive she could be to other people.)

Anyway, Joan really wanted to see the movie Saved and she sent me a link to the website. I went and looked at the website. When I was younger, loud noises really upset me and made me feel embarrassed, so I had an aversion to watching videos or listening to music, or really doing anything that involved sound if I didn't have to. I also really don't like to watch videos or listen to music when other people are around and I think I may have looked at the website when I was at school so that's another reason I didn't watch the trailer. But neither of this is the whole reason--another part may just be that I was in reading/looking at things mode, and didn't want to switch to a watching things mode. This was all very unconscious stuff and I didn't consciously think about my decision to not watch the trailer. But for the record, it was an ASD thing.

I told Joan that the movie looked good, and she assumed I had watched the trailer. A few days later at school, she made a reference to something that was in the trailer, and when I didn't get the reference, she was really mad; she felt that I had lied to her. She brought me to the school computer lab, where there were some people, and started to make me watch the trailer, and I panicked and left. Later, Joan wasn't talking to me and I (tearfully, probably) kept trying to get her to stop being mad. I'm not sure I was even conscious of why I didn't want to watch the trailer, so it was hard to explain that I had acted out of discomfort and panic rather than because I didn't care about her interest in the movie. However, I guess at some point she realized that it was related to me having Asperger's, and said, "Oh, it's an Asperger's thing?" At that point no one was in the computer lab, so I steeled myself and watched the trailer with her, and we were reconciled.

If you can't tell, what you are supposed to get out of this story is that if someone does something that you find insulting, but the person really likes you and doesn't seem like they would want to insult you, and they seemed to be very emotional and acting out of instinct when they did the thing that insulted you, you probably shouldn't be insulted because they probably had a reason for doing it that had nothing to do with you. And in my opinion, it's dumb for you to need to know what the reason is in order to not be mad at them, because there isn't only one possible good reason for doing something. If I had an aversion to movie trailers for some other reason, would Joan be justified in treating me that way? I don't think so.

2. For about a year, my best friend A.T. and I have been talking about maybe living together after college. This summer we were doing something or other in the city and while we were walking around, A.T. discovered that I thought it was feasible to drive from New York to Washington state, and said "Are you joking?" This isn't actually the whole thing; it's sort of the last straw. Basically A.T. is good at cooking and taking public transportation and finding her way around and I am really incompetent at all of those things and almost always rely on her to guide me through them when we are together. And sometimes I ask questions that she thinks are shockingly stupid.

As we were getting on the train to go to her house, A.T. said that the only reason she was sort of leery about living with me was that I had so little common sense and wasn't able to find my way around. She said that she could never rely on me to meet her anywhere, and would always have to help me with things and worry about me getting lost. She said that since I'm a year older than her, she hoped I could work on these issues in the year between our graduations, so I would be better at it by the time we started living together. When she said this, I was all hurt and acted passive-aggressively pissy the whole time we were riding the train, and we ended up sort of having a fight.

I guess this story is not quite as clear as #1 because it's hard to tell what you're supposed to be getting out of it. Well, what I get out of it is that it's a story about me being self-pitying and thinking that I deserve special rights because of my ASD. I don't think it was appropriate for me to pick a fight with A.T. because she said those things. No matter why I have those challenges with common sense and getting around, they might be hard for someone else to live with. They don't become less challenging because I happen to have ASD. A.T. doesn't have a responsibility to be okay with things that would otherwise bother her, just because I have a disability.

What a messy post. Just like I expected. Anyway, what I'm trying to say is:

A. If someone does something that offends you, you shouldn't get mad at them if they don't have bad intentions.
B. If someone does something that's weird, you shouldn't have a negative reaction if they're not doing something objectively bad.
C. If someone does something that bothers you--not because you think they're being "weird" or "offensive," but something quantifiable that they do that bothers you--it's okay for you to say that it bothers you and try to avoid being bothered by it in the future.
D. You should apply these rules to everyone.