Annie

(The story in this post might be upsetting to some people because it involves trying to pressure someone into taking medication and judging them for not taking it.)

I feel like I shouldn't be posting right now because I should be sleeping and I'll be tired on the way to work, but I feel like I use the excuse of sleeping to avoid almost everything, like church, and I barely sleep anyway so here I go.

"They say an unhappy man wants distractions--something to take him out of himself. Only as a dog-tired man wants an extra blanket on a cold night; he'd rather lie there shivering than get up and find one."--CS Lewis, A Grief Observed

When we were freshmen Clayton and I had a friend, let's call her Annie. I don't know how much of this is 100% accurate but I don't think Annie reads this blog, so it's probably all right to just tell you how I remember it. Annie identified herself in conversations as someone who had a mental illness and sometimes hurt herself, and one day she casually told me that she probably should be on medication because she was at an age when the way her brain was was being solidified and if she didn't go on medication right now, she would always have problems. She told me this like it was funny and she didn't particularly care to do anything about it.

Clayton and I both have savior complexes and we made it a project to try and get Annie to go to student counseling. Never mind that he would later realize how fucked up he had gotten from the medication student counseling put him on, or that I've been virulently anti-medication of any kind since I was 16, to the extent that I would rather throw up from pain than take an Advil. For whatever reason we decided that we were right and Annie was wrong and we had to get her to go to counseling.

It was almost summer; Annie wanted to be outside when it was sunny so she could skateboard and hang out with her friends. Every day the two of us would descend on her and try to get her to go to counseling and she would say that she didn't want to go until it was dark. Student counseling closed at five in the evening so this was the same as saying she could never go. I remember how ridiculous and reckless Clayton and I thought she was, and how much we annoyed her.

Annie and I grew apart over the next three years but she is someone I admire a lot because she's so smart and interested in so many things. Sometimes it seems like she just has to think of something she'd like, and all the resources appear to make it happen. I found her hard to be friends with because she moved so fast--she would suggest doing something, I'd resist it because it went against my schedule, and by the time I started realizing I would like to do it she would already have left to begin it.

The point is though that a year or two ago I started really understanding how I could see Annie's decision as smart, not stupid. It got me through the last year and a half of college, trying to think that way--blinding myself to the big picture, trying to unfocus my eyes and look at seconds and colors. I couldn't do things right and I couldn't feel good a lot of the time so I stopped trying. I didn't fail. When I saw something in front of me that might make me feel good, I took it.

So for a long time I've been on that kind of track and I've realized how hard it is for someone outside to see why you don't listen to "reason." Why you'd rather ride in a car than worry about your problems taking care of yourself. Why you'd rather have fun smoking than figure out if you will let yourself live long enough to die of lung cancer. Why instead of constantly apologizing to yourself and everyone for not being more organized, you're making Kraft Macaroni and Cheese in a huge pot and watching YouTube videos with your roommate.

The thing I feel most clearly now is that it was none of my business what Annie did with her time. I'm not as clear on the rest of it--how being like Annie applies to me and how I should feel about it.

I found myself talking about Annie today. I was trying to argue why it's okay for me to be involved with men even though I am gay. I'm probably going to get upset writing about this because the conversation turned to an end that felt more permanent than usual. I know I was convincing him at the beginning. At some point it wasn't working anymore for me to say "we should live in the moment" and "I don't expect to ever have a family or a relationship with a woman, so we might as well try and feel as good as we can."

And I remembered, a few years ago I would have thought being with a guy was like throwing something in God's face, being too lazy and desperate for comfort to feel anything but the shadows of what I could feel. I would have thought it was the real thing or nothing, and even now it's hurting me to type that it's not the real thing, because I want it to be as good as the real thing when it's with a guy, but it's not and that's not my fault. And the boy wasn't hurt, he's the strangest, nicest boy--he was relieved.

The truth is it's very hard for me to work especially not being a driver, and it's really hard for me to live on my own, and the only people I talk to outside of work are men who try and bother me. Giving up smoking is a serious sacrifice not because of nicotine as much as the fact that I lose a reason people will talk to me. I'm really sad right now. Sorry if this is too much information, but I've been going back and forth on the Annie thing for such a long time, and I wanted to write about it. Not Annie herself because obviously she shouldn't have been on meds when she didn't want to be, but thinking about endgames vs. staying in the sunlight whenever I can.

The thing is I don't know if I ever felt so much this way since I was on meds myself in tenth grade. Every day I'd take stimulants and spend a few hours thinking everything was really special and important, not realizing how much I didn't notice or how fucked up everything had gotten. As the day went on I got sadder and sadder and the only thing that mattered to me was--guess what--the person I was dating, who I wasn't actually attracted to.

Towards the end of the drugs, in some sobbing state, I told my mom I wasn't happy. My mom saw me all amped and buzzed up on the way to school every morning after I downed my Wellbutrin and Adderall. She said, "But I see you happy every day."

I said, "but I'm not a happy person."

I built myself back up through the two depressing but somehow joyful last years of high school. I was a very sad but happy person by the time I turned eighteen. I'm not sure how lazy and distracted I must have gotten, to get so far off track--because yeah I have to look at the small things, but this has gotten small enough to seep into all of them.

I'm not a happy person.

And this is me telling God and myself that I'm going to get better.

Good Behavior and Psychoanalysis

Jelly told me about this person named Smockity Frocks who is a Christian homeschooling blogger and apparently never heard of disabled people before in her life. She took her post down and replaced it with a link to Autism Speaks (of course, because it's better to eradicate people with disabilities than treat them with charity and understanding) but it's cached here: http://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B5C2Ta2YGCfTYmRhOTliZTUtNjQ5ZC00MmNjLWJmYzItNWU5MjNlYzU4ZTc3&hl=en

Basically, her post was about how she was at the library with her kids, READING THE BIBLE (for some reason that's my favorite part), and this other kid was waiting for the computer that SF's daughter was using. The other kid got very frustrated by waiting and started flapping her hands and saying, "I'm being really patient," to which her grandmother would reply, "Yes, you're being very patient, soon you'll be able to use the computer." So SF made a post about how no one understands how to treat kids anymore, and this kid was majorly spoiled and wasn't actually being patient at all, or something.

Then a bunch of people commented on it and were like, "This kid obviously has ASD and you fail at being Christian." Smockity Frocks was like, "Well, her grandmother should have made her read a book instead." Then the other people said, "That might not have worked with a kid who has ASD," and it all climaxed with Smockity Frocks declaring, "Well, YOU'RE not being very Christian YOURSELF, because what if I have a disability that keeps me from being able to tolerate kids who are BRATS??"

Oh, boy. There is a collection of response posts here from people whose kids have disabilities: A Message for Smockity Frocks. I haven't read them all but I like Kristina Chew's post a lot. Jelly also wrote a post, which is really good: Oh the joys of judgmental people. From my not especially thorough skimming, it seems like Jelly is the only ASD person who has written a post.

This was striking to me because I've been having a lot of trouble with waiting lately. I've said I've been having shutdowns but that's not really true because they're not really a state of bluntedness or distance, which is how I think of shutdowns; at the same time I don't want to call them meltdowns because I don't actually do anything. They're like proto-meltdowns, and they happen in situations like this, when I'm waiting for something to happen, or something to be over, and I get so tremendously agitated that I feel like I'm going to have...well, a regular meltdown. Which isn't practical since I'm 21. To stop it from happening I start trying to scratch myself with pens and stuff.

I'm sure that if someone looks around the room when a class is running long and sees me gritting my teeth and scratching my arms with a pen, it probably looks to them like I'm being a jerk and trying to tell everyone how much I don't like the class, but this isn't the case. Trying to judge other people's morals is a terrible idea, and CS Lewis explains this much better than I can in the chapter of Mere Christianity called Morality and Psychoanalysis. (I think this chapter isn't that specific to Christianity and can still be useful and interesting if you're not Christian.) CSL points out that you don't know what is happening to a person inside and it's not fair to just judge them by what they do because you don't know what they're fighting against.

[Note: I know that CSL equates homosexuality with having a phobia of cats. I think this is actually pretty charitable given his time period and culture, because he understands that a person can't help being gay and a gay person can be moral, or at least move in a moral direction. Obviously your mileage may vary, but I think he has a good attitude given his raw material.]

This is part of why instead of saying "high-functioning," "low-functioning," etc., I like to say "severely affected," "mildly affected," and so on. This means that instead of thinking about what the person appears to be doing, I'm thinking about what they are working against or around. This seems like a fairer and more accurate way of thinking about people.

The greatest story ever told: At the ASD school where I interned last summer, they used to take the kids on the subway. A lot of the kids had trouble taking the subway and their aides would try to make things easier, for example they'd hold a big clipboard in front of the kid showing how many points the kid was earning by being well-behaved. Also some of the kids would wear iPods on the subway.

Another thing that made the experience easier was being able to sit down. If people didn't offer their seats to the kids, the aides would sometimes ask. Apparently, one time they asked this woman if she could move over so one of the kids, who not only disliked standing, but also had a cold, could sit down. So she very slightly moved over and sat there glaring at the kid, who was squished in next to her. AND THEN HE SNEEZED ON HER FACE.

Living in the pregnant pause

(Hi, before you start you should know that this is not very much about what I usually post about--it's mainly about religion. As with many Christian traditions I halfheartedly absorbed just because I'm American, I feel that I didn't fully understand Lent when I decided to give up I'm Somewhere Else. Having thought about it more, I feel that Lent is a way of living and thinking and isn't as simple as just giving up something concrete, and I think this post is an appropriate post for me to make during Lent.)

When I was younger I used to think that all gay people felt empty and cried all the time because we're naturally unhappy people because it's an inferior state. I thought that whenever people did gay pride or anything, they were just trying to convince themselves, like the Emperor's New Clothes, and that when gay people said they were in love and wanted to get married, they were just trying to convince themselves they were in love, but really they were settling for someone they didn't really love.

This is probably hard to believe given how much I complain about being gay on this blog, but I don't feel that way anymore. There are still a lot of aspects of it that I find to be shitty, but I know they affect other people differently. Also, I just don't feel miserable. I think a lot of this has to do with my environment. When I was in high school I looked at all the shitty aspects of being gay and would just cry all the time, but I think that's because aside from the legit shitty aspects I was in an environment where there were lots of non-innate shitty aspects, like having to feel really nervous about everything I wrote and said, and having to feel cut off from being friends with both genders in different ways. These aspects were sort of under-the-radar and pervasive so I didn't necessarily see them. At Oberlin they are mostly gone, so even though I don't think that being gay is a fun time, I think that being alive while being a gay person can be a very fun time.

So, anyway, the way I used to feel about gay people is now how I feel about religious people. I drew a pretty good comic about it in class.



AFV: batter my heart 3-person God
God: (reaches down with a giant shining hand and wrests AFV's heart open) Hi! I'm here!
AFV: (looks happy)
AFV a few minutes later: (looking sad) Did that really happen. I probably just imagined it. AARGH I'm so alone in the world.

The fucking shit that God has done for me and I don't even care. Or, um, the fucking shit my brain is doing because the idea of there not being a God makes me want to die? Except, either way I just want to die so I can find out, at this point I feel like I'd rather be in hell and know there is a God. (I recognize this is kind of a messed-up thing to put on the Internet. I have no motivation to commit suicide, lots of fun stuff is happening right now and I'm a happy person, gay germs aside. I'm sure I will be agonizing about the afterlife for seventy more years, unless I get hit by a bus.)

I have actually figured out how I ruined my relationship with God. Amusingly, given that I now feel pretty normal about being gay, and horrible about God, in the time period when I felt horrible about being gay, God was just around. Sometimes people are like "it must have sucked to find out you're gay, you're so religious" but I wasn't raised in a religion at all. In fact I became religious when I was ten, after I had already started finding out that I was gay. It was my own thing. For a while I would tell God that I was sorry for being gay, but I soon figured out I wasn't. Even later, when I felt like it was an empty, horrible thing to be, I didn't think that God was mad at me for it or anything like that.

Sometimes I thought my prayers got answered. However, in twelfth grade I prayed for my music teacher, who was bipolar and would yell and swear at the kids in my class, to get better, because I knew something horrible was going to happen. I really loved my teacher, I was one of the only kids he considered worthy of apologies after he blew up. One time he awkwardly bought me flowers after making me cry in class. Anyway, I prayed a lot, and then something incredibly horrible happened. I think he wasn't even allowed back on campus afterward. After that, I didn't believe in the power of prayer, but I thought that God could change me if I wanted to be changed, and sometimes when I prayed I felt it happen--this grace, just something that altered my way of thinking about things.

Then at the end of first year I read Mere Christianity by CS Lewis. I always liked CSL when I was a kid but sometimes I think this was the worst decision I ever made. I always said Christian prayers because that's most of the little I had been exposed to, but I didn't really think Christianity was true. I remember watching the movie Jesus Camp and thinking "that sucks, those kids have a real feeling for God but they're being told all the wrong things about Him."

But then when I read Mere Christianity I thought a lot of it made sense. I started moving toward identifying as Christian. I also got interested in medieval studies and I was really moved by the way medieval Christians related to God. And I just thought that I wasn't Doing Enough. If I was Christian there would be certain things for me to read and certain things for me to do, in order to be a religious person.

The problem is because of my social shit it is pretty impossible for me to go to church regularly. For the past two Sundays I have gone to church and I think--could be wrong, could totally be wrong--that this will be the time it actually works out, because I have a friend who likes going to church and we go together, and no one really talks to us or anything, which is perfect.

Actually, I don't know why I said "the problem is." I have about eight problems. I would like to know what to do in church all the time, and be able to take communion. But it is scary to think about contacting people so I can get baptized and confirmed. Also, the really really really big problem is just that I have horrible doubts. And not just about the existence of God. I just find Christianity to be--well, I mean, it's very beautiful, and it makes sense, but--

Next year I want to live in Talcott, which is this really castle-y awesome dorm that is right next to the building where most of the creative writing and Latin classes are. Once I started thinking about living in Talcott, I remembered that the kosher co-op is in the same building, and wondered if it would be nice to join it. I remembered that last year I thought it would be nice to be in a co-op where they sometimes pray.

But then I couldn't even believe I had ever thought that would be okay, because I would probably like it a lot, and if I liked praying with Jewish people, then that would mean Christianity wasn't real. I realize now that I believe mostly in experience. I mean, I know I've experienced grace. But lots of people who aren't Christian have experienced things like that. I feel like my attempts at identifying with Christianity are just making me not believe in God because I find it completely impossible to reconcile Christianity with the things about God that I firmly and deeply believe.

Since I started identifying as Christian, I've become aware that lots more people than my parents (especially my father) are extremely contemptuous of religion. I mean, almost everyone I know is like that. It just makes me think I'm stupid and if I wasn't so stupid and deluded I'd be an atheist. I was reading some posts by chaoticidealism, who is an ASD person who's written some really good and important stuff about ASD and functioning level things, and is also Christian. She said that she has doubts, but that believing in God makes more sense to her than not believing in God, so it's actually less of a leap to be a theist. Maybe that's how I feel, now. The thing is I used to be so sure.

I keep meeting people and asking them if they're religious. Why would I do that? Who cares? Why do I need other people to make me not wake up in the middle of the night feeling incredibly terrified and alone all the time? (The other night I woke up and there was this voice singing outside and I didn't feel alone at all and I started shaking, but, fuck, that stuff never stays with me for long, of course, because that's just how stupid and horrible my brain is.)

I'm always screwing with my Facebook religious beliefs, trying to be clever and accurate at the same time. In the past year I've had "Episcopalian Quaker Deist," "Christian Universalist," "Affective Piety," "There was a pregnant pause before He said okay" (Belle & Sebastian), "Pray to God but row for shore" (a quote from Carnivale), and "Cretin." I guess these are all reasonably true (especially the Belle & Sebastian one) but "Cretin" probably gets the closest to how I feel.

"Cretin" means Christian. People started using it as a word for intellectually disabled people as a way of saying, God is for everybody. Our society hates intellectually disabled people, so now it is a Ramones song, but I like the original idea. I think that spending time with severely intellectually disabled people is a pretty good way to understand God, and this definitely isn't because I think that they are adorable saints, but I do think there is a deeper love in us that we try to constrict and deny the farther we get into the world. If you don't have language and you're not far enough entrenched in your standard culture to do impression management, I think that you experience and display that love in a more obvious way. I know a woman who tears up Bibles and scratches people in the face when she gets mad--I'm not saying severely disabled people don't have original sin--but she also hugs and kisses people as soon as she meets them. She doesn't remember people's names most of the time. I think that if we didn't remember we're not supposed to hug everyone, we would hug everyone. It's caritas.

I hope this doesn't come off as offensive but I seriously sometimes want a DDDD--Doctorate of Developmentally Disabled Divinity. I feel like maybe as I've tried harder to be standard, I've tried to make my feelings about God be standard too, and it's just not taking. It just makes me feel terrified, it has for months.

There has to be something under all the systems. There has to be something under all the words. I put all these words on top of God and now it's hard for me to see God. I'm always praying and it's like I need to pray to keep God alive. But what if there's a kind of prayer that stacks on top of God and hides God away?

I try to look at life like I have the brain disorder where you can see colors but you can't tell what anything is. Like an everlasting shutdown, but more fun. If you dislocate your mind like that, then of course you can see life is glorious, it's something more than the sum of its parts. But sometimes I'm afraid that that's all I can say about God. Maybe it's stupid that I find myself trying to say more than that.

(If you have any more faith than I do--i.e. about as much faith to fill a contact case, probably--please talk to me about this, I'm kind of falling apart.)

the Eisley post finally (written before they left WB)

I used to really love this band. They were the first band I really got into on my own, at the relatively late age of 16, right after their first full-length album, Room Noises, came out. They seemed otherworldly to me--these beautiful, spooky-looking Christian homeschooled teenagers. They lived in Texas, a place I had never been, and they’d started writing music eight years before I heard of them, playing shows in their parents’ coffee shop and becoming well-known in the local music circuit. They finally signed to a label in 2003--they didn’t want to sign to a Christian label because they don’t make religious music, which is fine, but did they have to sign to Warner Brothers? Their label basically treats them like an embarrassment, not advertising them or having them make videos, and telling them to underplay the fact that some of their songs are about sci-fi and fantasy subjects because that might turn off potential listeners. And I have to wonder if their label is partly responsible for the fact that their second album, Combinations, was so much worse. I mean, I’m not saying there weren’t some really good songs on it, but most of it is just girly stuff--falling in love, breaking up, and having a lot of other feelings that aren’t clearly explained.

There’s nothing wrong with writing about girly stuff, but because the content of the songs is more generic it exposes what awkward writers the DuPree girls are. They know a lot of words, but they don’t know what all of those words mean, and they also seem to have trouble just putting together lines that sound good. Which means we end up with really bad lyrics like, “You will take the cherished people that I hold.” “That” is bad grammar! “Cherished” is a cheesy word! Even “the people I hold” seems like a needlessly roundabout way of saying “the people I love.” The DuPrees are extremely good singers, and in “Ten Cent Blues” the simple line “I can’t control my feelings” is stunning because of Stacy’s vocal quality. But soon enough, the awkwardness: “But then she chose to dissect me, and I was casted into poverty.” Number one, it’s “cast” not “casted,” and number two, are you a fetal pig? In “Ten Cent Blues” this awkwardness can be forgiven because the lyrics are dense, specific, and evocative, like a lot of the lyrics on Room Noises. My other favorite Combinations song, “I Could Be There for You,” has tenderly eerie lyrics (“Ring, ring, ring, ring, where are you hiding?/...You’re a cave, admitting who you choose, but I could be there for you”). But some of the songs, like the incredibly generic “Go Away,” are stripped of any intentional strangeness or magic, and all that’s left is the counterintuitive phrasing--instead of just saying he wants to break up, Stacy’s boyfriend tells her “we’re gone”--and obtuse exposition--”I could keep this all from you/Or I could make a statement based on truth/But then it all comes tumbling down.” These lyrics are boring and make no sense. I hope the next album will be better, but I’m not too optimistic, since the recently-divorced Sherri has written a song where she refers to her “apocryphal wedding” (so, Sherri doesn’t know whether her own wedding took place or not?).

But anyway, back to the nice part, the part about why I was so enthralled with this band when I first heard them in 2005. When it comes to the songs on Room Noises and the songs before that, the weird phrasings and hard-to-decipher subjects become charming if you notice them at all. While a lot more of these songs have sci-fi and fantasy lyrics, there is plenty of girly stuff on Room Noises. It’s just strange and thick with images. “I Wasn’t Prepared” is probably a breakup song, but for some reason the verses are about bees, and for some reason this is poignant. “Plenty of Paper” is a song about artsy, companionate love, but it casts the main characters as superheroes. “Lost at Sea” is another song that plunges you into a strange, vibrant landscape, so that when you get to the blatantly sentimental chorus--“I’ll always love you”--you’re moved and surprised. The band defends Combinations by saying they’ve “grown up,” but the love songs they wrote when they were teenagers seem much more real and intimate, more like love and less like a description of how love looks in People magazine.

I never listen to this band anymore, but this morning I woke up with the first song on Room Noises stuck in my head. It starts with a farmer crying about much he loves plants. Then he dies. Then he and his wife try to talk to each other:

Wife: I’m always wondering where you are, I’m always wondering where you are.
Husband: Darling, shouldn’t I be the one wondering? After all, I’m the one who is gone.

The two singers switch off in this vein for a while, before returning to the chorus, which tells us that plants make up for the hard times in life. Because plants are a symbol for memories, or something. Despite the gorgeously spooky harmonies, these lyrics are as sweet and idealistic as anything can be, but who cares? “Memories” was clearly written by some sheltered, geeky kids who liked to sit at home and read the Harry Potter and Narnia books, but those kids wrote with much more passion and creativity than the people they grew up to be. I just want them back.

SUPPLEMENTARY VIDEOS:



MEMORIES. This is from spring 2005 and is my all-time favorite video in terms of Stacy cuteness. I don't think she'll ever totally fall out of my celebrity crushdom, but I'd forgotten how infatuated with her I was when I was in tenth and eleventh grade. I obsessively read her xanga and basically thought she was the most beautiful, pristine, smart, wonderful, talented person EVER. The DuPree parents, who are sort of stage-parent-y, used to make a big deal out of the fact that Stacy hadn't started dating because she was EXTRA PIOUS, and I remember feeling really guilty about having a crush on her, especially since I'm a girl. As soon as this video started playing I got really embarrassed and had to put my headphones on, even though I'm in a room by myself.



LADY OF THE WOOD. This song is seven years old, and possibly my favorite--although maybe that's not what I mean. It is probably the pinnacle in terms of really genre-y spooky music, which is to say it's much more representative of the stuff they did when they were really young.





I COULD BE THERE FOR YOU/TEN CENT BLUES. These videos are from 2006 and 2008 (and the songs are on Combinations which came out in 2007). The first video isn't marked but it's from a show that A.T. and I were at. I got really excited when I heard "I Could Be There For You," "Like the Actors," and "Ten Cent Blues," because I was actually a little bored of the fantasy-ish angle and find those three songs to be really stunning. But the other songs on Combinations ended up being much worse and "Like the Actors" wasn't even on it, which is a travesty. (Full disclosure, I like "A Sight to Behold" too.) I feel disappointed by these videos because I was trying to find a particular video of Stacy wearing a sweater vest which led to me wearing sweater vests for YEARS.

I feel like I have too many videos of recent stuff so I will include this little bundle of awesomeness:



PRETENDER! This song is sort of nuts because: 1. it's from before Chauntelle stopped singing almost completely (which I think was about 10-12 years ago). 2. it's pretty obviously about how YOU SHOULD GET SAVED, which I personally think is nice. Not because it's about being saved in particular, but just because it's obviously very passionate and sincere. Some of their recent love songs have just seemed like really unconvincing attempts at emotion.

Ohhh buddy

Temple Grandin Talks About Her Upcoming HBO Biophic

A world-renowned designer of livestock handling facilities, a professor of animal science at Colorado State University, and one of the world’s highest functioning autistics, the most recent chapter of her life is being written right now, or filmed to be more specific, in Austin, TX.

The grammar is annoying--the most recent chapter of Temple Grandin's life is a world-renowned designer of livestock handling facilities? How can a chapter be a designer?--but all in all, this is a pretty exciting sentence because it means that I'm like the most high-functioning autistic person ever, because I'm definitely higher-functioning than Temple Grandin. Actually that's a messed-up thing to say, because I think you should judge functioning by ability to carry out goals and not by passing, but by a conventional definition of functioning, totally, I win. And okay maybe they mean she's one of the highest-functioning people with Autistic Disorder--but I know people with Autistic Disorder who are conventionally higher-functioning than her. What the hell do they mean by higher-functioning? Oh right, they just mean that she's really accomplished.

What? I mean, when someone is writing an article about a regular person who accomplished something, do they call the regular person "one of the highest-functioning regular people?"

Unlike some people (or maybe I'm doing a strawman, I don't know), I do think there's a value to functioning levels. It is fucked up for me to go around acting like I know how things are for a nonverbal person, or a person who has more severe social disability than I do, or a person with an intellectual disability. I really don't like the queer/trans community (oh no not again!) because bisexual=/=gay and queer when your parents are liberal=/=queer when your dad is Alan Keyes and genderqueer=/=binary trans etc., and I think there are definitely instances of people who completely lack understanding of how hard stuff is for other people and just want everything to be an adorable melting pot. (I could go into more detail, but remember this is the stuff that makes me depressed.) But randomly messing around with what "functioning levels" means and making it mean eleven different things is not actually helpful to anyone.

In Mere Christianity, CS Lewis has a chapter where he talks about sin and goodness as it relates to a person's psychological makeup. He says that you can't tell from the outside what God thinks of a person because you can't tell how hard a person is working. He uses the example of a person who's terrified of cats picking up a cat for a really good reason. From the outside you might not be able to tell what a good thing they're doing. I guess I think it's important to keep this in mind when you're looking at pwds (or anyone, actually). You don't really know how hard someone is fighting against their impairments, and you definitely shouldn't decide that someone doesn't actually have impairments because they seem to be doing okay.

So I guess it's hard to identify severity because some people might fight their severity better than others. Or do a better job fighting because they have more support--maybe people only ever fight well because they have support. But I think that identifying severity matters, anyway. We should know how much of a force ASD is exerting on a person, right? Although in the end, I don't know if the force ends up equaling the severity, or if it's the end result. Like, the force of ASD minus how well the person does.

But if we're just going to identify someone as high-functioning because they're a brilliant scientist, regardless of what their ASD is actually like, then I don't see the point of going on about functioning levels at all.

Tattoo ideas

This time yesterday I decided I was going to get a tattoo. I was walking past a tattoo shop with my friend LB, who is visiting, and she exclaimed that we should both get tattoos there in the next few days. I immediately agreed and started agonizing over what to get. Nine hours later when we were falling asleep, I kept getting really upset and telling LB, "I wish I could do this, I wish I was different. I wish someone would fix me, I wish I was a real person." Then I prayed until I fell asleep, and woke up about fifteen minutes later and thought, what the fuck, I can't believe I was going to get a tattoo. I'm not really sure what getting a tattoo was mixed up with in my head; it seems like dream logic. It's hard to believe I was thinking like that in real life.

My opinion about tattoos is that they're wonderful when they're done right but I think it's stupid to get one just to get one. I don't see the point of having a really small plain image or phrase on your hipbone or your shoulder. I was thinking of getting one on my knee, but it would be hard to decide which way it should face; really, the only place I'd definitely be happy with would be my arm or my wrist, which is obviously a big decision because it's hard to hide. And I still live with my parents and they'd be upset (not to mention I'd be doing it with their money, which seems wrong). And I'm too young, in terms of independence and life experience, to really know what I'd be getting myself into if I got a noticeable tattoo. It's better to wait until I'm a little older. Then I guess I'll get something on my arm. And when I'm a little older than that, maybe I'll get a half-sleeve. And so on. (I wonder if it's possible to get the opposite of a half-sleeve, like a long glove. That would be so incredibly impractical and so incredibly awesome.)

Anyway, I feel weird that I got so impulsive and emotional about such an odd thing. Having LB here is really nice and I guess I feel more hopeful about life. Maybe I was trying to express that? It's not like me to make a lot of decisions and pronouncements I don't understand. But I am going to make a list of my ideas because I think they're good ideas.

1.

Harriet the Spy. This is something I've wanted for almost three years and there are lots of good reasons for wanting it. I've been into Harriet the Spy since I was eight and my obsession rises again every few years. Obviously writing is really important to me and I started because of her. When I was about 12, which I guess is when my second or third round of obsession happened, I saw Harriet as sort of an ASD role model who was actually interested in things and didn't care for politeness. (When I was mad at my mom, I would call her a "bridge-player," and I did it enough that it stopped being novel and started being just the same as calling her a bitch.) During my most recent round, when I was 19, I was feeling alienated from other gay people and comforted myself by thinking about how awesome Harriet and her creator, the super gay Louise Fitzhugh, are. Except, despite the fact that this is the most sensible tattoo ever, it's lost a bit of its appeal for me in the past few months. Which is probably proof that I shouldn't get any tattoos.

2. (the one on the far left)

Viola da gamba. Basically I have this giant thwarted love for medieval and Renaissance music. My high school had an early music group, which sounds really posh but was actually pretty messy and unfortunate for reasons I won't go into. But this was good for me because it meant that despite not being able to read music I was an important member of the group just because I was sincerely interested, and when I was a senior I ended up playing viola da gamba, which is a precursor to the cello which is 100% cooler in every way but fell out of favor because it's not very loud. I really loved playing it. Of course, because I can't read, I'll never be able to take part in any decent early music group in the Real World (and the Real World includes my college, which has a big deal conservatory--therefore I can't even get into classes where I could learn to read, because I'm not in the con). Besides, I'm not exactly good at playing even if I could read.

So early music is this thing that's probably gone forever from my life, but will always be a part of me. One of the only really powerful interesting things in my life when I was really sad and lonely; something I threw myself into because I had to. Also, my viola da gamba teacher had a really strong effect on me, both positive and negative, and that's something that will always be part of me too.

3. / / /

Corinthians lion! This is what I want the most and it is the one that would be the most difficult to get because I am very bad at communicating to professionals what I want (I think this is because when I was a kid, I was considered to be a holy terror when I got my hair cut because I was just like GET AWAY FROM ME STOP TOUCHING ME; I haven't found a happy medium between being like that and being a doormat, with the result that I end up with incredibly awful haircuts and have taken to just cutting my own hair or getting LB to do it because I'm not afraid to tell her to stop). Anyway, I need someone I trust to design my Corinthians lion before I get it. I want it to look sort of like a crest, although I don't actually want it to be a crest. IT'S HARD TO EXPLAIN.

I really loved the Narnia books when I was a kid and like the idea of getting a tattoo related to a childhood obsession. Narnia was a big part of my relationship with my dad when I was a kid, so there's that too. Most importantly, I love C.S. Lewis's apologetic books and they've had a big influence on me (that's understating it; I wouldn't identify as Christian at all without having read them). So having a Narnia tattoo is kind of a tribute to CSL in general, and therefore a religious tattoo.

I love Corinthians 13 just as much as everyone else and their mom does. In fact it is right below my palm right now because I wrote lines 8-12 on my computer keyboard. I mostly like it for the Platonic stuff, but "caritas numquam excidit" is the only phrase short enough to make a good tattoo. Besides, it's always true. It is usually translated as "love never fails" and then people use it for their wedding vows and stuff, which is dumb, because sex fails. Limerence fails. But caritas doesn't mean either of those things, it means mercy.

I think this is a tattoo I will definitely end up getting once I can design it/am older, because it is really important content-wise, is something I'll always believe, and would look awesome.

4.

Puddleglum is a Narnia character. He's a Marshwiggle. A lot of what I remember about him is just saying the word "Marshwiggle" a lot with my dad because we liked saying it. Puddleglum is usually whiny and grumpy I think, which makes him the perfect tattoo for me.

But I mostly want him because he says this: "Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things--trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones."

The main problem with getting him is that the only picture I could find that I liked (the one above) might end up looking sort of gross on my arm. So this is another thing where I wouldn't just be able to bring in a picture and say "do this."

Would you condescend to help me, I am stupid and blind

CS Lewis said, "What do people mean when they say 'I am not afraid of God because I know He is good?' Have they never even been to a dentist?" Lewis thought maybe God killed his wife because they had such a good relationship that they weren't being challenged. Or because there wasn't any more for her to learn.

My friend's dad died when he was a kid and my friend never really talks like God is not there. It seems like God has to be there, in his mind, because his dad has to be somewhere, he can't not. My friend is a noble person and sometimes things are hard for him because of that. He has a disproportionate number of unstable friends because he is prone to sticking around through everything, wearing himself out. It is exhausting for him and it exhausts me too when I try to do it, sometimes with the same people. We sort of vent to each other about these people, our nasty little side complaints twitching out of the corners of our mouths when we're alone; it's like an affair between people who are staying together for the kids. These mild explosions of resentment are hardly admirable, but we want to be there for the people we know who need help, but at the same time they ask for so much. "Am I a horrible person for saying this," my friend starts, sometimes, and there's no stopping him. He is not.

In pictures my friend is a little boy with round glasses and his dad is very old. My friend and I hold hands and we hold each other, sometimes we sleep in the same bed. He says all these things to me, like, "give me your little hand," and he kisses me on the top of the head. Like a lot of ASD people, I used to hurt myself, and my friend said we can't be best friends if I start again, because I will just be like the other people then and not someone he can count on. Even if I wasn't committed to being better, it's an easy trade. This boy is precious. He's very smart, but also, he's really young for his age, and he reacts to joy by spazzing out, flipping around and shaking his arms and legs. He can be a sad, still person, but when he's happy there is no one like him.

Anyway, apparently he has a girlfriend. I don't really understand why I didn't know this, but he can be a lazy friend and he hasn't contacted me in probably a week. For one thing, he probably hasn't worked out that he can't call me using my US number. I don't really know how to talk about my friend having a girlfriend; there's not a lot of room for how I feel. Being friends with someone is not supposed to be like having a relationship. If you're a lesbian, especially, boys are supposed to be nonentities that you maybe even hate. This is not the case for me. I've never had a serious relationship; my friends are everything to me. I am very, very close to this boy and in some ways he feels like mine, whatever that means.

He's pretty much terminally alone too, so I guess I've latched onto him more fervently than with any of my other friends. We would joke about getting married, a little. He would say why couldn't I be straight. None of this is to say that I really wanted to marry him, because believe me, I don't. It's not just that I want to get married to a girl, but it really, truly is that I know he wants a real girlfriend as much as I do. And I know with prayer and all that I will feel okay about this. But I just have this constant feeling of being always alone--with boys, I get these little flickers of affection and love, but I'm gay, so it never goes the whole way. And with girls, I just feel tremendously unlucky and impaired, and I'm paralyzed; I'm too closed off to feel much for them even when it's safe. My friend has never been like this, he gets his heart broken again and again, and finally his strength has paid off.

The truth is I should be happy for him, and I will be. It just takes time. I like CSL because he saw the world as painful and beautiful. God will work through me and fix me and I won't feel bitter about these things.