okay so this is something I wonder about all the time.

whenever I read any mainstream media article about verbal people with autism, the people with autism are so rude! well not necessarily rude, but just really really insensitive to other people's feelings or to being polite.

obviously there are people with and without autism who sometimes make me go, "you're so fucking rude/insensitive!" and I'm sure some people think the same about me, but it's never to the degree portrayed in these articles. like when I'm going to hang out with a friend and I take FOREVER to get ready and delay the whole thing. not nice. or when someone goes, "it's nice to see you, you're not the person I was most looking forward to seeing, but it is nice." (yes I know someone who said this) or even just when you make an effort to do something for someone and they don't say thank you. or when someone doesn't ask how you are doing and only talks about themselves. or interrupts all the time.

stuff happens! people are rude. maybe us more for the sake of argument, but not on the dramatic level portrayed in these newspaper/magazine articles. those articles never look like me or anyone I know and I used to always be like, damn my autism is so fake! all my friends' autism is so fake!

but sometimes I wonder if it just the point of view of the article and I'm wondering if anyone else thinks that might be true. could I make people in my life sound like that if I wanted to?

roommate is cute, slash I think some of this is useful

me: I don't know
I just think my life is a lot better since I stopped thinking of myself as being "socially impaired" or whatever
Liam: yeah
i mean its just a word
me: like, sometimes I make a joke that someone doesn't get or something, maybe it's because I'm different, but it's an interaction between the two of us, maybe we don't fit
Liam: yeah for sure
me: like, I used to just feel really embarrassed like every time i made a joke someone didn't get or something
like "oh it's my autism making me say stupid things"
Liam: i mean i find it way easier to hang out with you than a lot of other people
me: but I just think that's dumb and I feel like other people can think "that person didn't get my sense of humor" and they don't have to take it personally
dude I don't know do you find me to be like "simple" or "dense"? it's okay if you do
I just wondered
Liam: no
i think you are really smart
maybe child-like
i mean you get a lot more excited about things than most people
i think you also just approach things in general a little differently
but in a good way
me: I mean, that's cool
I don't mind being different. I just used to always mind the idea that I like...was supposed to be unaware of what was going on because of my disability
Liam: i mean thats totally not fair
everyone sees things a little differently
i mean i cant see red and green
me: aww
Liam: i think everyone is different and its easy to compare yourself to other people
i mean i always feel like im really slow
me: well I think I'm going to come to the library so I can type up my writing project
Liam: and bad at writing
me: it's easier to prop my notebook up on a desktop
Liam: cool
we are in a study room
me: oh
where?
wait are there desktops?
I guess I won't see you
:(

I hope everyone is reading Josh's tumblr posts today. I read one and went back to sleep and then there were MORE!

Buffy, Faith, and Camus
..ok sorry to go on about this but more Buffy thoughts.
..I mean I’m not saying Willow is an elitist, classist bitch

The initial crime that marks her out and separates her from the Scooby Gang is not so much accidental manslaughter but not displaying a socially normative emotional reaction to a traumatic event...I’m sure the well meant concern and flapping from the Scoobies, and having Buffy’s deeply empathic grief thrust at her pours considerable salt on this alienation. Perhaps if they’d not made a value judgement on Faith’s psyche, she wouldn’t have become what- from that moment- they feared she may well be?

A++

little thing that bothers me (actually, two little things)

cute stories about verbal people with ASD (usually adults) "learning to do things" (such as: flirt! go on a date! go to a party!).

I don't exactly know for sure what it is that bothers me so much, but let me just explore a possible reason, which may be wrongheaded.

The thing is I am probably way biased in being annoyed by this--you know, maybe I have a nonstandard experience in terms of what's hard for me and maybe the only reason I find these stories so stupid is that's not how my ASD is. But on the other hand, I don't know anyone like the people in these stories. If I'm an exception, it seems like exceptions are more numerous than people who follow the rule.

This may be a generational thing, since most of the people I know were diagnosed as kids--so maybe people diagnosed as kids were aware enough of social problems they had or might have had that they picked up on everything they could be taught?--and also most of the people I know are women--so, same thing? So you can take this with a grain of salt, I guess. But I just find myself reading the word "Asperger's" in some cute story or other, and what follows doesn't resemble anyone I know who has an ASD diagnosis.

I know some people, and if you'll just let me do a brief rundown of what verbal people with ASD, of my acquaintance, are like when they socialize:

1. Some people try really hard to respond to everything in a normal/"appropriate" way. Which can be kind of a painful reality to live in, and isn't actually that cute or simple.

2. Some people are themselves and that's okay with them; and maybe the way they think about themselves isn't "am I doing something odd?" so it isn't so much that they mistakenly think they're normal when they're doing weird things, but that they aren't asking the question.

(Obviously there's switching between these two modes, for some people. There's also a ton of variation in which mode actually leads to a certain person being seen as "wrong.")

I just don't really see all these "weird" people who are doing things "wrong," who upon given the right kind of help, or upon deciding to put their nose to the grindstone and "learn how to do things" (what were they doing before, hibernating in a cave?), are totally shocked to discover all the wrong things they've been doing and start doing everything properly and life is better.

A related trope that bothers me is the idea that people with "Asperger's" are like aliens (or humans raised by aliens) coming to earth. The problem with this simile is obvious: an alien has trouble fitting in to earth culture because the alien has actually grown up and lived a whole life in a different culture. So this has a few problematic implications:

1. The alien may be perfectly capable, with time, of learning to do everything just the way people do it on earth.

2. Again, if someone with ASD=alien, and becoming aware that they behave differently=coming to earth, are you saying that this person wasn't a part of the real world for the whole time that they were un-self-consciously different from other people?

More on problematic implication 1, which is really my biggest issue here, because it very much oversimplifies social problems (and erases emotional and functioning problems) faced by people with ASD. If people with "Asperger's" are just normal people who don't know how to act at a party but can be taught, then how is it actually a disability? Just learn how to act at a party, then. In addition to not being a disability, pop culture "Asperger's," when we come down to it...basically requires nothing from other people. If people who are different aren't just naturally innately different, but have just for some reason not learned how to be the same, then there's no reason for society to accept them. Society can give them a little extra time and smile at them fondly while they "learn how to do things," but just being okay with someone who's different and is cheerfully living as different? That's too much to ask.

Am I totally off base? I mean, I think I mostly am, but I also think I have a little bit of something here.

I think if you googled the word "boring" you would find this blog

On my school's gossip/general anonymous noodling forum, someone posted an Empathy Quotient test by Simon Baron-Cohen. Like all annoying "quotient" tests by Simon Baron-Cohen, this asks you to strongly or slightly agree or disagree with a number of statements about yourself.

I think first of you know that I'm going to reply to statements like, "I don't tend to find social situations confusing," with, "What kind of social situation are you referring to?" Even the most ridiculous Baron-Cohen stereotype can be pretty un-confused if he hangs out at the comic book store playing D&D. Despite the fact that I am very comfortable in almost every social situation I regularly find myself in, I generally find myself writing down that I do find social situations confusing, because it's such a super broad question and I think I might find the kind of situations Simon Baron-Cohen thinks are real social situations to be confusing? Maybe? I don't know?

Also, this: "If I see a stranger in a group, I think that it is up to them to make an effort to join in." This is an opinion and doesn't have to do with being able to "read" people or sense their feelings.

But never mind. My normal "social skills don't exist" racket is not the motivation for me telling you about the Empathy Quotient. Instead, I'd like to show you some of the other statements that Simon Baron-Cohen thinks are somehow related to socializing and empathy:

I am at my best first thing in the morning.
I would never break a law, no matter how minor.
I live life for today rather than the future.
I like to do things on the spur of the moment.
I can't relax until I have done everything I had planned to do that day.
I often start new hobbies but quickly become bored with them and move on to something else.
I would be too nervous to go on a big roller coaster.
I like to be very organized in day-to-day life and often make lists of the chores I have to do.
I don't like to take risks.
Before making a decision I always weigh up the pros and cons.

I don't think I need to overexplain this. It's poor methods, to say the least.

eta: just kidding, Zoe explained to me why I'm wrong and these are actually the filler questions. I'm kind of relieved SBC isn't exactly 100% as dumb as I thought he was after reading this test.

all it takes

Tonight in line at the dining hall I was having a conversation with someone I kind of know. He was strikingly knowledgeable about when, in the mind of the register at the dining hall, the "dinner" period becomes the "fourth meal" period. Many people aren't clear on this, and when I am cashiering people will sometimes try to swipe their card at 9:30 after eating dinner at 5:30, not understanding that it is still the dinner period and their card won't work again until 10:01 when fourth meal officially starts.

So I was like, "Wait did you cashier at some point?" and he said, "No, but when I was a freshman I lived in the dorm in this building so I was here a lot," and I was like, "Dude I know that, we lived on the same floor," and he said, "Oh sorry, I remember." But as soon as I thought about it, I felt much sorrier than he did.

This guy (whose real speech style I am not even attempting to replicate) has ASD and Tourette's. He is probably everyone's stereotype of a person with "Asperger's"--I mean, now I think the unusualness of his speech is what's most obvious, but when we were freshmen he would always monologue about engines--isn't that the most stereotypical thing you can think of? He'd draw pictures of machines and explain them to people, for heaven's sake!

The way I treated him was just...barf. I was always trying to tell him what to do and how to talk to other people. He didn't get mad at me for this, but he'd never asked me to do it. I just couldn't help thinking that I knew something he didn't. I knew the proper way to act if you had ASD. You were careful. You never talked about anything you were interested in. And look, look, some people were ignoring him when he talked! I was right. Why didn't he just pick up on what I was trying to teach him so he could make more friends?

Except, then he did make a lot of friends, and became really popular. I hardly ever see him alone. He's involved in lots of extracurricular activities. Most people don't guess that he has ASD because he doesn't fit into their idea of it; he's not ~isolated~ by his ~pathology~. He's just himself, and almost everyone likes him for it.

I haven't spent a lot of time with this guy since the first semester of our first year. But being in school with him, and seeing how things turned out, was one of the things that made my frame on social skills begin to change. He is fine. He did not need help becoming more like me as I was then, or more like anyone else.

What's so important is that all it takes is to see one or two really naturally, visibly nonstandard people in a state of really awesome social success.

You stop chewing on your tongue while the person is talking, thinking about what they should be like, what they probably just don't understand is the right way to be; you stop cringing for what's going to happen to them if they're not careful. You just see the person. You see that they're really cool. You see that you weren't treating them like an adult, before.

And then you think about all the environments where the way this person is would sentence them to isolation, bullying, unemployment, and other undesirable ends, because of their "bad social skills." And then you start to see how incredibly cruel and ridiculous those environments are, for being the way they are. And then you stop being careful. And you start being super pissed off.

Passing as Ethics: a primer

Passing as Ethics

So, passing as ethics is a term I invented and I use it a lot. It’s at the core of a lot of the stuff I write. In retrospect, I wish I had said “passing as functioning” or “passing as cure” because I think that would be more inclusive and cover more ground. Originally I thought that passing as ethics only happened to people with autism, but as I learned more I found out that it was more pervasive than I could ever have imagined.

Here are some passing as ethics values. I’m mostly writing this as if a professional is saying it, but disabled people can totally feel most of this stuff about themselves and I certainly did for a long time. I think it’s a very basic part of life for most people.

1. It is better for a person with a physical disability to walk without any visible mobility aids than it is to use a wheelchair, crutches, or cane--even if the person finds it painful or tiring to walk unaided, and/or is danger of falling.
2. If someone’s disability causes them to have an unusual gait, this is a problem, and it would be an improvement if their gait could be changed to look more normal, even if this didn’t make the person walk any faster or more easily.
3. Habits that mark someone as a person with an intellectual disability or autism, such as flapping hands, are inherently bad, and people who do them should be trained not to do them.
4. If there is a conflict between someone with autism and someone without autism, it’s the person with autism’s fault. If a person with autism gets bullied, this is evidence of why #3 is true; if no one had been able to tell they had autism, this wouldn’t have happened.
5. If someone misunderstands a person with autism, it is because the person with autism didn’t express themselves right.
6. Deaf and hard-of-hearing people should learn to lip-read. Hearing people need not learn sign language.
7. So basically, people with disabilities should always try to communicate in a way that is comfortable for people without disabilities, even if it makes the people with disabilities uncomfortable
8. To sum up, any habit, style of movement, facial expression, interest, feeling, word choice, way of pronouncing words, way of sitting, way of communicating, okay you get the idea, that is commonly associated with disabled people is
a. the opposite of success, and must be destroyed to improve someone’s “functioning”
b. morally wrong in some cases--that is, the person who is doing the behavior that’s associated with disability becomes automatically wrong in any conflict
9. If someone who used to look like they had a disability now doesn’t look like they have a disability (to most people), then they are recovered/cured (no matter how negatively it affects them to hide their disability, and no matter how many less visible aspects of their disability continue to affect them).
10. Don’t kill yourself after reading #1-9 because people will just think you killed yourself because it was so depressing to be disabled.

how an autism spectrum disability affects my life now

[the video hasn't processed yet, if it doesn't make it onto youtube I'm going to plotz though.
FUCK YEAH SEAKING IT'S PROCESSING
score

]

Hey um I tried to do this yesterday but the video was too long and it wouldn't post. Um, I made this video a year and a half ago which is called "How Asperger's Syndrome affects my life now." I, um, constantly want to delete this video because I don't identify as having Asperger's Syndrome anymore, and um the video also starts with me saying something like, "Well I guess I'm very high-functioning so you probably shouldn't judge Asperger's Syndrome from listening to me," and in retrospect I think that's a ridiculous thing to say. But I mean like everyone else I like when people talk to me on the Internet and I get a lot of comments on that video so I don't want to delete it. But I wanted to make a sequel.

Um, first of all, like, the whole Asperger's thing...kind of a stupid word, not going to be in the DSM anymore because it's not a concept that makes sense. Um, I mean it's not the only ASD diagnosis that I ever got, either, and I also um...the thing is that the reason I used that word about myself was not ever because I wanted to. Like, I used to use the word autistic when I was much younger. But um, from non-disabled people I would face you know criticism because I would be told, "You shouldn't be using that word about yourself because you're not severely disabled enough" or something like that. Um, I don't really think that this is a way of talking that makes sense, I mean there are lots of...pretty much every disability that I can think of, there are some people who are very severely affected and some people who are very mildly affected. I also don't think that people can just talk to me and decide that I am mildly affected when they don't live my life. Um, so, I guess, I'm no longer interested in feeling guilty about using the word Autistic about myself--I mean I consider myself part of Autistic culture, I consider people with severe disabilities to be people who I feel as much loyalty to as I do to people who have a disability experience very much like my own, I don't, um...I mean, I've known a lot of people with severe autism, and I mean it's more severe but it's not something else, and I don't...that doesn't really make sense to say it is.

Yeah, sorry, to actually talk about myself, um...I, like, I feel like, I mean before, I didn't know other people with autism so I was very um, my whole view of what stuff was was very much based in what I read in books by people who didn't have autism, so I was, I feel like I was always trying to fit myself into that kind of category and then when I didn't fit it I would just say, "oh well I must be so high-functioning that that's why I don't fit into that description." [note: but then there were other things I couldn't do that even people with "classic Asperger's" [i.e. worse than mine] were supposed to be able to do, so I didn't understand that.] But you know as I've gotten to meet other people with autism and other disabilities I've realized that you know I have stuff going on that's pretty classic sometimes but it hasn't been written about as much but it happens to most of the Autistic people that I know.

Um, okay, so, first of all, the whole social thing has been something that's really massively changed for me in the past year and a half since I made that video and since I became more involved in disability culture. I think the thing is that even though before I used to think of myself as being, like, "better" and "recovered" and "not really autistic anymore," like, because I was always judging by, because I was always judging myself by the standard of whether I looked like a normal person, I...it was very hard for me to relate to other people who didn't have disabilities because I always felt inferior to them.

Like, um, I guess um the way that I walk is kind of different from some people who don't have disabilities, so um, especially with other women--when I was friends with other girls, if we were both walking down the street I would become so conscious of the way that I walked and the way that it wasn't like the way the other person was walking that I would get like pretty upset, and um it really poisoned my relationships especially with other girls because I was very, I was always comparing myself to them and thinking how I couldn't move like them and stuff like that which is kind of stupid.

Um, another thing is that I was really really worried always that other people didn't really want to be around me and I was just like attaching myself to them, so it meant that it was hard for me to reach out to people and then when I did I felt really like upset about it and like they didn't really want me there and I mean...I think this has been a really...it was a really bad thing in a lot of my friendships because I couldn't help...I would always resent people as if they'd actually done something to me, when in fact like the only thing that was going on was that I thought that I was inferior to them so I just resented them. And um I guess all I can say is that since I've become more conscious of identifying as disabled and less upset about being disabled, it's pretty, like...you know if I'm walking along and I know that I'm walking differently from someone else it's like, surprise! I guess I'm disabled so I walk like I'm disabled. Shock! Not really a big deal. Um, I mean I figure that other people probably want to be around me just as much as they want to be around anyone else so I'm not afraid I guess of trying to reach out to people and talking to people and...

It's funny because people, um, professionals always talk about "social skills" and they frame social skills as being able to look like you're normal, but I mean, what I would call my social skills have vastly improved now that I don't care about that anymore because you know when you're not thinking about trying to make yourself look like you're normal, you really are much more interested in other people and you have a lot more energy to spare on just caring about other people and listening to what they have to say.

Um, other stuff, the brain stuff, which is actually, like, the real problem. Um I've been watching The Walking Dead recently which is a TV show about zombies and I figured out that I'm basically a zombie. For example if a zombie was following a person that it wanted to eat, and the person leaves, the zombie will just keep going in the same direction, and um that's pretty much what I'm like. It's hard for zombies to like make new decisions or um figure things out, like they just see objects that they used to use when they were alive and they just get triggered into using them the same way 'cause they don't really, you know, get it. Um, it's very hard for me to think about anything in a new way or to switch myself into any kind of new task, which can be a really huge problem. It's, um, and I mean there's also a lot of stuff which I guess is probably a bit like having dementia which is just you know constantly forgetting what you're doing a lot--and I mean, I know all this stuff is the kind of stuff where people can be like, "oh that happens to everyone," which is totally true, but I mean the way that it happens to me is very pervasive and makes it hard to do things.

I also have pretty severe anxiety problems and um a problem is that I get such severe anxiety about my um (laughs) cognitive problems, which I guess are what you would call poor um central coherence and executive dysfunction, and stuff like that, if you like big words, um I get so upset about those things that I like will intentionally like block off like the part of my brain that tries to remember what I have to do and um will intentionally get myself stuck on like new ideas--or, not new ideas, I will intentionally get myself stuck on old ideas so I can just kind of stim out on them and not have to um do the actual work--which I mean, it's very hard, the only way...I mean, the good way for things to happen is for someone else to just sit down with me and like calmly explain to me what I have to do and help me like stay like emotionally stable during that.

But that doesn't always happen because I don't get disability services at school because I haven't been recently diagnosed enough, etc., and even if I was people would probably be like, "well, autism is just a social disability so why do you think you need help with mental stuff?" Um, yeah, not a lot of fun, that stuff.

Something that's interesting, I don't know how many people it happens to, but I, um, when things are very bad for me I have like dissociative and derealization symptoms which are um...it basically means that everything kind of looks and feels the same. So like talking to my mom and talking to my best friend and talking to a stranger all feel exactly the same. It's like um I mean intellectually I remember who people are but it's kind of as if I had just been fed the information and I didn't actually have like the lived experience of having them in my life. So it's just like when you're with people you don't feel the same click of recognition when you're having that kind of episode (I guess it's, I guess you could call it an episode) and I um I don't know. It can be really scary. Especially because you feel like you don't know them so it's kind of like a sense of stage fright, because you know it's as if you're performing a relationship with someone that you don't really have in your life. So um that can be really hard and I think that's a lot of why I try to avoid all my cognitive stuff and just end up fucking myself over by trying to ignore like the brain stuff, just because um when I look at things head-on I get a lot of anxiety and the results can be so unpleasant that I feel like it's almost worse not to do it.

Okay, I ran out of time, I hope this video is short enough that it'll actually post. But I just wanted to make this because the other video I don't like so much and I really think this is better and more in line with what I actually think about and believe now. Okay.

13. Social model of social failure

I guess this as close as I will get to an ending. I've typed up everything I can find in my notebook related to this, and written the things I had floating around.

Basically I think it's definitely true that a lot of normal people sync up with each other and come off in certain ways to each other, and then when a lot of people with autism don't sync up with normal people, or don't come off properly, the results can be very bad for the person with autism.

I don't think this relates to people with autism not having "social skills."

I don't think social skills exist. Or, if I do, I think they exist like God exists--in everyone. They just may not always be apparent. For example, I may have very good social skills when relating to other people who have disabilities, or people who are interested in the same things I'm interested in. I have much better social skills with men than I do with women. Social skills are not contained in a person--they require the right other person.

With work, I think a lot of people can learn to develop their mindfulness and modulation skills so that they can have good social skills (i.e., capacity to connect) with more people--or, so that more people can have good social skills with them. It's the same thing.

Some people--disabled or not--may not be able to learn how to do that, but they will still sometimes meet a person who is exactly like them, or who is very good at mindfulness and modulation, and they will have good social skills when they are with that person.

Other people will just not let other people in. Sometimes it will be because the other person is obviously different. Such people may have good social skills when interacting with people who aren't different. But with people who are different, they will always have no social skills; and when a person who's different is with someone like that, they will "lack social skills" too. (But if they were told by a professional that they lack social skills, they won't understand the two-way nature of the failed connection.)

A person could be going through life, who can't talk, doesn't like to look at people, and is in a lot of emotional pain which they express with "challenging behaviors." This person may live in an institution where no one engages with them because the person is not judged to be interesting, or interested, or capable. One day a new person comes to the institution who is interested in the first person. They start to walk around together and sit together, even though they don't look at each other. Maybe they play games like the two kids I knew who liked to move each other's arms without looking at each other. Maybe they make noises at each other. Maybe they just physically stay near each other as much as possible. This is what life is about, and for some people, it never happens.

But it just takes people who fit each other, or learn to fit each other.

When someone is isolated or bullied, that is not all about them. Other people are bullying them and deciding not to engage them. Still other people, from a distance, in abstract, are framing the person as Someone Without Social Skills, while leaving the other people involved unmarked.

But everyone involved must have bad social skills, because they are all contributing to what is going on. Maybe we can't in the short term stop people from bullying and isolating other people, but we can in the abstract apply the social model of social failure, and stop saying that social failures deserve to be alone.

6. Mindfulness and modulation (a general look)

One time when I was making an earlier stage of this post, Fiona commented and defined social skills in the following way:

I think social skills are a cluster of related skills, not just one skill. Mainly I think it revolves around a) being able to read people via their body language and facial expression and tone of voice, and to be able to adjust you how deal with them appropriately based on that, b) being a good communicator; knowing how to bring up sensitive topics and assert yourself without increasing the level of conflict but being able to achieve a sort of win-win situation where both parties feel like they were treated fairly and got what they emotionally needed, c) being able to approach people and make friends without experiencing a lot of rejection.

Right now I would like to zoom in on b (I think c is what a lot of this series is about--rejection is an action undertaken by other people--and I may briefly address a because I think it's the "skill" that has the strongest case and it would be disingenuous for me to ignore it). If you are going to describe social skills as getting along with other people and being diplomatic, then you have to prove that normal people usually get along with other people and are diplomatic. You can't prove this, because almost everything that happens in the world shows that it isn't true. Besides, if all normal people had this type of "social skills" and all people with autism didn't, then people with autism wouldn't have social problems anyway--as long as they only interacted with normal people, they could rely on the normal people to adapt to them. Since this is not how things are, it can't really be true that b is a part of being normal and not-b is a part of having autism.

I actually do think there is a skill set that involves mindfulness and accommodating other people, but it is not particularly associated with normal people. Lots of normal people have it but lots of people with ASD have it too. In fact, I think that some people who have grown up being "weird" or "socially impaired" or "socially isolated" have an almost mathematical sensitivity to other people's feelings, because to them relationships feel more novel.

One time another person with ASD send me an email saying something like, "I'm really stressed and I have to write an email to my sister, but I thought I should write to you first because I know that you might get worried and think I'm mad at you if I don't email you back." This is a good example (and a lovely person), but a better exploration of the same thing was written by Luai and posted here:

I saw a report once about a study where autistic kids and NT kids were asked a series of questions about how they would act in certain situations; one of them was what they would do if they saw their mother crying. While the NT kids answered that they would go over and talk to her and hold her, the autistic kids almost universally said they would do something they knew she liked, like emptying the dishwasher, or making something for her.
And I love this, because it illustrates something I've always felt was true. If you don't know the social script, the set thing "everyone" does when someone is upset, or the set thing that "everyone" thinks is valuable, you have to think it through for yourself. You have to think, what makes person X happy? And this is why that boy caught bugs for you in seventh grade, and why I made a green alligator-shaped valentine for my crush in first grade, and why a friend of mine made a special "romantic dinner" for her boyfriend that consisted of pokemon mac-and-cheese and dinosaur chicken nuggets.

Sadly the article referred to going over to one's mother and hugging her as being the "right answer" (as in, "all the normal kids picked the right answer, but the autistic kids...."). >.<; I honestly don't know how people can continue to be so stupid.

Postscript: I like Fiona and she can have whatever opinions she wants. I don't want her to feel like a frog that I am taking apart.

5. Is going to a hospital normal?

I really love chaoticidealism's blog, but I take issue with something she said in this NPR article about her. I actually don't really like the article at all because it seems to be focusing on how Lisa Daxer/chaoticidealism's ASD causes her to be able to study normal people and their amazing social behavior. I dislike this frame of autism ("autism teaches us about ourselves [ourselves meaning people who have certain abilities and act a certain way]!") and, although I haven't read all of her posts, the ones I have read have been about ableism and disability/autistic identity, not about studying normal people. I feel it does her a disservice to describe her blog that way.

Anyway, the offending passage is:

Daxer learned a lot about empathy from one of her housemates, a young woman she calls "superneurotypical" because she had such good social skills.

At the time, Daxer was feeling increasingly depressed and isolated. This woman seemed to understand. "I think she knew that I was hurting and she didn't want me to hurt anymore," Daxer says.

But her depression got worse. Eventually, Daxer ended up in the hospital.

"She visited me in the mental ward," Daxer says. "In our society, being crazy is considered very, very frightening. You think of TV slasher killers. And this girl, when I had depression, she visited me in the mental ward. That takes courage; that takes friendship; that takes empathy."

Obviously this girl sounds awesome, but I wouldn't characterize her awesomeness as "superneurotypical." To say that someone is "supersmart" would mean that they have more of whatever the average smart person has; to say that someone is "supergay" would mean they have more of whatever the average gay person has; and so on.

So, is the average "neurotypical" person (not a word I like, but I'll go with it) able to kind of judge what a person with ASD is feeling? I mean, is it the case that "neurotypicals" are better able than ASD people to judge everyone's feelings, not just "neurotypical" feelings? Which would lead to the conclusion that "neurotypical" people outperform ASD people at judging ASD people's feelings?

Well, that would be interesting--but it's obviously not true, because many people with ASD say that they can judge the feelings of other people with ASD. I don't know whether that's the case for me*, but I definitely know that lots of non-ASD people are terrible at judging how people with ASD are feeling. If you just noodle around the Internet for a minute, you will find quite a lot of ASD people describing how someone thought they were nervous or sad when they were calm, bored when they were having a panic attack, uninterested in things they were actually very interested in, and so on. In fact, sometimes police officers will harass or physically hurt people with ASD because they misinterpreted the person's behavior.

Lisa Daxer describes the "superneurotypical" girl as not just being able to identify LD's feelings, but as being brave and kind because she visited Daxer in the mental ward of a hospital, an intimidating and stigmatized place. Is this, too, a super version of normal behavior? Would the average normal person do something a little bit intimidating for the sake of kindness, whereas this extra-normal person did something very intimidating? With the implication being that people with ASD wouldn't inconvenience themselves for the sake of kindness at all?

Again, I think this is not true. I think normal people run around hugging each other all the time because that's easy for them. I think all people, when confronted with a scary action that seems like the right thing to do, make a decision based on various things--ability to handle anxiety and stress, bravery, morality, how much they care about the person they're doing it for.

I don't think chaoticidealism's friend was more normal than other normal people. I think she was a normal person who was extremely sensitive, loving, and brave. I think disabled people can also be sensitive, loving, and brave, and I would prefer that those characteristics not be equated with "ourselves" (non-disabled people) at the expense of the rest of us.

(I should mention that the impression I get of chaoticidealism from her blog is so different from the impression I get of Lisa Daxer from the article that I wonder if her comments were misrepresented by NPR. I have no idea whether this is true, but if it is true, the passage in the article is still a good example of how not having autism is associated in pop culture with kindness and sensitivity, to an illogical degree.)

1. What are social skills?

When I was in eighth grade, my history teacher mentioned an interesting piece of trivia one day during class. "There's this disorder called Asperger's and people who have it have no social skills." I don't remember why he said this, but since I had recently been told that I had "Asperger's," it was a little more than interesting to me.

I was going to say that saying someone has no social skills is akin to calling them a corpse, but actually I guess some people open up to corpses in a way they don't open up to anyone else. So maybe corpses know something we don't.

I am socially impaired because I'm Autistic, but I'm also socially impaired because I'm gay. Some people are uncomfortable when they learn that someone is gay, so I risk an awkward silence if I mention certain parts of my life. This means I can seem quite withdrawn in certain environments.

If an American teenager's parents are from another country, don't speak English well, and aren't involved in American culture, that person is socially impaired if they go to school with kids who all have American parents.

We can talk about blindness and say that in a country where everyone was blind, being blind wouldn't matter at all. We can say that being blind matters less when blind people are accommodated by people who aren't. We can say the same thing about dyslexia. But while difficulty is constructed, impairment is not--a blind or dyslexic person lacks an ability that other people have.

But what does a person lack if they have no social skills? How can anyone be bad with people? There is more than one person in the world.

hi fitz-clementine:
I want to quote/write about this in my epic social skills post. Is that okay with you and your friend?