is the word for really good things to say that you think of when it's slightly too late. Recently I had some in my child developmental disabilities class. I obviously need a tag for this class, but anyway.
The first one wasn't really a lack of something to say, I just spaced and didn't get to make an answer that would have been very easy. Basically the professor asked a question which assumed that no one in the class had autism. This is rude, since she knows I have autism, so I would have liked to respond gently and politely to the question, from my own personal experience.
The second one I just couldn't think fast enough though. We watched a movie about autism which was mainly parents and professionals, but at one point Temple Grandin appeared and spoke in the movie. I don't really like her, but anyway. After we watched the movie, my professor said something like, "Can you see how Temple Grandin's communication [or social skills or social reciprocity or something, I forget] is lacking?"
I said, "Well, we can't really tell from the movie, because we don't see her talking to anyone else, we just see her talking to the camera."
"Really?" my professor said, in an amused way. "You couldn't tell that she was different?"
My friend said, "Well, we know that she has an autism spectrum disorder, so it's hard to tell if we would know if we just saw her."
The professor said, "Speaking as a clinician, you can...well, everyone always laughs when I say this, but there's a certain smell--not a literal smell, but you can just tell when someone's autistic. Come on, let's talk about it. What is missing from Temple Grandin?"
But what I would have liked to say, when my professor said, "What, you couldn't tell that she was different?" would not have been mean or anything, but just low-key. I think that a lot of the time, just insisting on saying what you actually experience and think in an environment that is really marginalizing can be a pretty violent form of rebellion even if you are talking slowly and not being harsh to anyone. So, I would have said:
"Well, it's true that there's sort of a constellation of physical actions, like stimming and toe-walking and maybe including voice and facial expressions...well, it's like a type of body language that I click into really well and it feels really familiar. So that's how I can sense when someone else is disabled. But that doesn't really have to do with anything being 'missing' from Temple Grandin because I don't know enough about her life to know what she can't do."
And this part is for fun and isn't what I would have actually said, because it gets kind of shrill, but I'll just type it up for posterity (this is the spirit of a really long staircase):
"Besides, I don't really think of disabled people as missing anything and I feel weird about watching videos of an adult who seems satisfied with her life and trying to say what she's 'missing.' I mean, is that what you think about me when I'm talking? That's not how I feel about myself. As far as I know I'm the only person in this class with a significant disability--and by significant I don't necessarily mean severe, I just mean it affects my life at all times and in all places, and it's lifelong. So I mean I've always lived with it, and that's just not how I feel about disability. It doesn't make me uncomfortable and I don't think it's sad. When I see other disabled people I feel like, 'Oh cool, another disabled person'--I don't feel like something is missing. I love my friends with disabilities and I love the kids with disabilities I'm working with right now. They're swell people. [I don't really say swell as much as I'd like to.] Sure I can identify a lot of disabled people on sight because there are particular ways of moving that are more common for disabled people--but it's not because they don't have something that other people have, we just look different from them."
(As is usually the case, Amanda Baggs wrote a much better post about this sort of thing.)
Showing posts with label reading (the other kind). Show all posts
Showing posts with label reading (the other kind). Show all posts
30 November, 2010
28 August, 2010
stimming photo project idea
(This will be like a million years in the future if I do it, plus there are ethical issues so it might not be possible, but I just thought it was a really good idea so I wanted to share.)
I used to really like to take pictures without flash in dim environments, so that I could do things like make myself have two faces (my ghost pictures). I also liked taking pictures of myself stimming because it looked like I was flying or disappearing. I don’t have much skill but you don’t need it.
I would really like to take pictures of people with developmental disabilities stimming, especially blurry pictures so that the images come off as kind of beautiful and otherworldly. Stimming is always portrayed in a really clinical medicalized context and it’s usually treated as “abnormal” if not outright bad (and it’s usually treated as bad). There are no images of people stimming that portray the people as beautiful. I’d like to take beautiful pictures of stimming for the same reason that people have to take beautiful pictures of queer people, fat people, people with physical disabilities, etc. Mainstream images don’t reflect the actual personalities and feelings of people who are different.
I am really concerned about how to do this though because I don’t want to do the project unless I can include pictures of people who have a range of abilities. People with severe disabilities are the people who are the most vulnerable to being treated horribly for stimming. They are also What Passing People Are Afraid Of when we feel instinctively ashamed about stimming when we’re growing up. Disability is stigmatized and kept out of sight so that people who aren’t obviously disabled are terrified of people who are, and of things that make us look like them. Leaving “those people” out would be hypocritical, and a big loss since some of them are great stimmers.
It would be really easy to take these kinds of pictures of people with more severe disabilities but I guess I’m concerned about making sure the person understands and agrees with the idea of the project and what the project is etc. Lots of people just take pictures of nonverbal people and use them for stuff without asking and I don’t want to do that obviously. I also don't know whether it’s ethical for me to try to recruit people I’m staff for or have been staff for in the past.
I’m not interested in taking pictures that are accurate, I’m interested in taking pictures that make the subject look attractive and cool. I’d like the people in the pictures to pick out the stimming pictures of them that they like the best.
I used to really like to take pictures without flash in dim environments, so that I could do things like make myself have two faces (my ghost pictures). I also liked taking pictures of myself stimming because it looked like I was flying or disappearing. I don’t have much skill but you don’t need it.
I would really like to take pictures of people with developmental disabilities stimming, especially blurry pictures so that the images come off as kind of beautiful and otherworldly. Stimming is always portrayed in a really clinical medicalized context and it’s usually treated as “abnormal” if not outright bad (and it’s usually treated as bad). There are no images of people stimming that portray the people as beautiful. I’d like to take beautiful pictures of stimming for the same reason that people have to take beautiful pictures of queer people, fat people, people with physical disabilities, etc. Mainstream images don’t reflect the actual personalities and feelings of people who are different.
I am really concerned about how to do this though because I don’t want to do the project unless I can include pictures of people who have a range of abilities. People with severe disabilities are the people who are the most vulnerable to being treated horribly for stimming. They are also What Passing People Are Afraid Of when we feel instinctively ashamed about stimming when we’re growing up. Disability is stigmatized and kept out of sight so that people who aren’t obviously disabled are terrified of people who are, and of things that make us look like them. Leaving “those people” out would be hypocritical, and a big loss since some of them are great stimmers.
It would be really easy to take these kinds of pictures of people with more severe disabilities but I guess I’m concerned about making sure the person understands and agrees with the idea of the project and what the project is etc. Lots of people just take pictures of nonverbal people and use them for stuff without asking and I don’t want to do that obviously. I also don't know whether it’s ethical for me to try to recruit people I’m staff for or have been staff for in the past.
I’m not interested in taking pictures that are accurate, I’m interested in taking pictures that make the subject look attractive and cool. I’d like the people in the pictures to pick out the stimming pictures of them that they like the best.
14 June, 2010
privilege scrounging
I think this has a lot of potential--not really to be posted or published anywhere else, but just to be a really complicated and decent post on this blog--but I kept putting off the first draft because it seemed so daunting, and at this point I’ve been writing it for weeks and I’m leaving for Vermont in three hours and going to have basically no Internet until I get home at the beginning of August. So I’m just posting the first draft, which is a bunch of pieces of things jammed together. Please, say anything you can think of to say.
This is not really a piece with ideas or arguments, it’s just a really long confession. Bear with me.
...
On a related note, I can't help thinking of my tendency for gleefully tearing apart anyone I perceive as thinking that mild ASD is not a disability, or is especially interesting or cool. I mean I do think those views are fucked-up and fallacious, but they are not held by millionaires who pass without effort and have all the friends they could want. The situation is not a person who feels powerful wanting to push people with severe and/or visible disabilities even farther down on the food chain than they already are. That is what they're doing in practice, but it's my sickness too.
Before I go far, I should probably say that I don't think of ASD and intellectual disability as being two completely separate things, at least in practice. In addition to the facts that of course some people have both, and that people who really only have ASD are often misdiagnosed with comorbid ID, I just feel there's a lot of overlap in terms of what people with ID and ASD are like, and also what our oppression is like. I hope it's obvious that this doesn't mean I would refer to myself as ID, or try to be in spaces/organizations that are just for people with ID--but it is the reason that I don't think of this as an ASD blog or really think of my disability-related trains of thought as ASD trains of thought. Also people with ASD, ID, and both all make me feel safe, and feeling safe is the focus of what I’m trying to say.
...
A bit of my history as staff or pseudo-staff, because I’m not really staff yet (actually at nine tonight I will be arriving at my first real staff job, at a summer camp). It is sort of a big identity thing, it’s in the sidebar, and I guess it gives me a somewhat different relationship to DD than someone who only has DD. Better and worse.
I once, like many people, was “interested in autism” (I can’t imagine being less interested in anything now). In my freshman year of college, when I was realizing that I wasn’t cut out for my previous aspirations, I took a psych practicum where we went into a special ed school and observed/helped out in a class of nonverbal ASD kids. I won’t pretend this was some kind of life-changing experience. I found it interesting and relaxing, and was fond of one girl who would somberly take hold of my hands and run her fingers over the collars of my shirts. Her aide was really shitty to her, and one of my psych classmates explained that it was hard to find people to work with disabled kids. So that’s how I started aiming in that direction--I figured it would be easy and I couldn’t possibly be as bad as the people who were already doing it.
That summer, when I was nineteen, I got my first job. I worked in Cape Cod at a complex that contained a golf course, a drive-in theater, a regular movie theater, and a flea market (which was located in the same place as the drive-in). Mostly I cashiered at the flea market snack bar during the day, which I really liked. Some days were incredibly slow and I could just read and write. I didn’t mind days that were fast either. I liked dealing with big crowds from a safe vantage point behind my register, seeing lots of different kinds of people, and endearing myself to the flea market vendors who would then give me discounts when I wandered out of the snack bar on my break. The other people who worked during the day were two middle-aged women who were easy to be with. We would joke around together.
Every week, I would have to work about a day and two nights at the regular movie theater, where most of the employees were my age. This was a lot harder because they all knew each other and some of them seemed slightly contemptuous of me. (I should have expected this after what happened the first night I worked there, when they reacted with barely-concealed disgust after a teenage boy with a DD was unwise enough to start a conversation with them.) I also had more trouble working there because I wasn’t just a cashier, and I didn’t work fast when I was being asked to do lots of different things at once. So they were always at least slightly annoyed at me.
Then later my boss started assigning me to work at the drive-in snack bar at night. This was sort of okay because I got to use the register I was used to, and watch the movie out the windows. But I didn’t get along as well with the people who worked there. I was going through some issues about being queer, and two of the people who worked there were a middle-aged lesbian couple. I always wanted to talk to them and have them like me, but they liked everyone else better. I especially wanted to talk to one who was a special ed teacher, but she was always rolling her eyes when I had trouble understanding the words she was saying or overfocused on how to do something. At both the drive-in and the movie theater, I spent some nights getting more and more depressed, feeling really cold and nervous as my mind went over the same circles (especially when I was sweeping or mopping floors). I didn’t know anyone in Cape Cod so my social interactions consisted of joking around at the flea market, and phone conversations and letters with my friends from school. I got more and more lonely and depressed.
The last night I worked at the complex, I worked at the drive-in. As I got to work and was punching in, getting ice for the soda fountain, and putting my hair up, I started to think about how I would soon be back in college with my friends. But when I thought of my friends, I thought that they weren’t real. I knew they were, but they didn’t feel real. They felt like people I had made up.
All night I felt like I was slipping away from myself. It was really hard for me to remember any errands I was being sent on (I had to make up little songs to remind myself which novelty ice creams to get out of the freezer which was about two yards away from where I was standing). I kept wishing they’d put me on the register, which I was good at, but when they finally put me on the register, I was fucked. Every time a new customer appeared, I couldn’t recognize the food they were holding. I looked at it really carefully and slowly figured it out: pizza, chocolate bar, Hoodwich. Then I had to look at the register and find the key to press (I normally knew the register like the back of my hand). During the rush between the first and second feature, the special ed teacher snapped at me for getting in her way and accidentally signing in to the wrong register. As soon as the movie was over, I did my share of the cleaning as fast as I could, pulled on my flannel shirt and my bag of books, and slipped out the back of the building while the other employees were hugging each other goodbye.
...
That summer, and during the fall, I had occasional positive encounters with other DD adults. I was part of a school club that visited and arranged activities for the residents of local group homes. I also met a few people who came to the flea market and movie theater.
Once I remember being at the theater all day with a really intimidating girl named Julie--in the morning and early afternoon, almost no one came in. A guy with Down Syndrome came in with his mom, who went to the bathroom and bought gift certificates from Julie. As was usually the case when it was slow, one person was at the counter and another person sat down in the theater lobby. The guy came in and sat across from me in the lobby, and soon he was telling me about the upcoming Star Trek movie, which he obviously spent a lot of time reading about online. I am not into Star Trek (except the girl version, which I don’t think the movie was based on), but I could occasionally interject, “Oh, I love Simon Pegg,” and I was relieved enough by the non-stressful interaction that I enjoyed everything he had to say.
I remember wondering what Julie thought. It was probably obvious that I had no job-related reason to talk to this guy. Did she think I was being nice? Did she think, wow, Amanda’s so weird that she can only talk to a person with Down Syndrome? (Number two is of course the true assessment, although it’s interesting that I assume the agency is mine. “That guy has such a calming presence that even a giant freak like Amanda doesn’t mind talking to him” is an equally accurate way of putting it.)
These brief encounters were pleasant, but the real game-changer occurred in the spring term of my sophomore year. My friend suggested that we volunteer twice a week at the MRC sheltered workshop for DD adults. Ostensibly we taught a class about countries--we would discuss facts about a particular country, look through books about the country, and do a related craft. Talking and looking at books didn’t take very long, and coloring gets boring after the first thirty years, so we often spent a lot of time talking about whatever we wanted. After class, my friend and I would walk around the workshop saying hello to people we had met when visiting the group homes. Every time we were there, our beloved Mike Ward would come and find us at least twice (barging into the conference room to show us his fliers, running up to us before we left and giving us a drawing he’d stolen from someone else in his group home).
Over time, three things happened.
1. There were some people I became more close with, and would usually sit and talk with during class. I learned a lot about what was important to them and what they were happy and unhappy about. It was cool because it was the first time I really saw “that kind of people” on a regular basis and knew them well enough to consider them friends.
2. A lot of things I hated about myself were things I subconsciously associated with “that kind of people.” Once I actually met a lot of t.k.o.p., I was able to recognize the nature of my self-hatred; and once I got to know some of them, I was able to see that I should be unashamed of any resemblance between us.
3. I loved going to the workshop because a lot of the people were so loud and effusive in how they expressed themselves, and many people were really happy to see my friend and me. I felt that here, people liked me, I knew where I stood with them, and there was enough diversity of behavior that I didn’t have to worry about doing things right. I once said that I hoped the afterlife was in the MRC workshop.
...
Most feelings can be accurately summed up by quotes from the movie Serenity. This feeling's quote is the thing the Operative says to Mal about how there would be no place for him in a better world. It sums up the guilty resentment I experienced as I became more advanced in how I thought about developmental disabilities--saying "ID" instead of MR or retarded (the words that the nondisabled people around me used), and becoming more aware that sheltered workshops and group homes weren't something I should simply accept as the places where MRC consumers would naturally work and live. The people at MRC were some of the only people in the world I felt uncomplicatedly safe with; although I recognized it as fair that I should feel scared of offending them the way I felt scared of offending everyone else, I felt that I’d lost something when I realized there was an appropriate word to use and I hadn't been using it.
I liked the workshop and the group homes, because they were environments where people without disabilities were in the minority. I hoped to work at the MRC school after college because it had the kind of low-key setting I felt comfortable in, and the building was full of kids who looked and acted different. I wasn't interested in being an aide for an ID or ASD kid at a mainstream school, where I imagined the halls would be noisy and chaotic, my student and I would sit in a neat row of desks, and the non-disabled students would bully us both. (If my student was socially successful, of course, that would also suck; my student would be my only person to talk to, since I knew I wouldn’t fit in with the teachers and other aides.)
I'm using the past tense even though not all these feelings were in the past.
...
I've only been to the workshop twice this year. But I have cashiered at my school's dining hall during the period of the day when several people from the workshop also work there, and in light of becoming more guilty, this has been a tense experience.
First there is Laurie, who is someone I knew at the workshop last year. We weren't close because she was always with her boyfriend, but when she saw me at the dining hall she would say hello in the energetic way she did most things. Sometimes, in the first few weeks of my job, she would come up to the register and we would each ask how the other person was doing. This petered out, and I'm wondering if it was because I felt self-conscious around Laurie and talked to her in the shy restrained way I would talk to an acquaintance who wasn't disabled. After a month, she just said hello to me in a bored way, and this made me sad.
Second there are other people, who I liked to watch when I was at work because it's a relief to see people moving jerkily, swinging their arms, or concentrating on things you're not supposed to concentrate on. Some of them I wanted to talk to--a guy with a beard, a guy who warned me not to touch a stack of hot dishes. I would always walk by the MRC people to punch in and out, to get detergent, to throw rags away--it started to make me feel cold like I felt cold during nights at the theater complex, this feeling of not being able to talk to them because I wasn't good for them or was drawn to them for the wrong reasons.
...
I think of myself as very normal-acting. And I am very normal. Acting. I have spent a lot of time buckling down to get through things without being immediately identified as extremely different. When you ignore feelings for long enough, they go away, and this means that in addition to my occasional dissociative symptoms, the fact that I for example have anxiety problems is something that I have to prove to myself logically by making a list of things I’ve done that could have no other motive. I tend not to feel angry when I hear people say things like, “Retarded people depress me because there’s no point to their lives,” because I do not feel anger on a regular basis. I figure that professionals who try to stomp stimming out stimming people are just coming from a place of not really examining their privilege or putting themselves in stimming people’s shoes. Actually a lot of the writing on this blog, I think, is a result of my numbness and subsequent willingness to engage with arguments that are quite irrational and hateful.
Anyway, I think what I’m trying to say is that I don’t think of myself as disabled. Or I do but I don’t. In terms of working with developmentally disabled kids and adults, I don’t think of myself as a DD person who feels understandably relaxed when I get to stop packaging myself for non-disabled consumption. Instead I just think of myself the way I imagine non-disabled people see me: this weird girl who is really drawn to DD people, beyond professionalism, beyond allyship...just, kind of creepy.
As I don’t experience anger and anxiety on an obvious level, I forget what it means for me that I am normal-acting. But I can try to construct the facts like a detective. I have some very good friends and they are different. But the truth is that most moments (airport, library, classroom) I never stop working, I feel incredibly inadequate anyway, and that’s painful in a way I don’t think about because it’s always there. Except with certain people at the MRC.
Passing is not some sort of miserable burden--the group homes I think of so nostalgically are not places I’d want to live myself. I like being in college and thinking about where I want to move after I graduate. I like blundering around alone more than I would like having people ask if someone like me should be left unattended. I like privilege, do I ever--but I would like to avoid having to earn it with the constant, barely successful work of passing. If I was staff in a segregated environment, that would be possible--I’d retain the social status of a normal person without having to actually be around n.p.s.
So I mean--I’m not saying I’m not a piece of shit.
...
What I try to do is--and I mean, I don’t want to feel it all, but the other week I told my best friend that I could remember facts about him, I could remember how we started talking, but I felt emotionally like I’d never met him before. I was even kind of nervous, like I was talking to a celebrity for the first time, but trying to pass for someone who knew him well. I didn’t realize until my friend got upset that this wasn’t something that happened to lots of people. I conclude that this level of dislocation, while practical, is a little unbearable if I’m going to continue being alive.
What I’m trying to explain to myself is that I also count. Because of course I know that I’m a piece of shit--I understand that it is horrible to feel attached to segregated environments because those are generally environments where people have less control. I got very afraid of these feelings in myself, they were a piece of my sin I couldn’t even look at--and this was infuriating because I had felt like the person I was with MRC people was the only really pure part of me. I began to sort of resent progress, or at least hope it would happen slowly so I could still have the kinds of jobs I wanted to have.
I am trying to remember that I am in fact disabled and that I’m actually stressed out by real things, and that a better world for disabled people is not a world where Disabled People (whoever they are) get better and I am still stuck where I am. In a better world I would not have had to hit on a solution to avoid the wearing down of my ability to feel or sense things; I wouldn’t have to think about my life like Fantastic Mr. Fox, trying to locate the exact tunnel I can use to feed myself without coming in contact with Boggis Bunce and Bean. I’m trying to remember that if I wasn’t disabled I wouldn’t feel like I’m getting away with something when I get a job or have a conversation with a stranger. When people asked me out I wouldn’t avoid answering rather than wonder when they would realize what was wrong. If the MRC workshop is a refuge then it’s actually a refuge from something, right?
I think I’m trying to remember that while I can and do oppress MRC consumers if I accept everything the MRC does as The Way Things Should Be, instead of hating myself it is better to untangle it and try to remember that I can also be helped by that nebulous Progress.
This is not really a piece with ideas or arguments, it’s just a really long confession. Bear with me.
...
On a related note, I can't help thinking of my tendency for gleefully tearing apart anyone I perceive as thinking that mild ASD is not a disability, or is especially interesting or cool. I mean I do think those views are fucked-up and fallacious, but they are not held by millionaires who pass without effort and have all the friends they could want. The situation is not a person who feels powerful wanting to push people with severe and/or visible disabilities even farther down on the food chain than they already are. That is what they're doing in practice, but it's my sickness too.
Before I go far, I should probably say that I don't think of ASD and intellectual disability as being two completely separate things, at least in practice. In addition to the facts that of course some people have both, and that people who really only have ASD are often misdiagnosed with comorbid ID, I just feel there's a lot of overlap in terms of what people with ID and ASD are like, and also what our oppression is like. I hope it's obvious that this doesn't mean I would refer to myself as ID, or try to be in spaces/organizations that are just for people with ID--but it is the reason that I don't think of this as an ASD blog or really think of my disability-related trains of thought as ASD trains of thought. Also people with ASD, ID, and both all make me feel safe, and feeling safe is the focus of what I’m trying to say.
...
A bit of my history as staff or pseudo-staff, because I’m not really staff yet (actually at nine tonight I will be arriving at my first real staff job, at a summer camp). It is sort of a big identity thing, it’s in the sidebar, and I guess it gives me a somewhat different relationship to DD than someone who only has DD. Better and worse.
I once, like many people, was “interested in autism” (I can’t imagine being less interested in anything now). In my freshman year of college, when I was realizing that I wasn’t cut out for my previous aspirations, I took a psych practicum where we went into a special ed school and observed/helped out in a class of nonverbal ASD kids. I won’t pretend this was some kind of life-changing experience. I found it interesting and relaxing, and was fond of one girl who would somberly take hold of my hands and run her fingers over the collars of my shirts. Her aide was really shitty to her, and one of my psych classmates explained that it was hard to find people to work with disabled kids. So that’s how I started aiming in that direction--I figured it would be easy and I couldn’t possibly be as bad as the people who were already doing it.
That summer, when I was nineteen, I got my first job. I worked in Cape Cod at a complex that contained a golf course, a drive-in theater, a regular movie theater, and a flea market (which was located in the same place as the drive-in). Mostly I cashiered at the flea market snack bar during the day, which I really liked. Some days were incredibly slow and I could just read and write. I didn’t mind days that were fast either. I liked dealing with big crowds from a safe vantage point behind my register, seeing lots of different kinds of people, and endearing myself to the flea market vendors who would then give me discounts when I wandered out of the snack bar on my break. The other people who worked during the day were two middle-aged women who were easy to be with. We would joke around together.
Every week, I would have to work about a day and two nights at the regular movie theater, where most of the employees were my age. This was a lot harder because they all knew each other and some of them seemed slightly contemptuous of me. (I should have expected this after what happened the first night I worked there, when they reacted with barely-concealed disgust after a teenage boy with a DD was unwise enough to start a conversation with them.) I also had more trouble working there because I wasn’t just a cashier, and I didn’t work fast when I was being asked to do lots of different things at once. So they were always at least slightly annoyed at me.
Then later my boss started assigning me to work at the drive-in snack bar at night. This was sort of okay because I got to use the register I was used to, and watch the movie out the windows. But I didn’t get along as well with the people who worked there. I was going through some issues about being queer, and two of the people who worked there were a middle-aged lesbian couple. I always wanted to talk to them and have them like me, but they liked everyone else better. I especially wanted to talk to one who was a special ed teacher, but she was always rolling her eyes when I had trouble understanding the words she was saying or overfocused on how to do something. At both the drive-in and the movie theater, I spent some nights getting more and more depressed, feeling really cold and nervous as my mind went over the same circles (especially when I was sweeping or mopping floors). I didn’t know anyone in Cape Cod so my social interactions consisted of joking around at the flea market, and phone conversations and letters with my friends from school. I got more and more lonely and depressed.
The last night I worked at the complex, I worked at the drive-in. As I got to work and was punching in, getting ice for the soda fountain, and putting my hair up, I started to think about how I would soon be back in college with my friends. But when I thought of my friends, I thought that they weren’t real. I knew they were, but they didn’t feel real. They felt like people I had made up.
All night I felt like I was slipping away from myself. It was really hard for me to remember any errands I was being sent on (I had to make up little songs to remind myself which novelty ice creams to get out of the freezer which was about two yards away from where I was standing). I kept wishing they’d put me on the register, which I was good at, but when they finally put me on the register, I was fucked. Every time a new customer appeared, I couldn’t recognize the food they were holding. I looked at it really carefully and slowly figured it out: pizza, chocolate bar, Hoodwich. Then I had to look at the register and find the key to press (I normally knew the register like the back of my hand). During the rush between the first and second feature, the special ed teacher snapped at me for getting in her way and accidentally signing in to the wrong register. As soon as the movie was over, I did my share of the cleaning as fast as I could, pulled on my flannel shirt and my bag of books, and slipped out the back of the building while the other employees were hugging each other goodbye.
...
That summer, and during the fall, I had occasional positive encounters with other DD adults. I was part of a school club that visited and arranged activities for the residents of local group homes. I also met a few people who came to the flea market and movie theater.
Once I remember being at the theater all day with a really intimidating girl named Julie--in the morning and early afternoon, almost no one came in. A guy with Down Syndrome came in with his mom, who went to the bathroom and bought gift certificates from Julie. As was usually the case when it was slow, one person was at the counter and another person sat down in the theater lobby. The guy came in and sat across from me in the lobby, and soon he was telling me about the upcoming Star Trek movie, which he obviously spent a lot of time reading about online. I am not into Star Trek (except the girl version, which I don’t think the movie was based on), but I could occasionally interject, “Oh, I love Simon Pegg,” and I was relieved enough by the non-stressful interaction that I enjoyed everything he had to say.
I remember wondering what Julie thought. It was probably obvious that I had no job-related reason to talk to this guy. Did she think I was being nice? Did she think, wow, Amanda’s so weird that she can only talk to a person with Down Syndrome? (Number two is of course the true assessment, although it’s interesting that I assume the agency is mine. “That guy has such a calming presence that even a giant freak like Amanda doesn’t mind talking to him” is an equally accurate way of putting it.)
These brief encounters were pleasant, but the real game-changer occurred in the spring term of my sophomore year. My friend suggested that we volunteer twice a week at the MRC sheltered workshop for DD adults. Ostensibly we taught a class about countries--we would discuss facts about a particular country, look through books about the country, and do a related craft. Talking and looking at books didn’t take very long, and coloring gets boring after the first thirty years, so we often spent a lot of time talking about whatever we wanted. After class, my friend and I would walk around the workshop saying hello to people we had met when visiting the group homes. Every time we were there, our beloved Mike Ward would come and find us at least twice (barging into the conference room to show us his fliers, running up to us before we left and giving us a drawing he’d stolen from someone else in his group home).
Over time, three things happened.
1. There were some people I became more close with, and would usually sit and talk with during class. I learned a lot about what was important to them and what they were happy and unhappy about. It was cool because it was the first time I really saw “that kind of people” on a regular basis and knew them well enough to consider them friends.
2. A lot of things I hated about myself were things I subconsciously associated with “that kind of people.” Once I actually met a lot of t.k.o.p., I was able to recognize the nature of my self-hatred; and once I got to know some of them, I was able to see that I should be unashamed of any resemblance between us.
3. I loved going to the workshop because a lot of the people were so loud and effusive in how they expressed themselves, and many people were really happy to see my friend and me. I felt that here, people liked me, I knew where I stood with them, and there was enough diversity of behavior that I didn’t have to worry about doing things right. I once said that I hoped the afterlife was in the MRC workshop.
...
Most feelings can be accurately summed up by quotes from the movie Serenity. This feeling's quote is the thing the Operative says to Mal about how there would be no place for him in a better world. It sums up the guilty resentment I experienced as I became more advanced in how I thought about developmental disabilities--saying "ID" instead of MR or retarded (the words that the nondisabled people around me used), and becoming more aware that sheltered workshops and group homes weren't something I should simply accept as the places where MRC consumers would naturally work and live. The people at MRC were some of the only people in the world I felt uncomplicatedly safe with; although I recognized it as fair that I should feel scared of offending them the way I felt scared of offending everyone else, I felt that I’d lost something when I realized there was an appropriate word to use and I hadn't been using it.
I liked the workshop and the group homes, because they were environments where people without disabilities were in the minority. I hoped to work at the MRC school after college because it had the kind of low-key setting I felt comfortable in, and the building was full of kids who looked and acted different. I wasn't interested in being an aide for an ID or ASD kid at a mainstream school, where I imagined the halls would be noisy and chaotic, my student and I would sit in a neat row of desks, and the non-disabled students would bully us both. (If my student was socially successful, of course, that would also suck; my student would be my only person to talk to, since I knew I wouldn’t fit in with the teachers and other aides.)
I'm using the past tense even though not all these feelings were in the past.
...
I've only been to the workshop twice this year. But I have cashiered at my school's dining hall during the period of the day when several people from the workshop also work there, and in light of becoming more guilty, this has been a tense experience.
First there is Laurie, who is someone I knew at the workshop last year. We weren't close because she was always with her boyfriend, but when she saw me at the dining hall she would say hello in the energetic way she did most things. Sometimes, in the first few weeks of my job, she would come up to the register and we would each ask how the other person was doing. This petered out, and I'm wondering if it was because I felt self-conscious around Laurie and talked to her in the shy restrained way I would talk to an acquaintance who wasn't disabled. After a month, she just said hello to me in a bored way, and this made me sad.
Second there are other people, who I liked to watch when I was at work because it's a relief to see people moving jerkily, swinging their arms, or concentrating on things you're not supposed to concentrate on. Some of them I wanted to talk to--a guy with a beard, a guy who warned me not to touch a stack of hot dishes. I would always walk by the MRC people to punch in and out, to get detergent, to throw rags away--it started to make me feel cold like I felt cold during nights at the theater complex, this feeling of not being able to talk to them because I wasn't good for them or was drawn to them for the wrong reasons.
...
I think of myself as very normal-acting. And I am very normal. Acting. I have spent a lot of time buckling down to get through things without being immediately identified as extremely different. When you ignore feelings for long enough, they go away, and this means that in addition to my occasional dissociative symptoms, the fact that I for example have anxiety problems is something that I have to prove to myself logically by making a list of things I’ve done that could have no other motive. I tend not to feel angry when I hear people say things like, “Retarded people depress me because there’s no point to their lives,” because I do not feel anger on a regular basis. I figure that professionals who try to stomp stimming out stimming people are just coming from a place of not really examining their privilege or putting themselves in stimming people’s shoes. Actually a lot of the writing on this blog, I think, is a result of my numbness and subsequent willingness to engage with arguments that are quite irrational and hateful.
Anyway, I think what I’m trying to say is that I don’t think of myself as disabled. Or I do but I don’t. In terms of working with developmentally disabled kids and adults, I don’t think of myself as a DD person who feels understandably relaxed when I get to stop packaging myself for non-disabled consumption. Instead I just think of myself the way I imagine non-disabled people see me: this weird girl who is really drawn to DD people, beyond professionalism, beyond allyship...just, kind of creepy.
As I don’t experience anger and anxiety on an obvious level, I forget what it means for me that I am normal-acting. But I can try to construct the facts like a detective. I have some very good friends and they are different. But the truth is that most moments (airport, library, classroom) I never stop working, I feel incredibly inadequate anyway, and that’s painful in a way I don’t think about because it’s always there. Except with certain people at the MRC.
Passing is not some sort of miserable burden--the group homes I think of so nostalgically are not places I’d want to live myself. I like being in college and thinking about where I want to move after I graduate. I like blundering around alone more than I would like having people ask if someone like me should be left unattended. I like privilege, do I ever--but I would like to avoid having to earn it with the constant, barely successful work of passing. If I was staff in a segregated environment, that would be possible--I’d retain the social status of a normal person without having to actually be around n.p.s.
So I mean--I’m not saying I’m not a piece of shit.
...
What I try to do is--and I mean, I don’t want to feel it all, but the other week I told my best friend that I could remember facts about him, I could remember how we started talking, but I felt emotionally like I’d never met him before. I was even kind of nervous, like I was talking to a celebrity for the first time, but trying to pass for someone who knew him well. I didn’t realize until my friend got upset that this wasn’t something that happened to lots of people. I conclude that this level of dislocation, while practical, is a little unbearable if I’m going to continue being alive.
What I’m trying to explain to myself is that I also count. Because of course I know that I’m a piece of shit--I understand that it is horrible to feel attached to segregated environments because those are generally environments where people have less control. I got very afraid of these feelings in myself, they were a piece of my sin I couldn’t even look at--and this was infuriating because I had felt like the person I was with MRC people was the only really pure part of me. I began to sort of resent progress, or at least hope it would happen slowly so I could still have the kinds of jobs I wanted to have.
I am trying to remember that I am in fact disabled and that I’m actually stressed out by real things, and that a better world for disabled people is not a world where Disabled People (whoever they are) get better and I am still stuck where I am. In a better world I would not have had to hit on a solution to avoid the wearing down of my ability to feel or sense things; I wouldn’t have to think about my life like Fantastic Mr. Fox, trying to locate the exact tunnel I can use to feed myself without coming in contact with Boggis Bunce and Bean. I’m trying to remember that if I wasn’t disabled I wouldn’t feel like I’m getting away with something when I get a job or have a conversation with a stranger. When people asked me out I wouldn’t avoid answering rather than wonder when they would realize what was wrong. If the MRC workshop is a refuge then it’s actually a refuge from something, right?
I think I’m trying to remember that while I can and do oppress MRC consumers if I accept everything the MRC does as The Way Things Should Be, instead of hating myself it is better to untangle it and try to remember that I can also be helped by that nebulous Progress.
26 May, 2010
from a comment I posted here
The point of disclosing is that you have "real trouble" if people don't understand the way you are. People may not read you as disabled, but read the way you are as some kind of choice or a symptom of something besides disability.
For example, I am a bad speaker and have been since I started talking. I run my words together, speak softly, get off track easily, and perhaps most unfortunately I have trouble using the kind of words that go with the verbal dress code of the situation (for example I'm often mistaken for a class clown when I'm being completely genuine, simply because my word choice doesn't seem academic enough so my classmates and professor assume it is a joke). By concentrating hard I can make sure I stay on track, but that leads to me seeming very nervous or sometimes like I don't care (because it's hard to monitor my content carefully while also making expressions and looking people in the eye).
One result of this is that people make assumptions about my character. For example because they think I'm nervous, they think that I'm shy or I'm being dishonest. People also make assumptions about me being somehow weak or immature--judgments that are insulting, because they mean that no matter how emotionally strong or mature I may become, I will always be regarded negatively because I have trouble talking.
I also recently heard that someone who interviewed me for a job working as a camp counselor thought I wasn't capable of being responsible for someone else's safety, because I was "so quiet" when I was being interviewed.
Sorry to write such a long and in-depth response but I think these are good examples of how disability can affect a person negatively without being read as a disability.
For example, I am a bad speaker and have been since I started talking. I run my words together, speak softly, get off track easily, and perhaps most unfortunately I have trouble using the kind of words that go with the verbal dress code of the situation (for example I'm often mistaken for a class clown when I'm being completely genuine, simply because my word choice doesn't seem academic enough so my classmates and professor assume it is a joke). By concentrating hard I can make sure I stay on track, but that leads to me seeming very nervous or sometimes like I don't care (because it's hard to monitor my content carefully while also making expressions and looking people in the eye).
One result of this is that people make assumptions about my character. For example because they think I'm nervous, they think that I'm shy or I'm being dishonest. People also make assumptions about me being somehow weak or immature--judgments that are insulting, because they mean that no matter how emotionally strong or mature I may become, I will always be regarded negatively because I have trouble talking.
I also recently heard that someone who interviewed me for a job working as a camp counselor thought I wasn't capable of being responsible for someone else's safety, because I was "so quiet" when I was being interviewed.
Sorry to write such a long and in-depth response but I think these are good examples of how disability can affect a person negatively without being read as a disability.
05 April, 2010
Some more reading
I was going to tell this to Lion Face but it's not really an LF-specific story so I will just tell you. Last week I was at the doctor's office when a DD person came in. The reason I'm using the umbrella term, even though I know he was intellectually disabled and not ASD, is that the reason I read him was his body language. There are some DD people who have a really distinctive, dramatic way of walking, and I think anyone could read them, but I like to think that my reading of this guy wasn't something that just anyone could do. Without being at all critical of the intellectually disabled people I know in Ohio, who tend to dress in a distinctive way, I'll say that he didn't dress like them. He was wearing an orange striped polo shirt and khaki pants. He looked nice.
The way he moved was nice too. How do I say this? The shape of his smile, but mostly just the fact that he wanted to do things he wasn't doing. He waited for his aide to go in and talk to the nurse, and he started to twist his legs around, started to bend one of his legs up, but kind of stopped himself and put his leg back down.
His aide came out and sat down next to him. And the nicest thing happened--they looked at each other and grinned sneakily. I'd almost forgotten why I used to want to work with adults, but the potential for sneaky grinning is definitely the number one reason. (I'm probably going to work with adults because I think there's a greater need for sincere and ethical support staff when it comes to adults. But in light of recent events, i.e. Joe Cuteness, I've started feeling more reluctant about the idea of not working with kids.)
I wanted to talk to the guy, but I felt weird. His aide went over to the receptionist and he looked at a magazine. I felt like he was aware of my presence because he kept doing almost-stimmy movements with his hands, but when I looked up (I was sitting across from him) he would stop. So I said, "What are you reading?" and he said excitedly, "Good!" and I said "What's it about?" and he indicated that he hadn't really started looking through the magazine yet, and I said, "Well, what are you going to read?" and he looked through the magazine for a minute and then his aide came and got him to go up to the reception desk.
Cut to me feeling weird. Is it okay for me to bug other DD people and try to talk to them? And I mean, let's be honest--it may feel the same to me, I may feel plugged into them in a sense I don't feel with non-disabled people, but we're basically looking at an apparently normal person striking up a conversation with a person who (while almost passing when he doesn't talk) is moderately to severely intellectually disabled. Doesn't that seem patronizing, or something?
I wasn't being charitable. His way of holding himself warmed something in me. It's really, really nice to see other people who move differently--it's funny, because who knows if the way I move even looks that strange--I'm not masochistic enough to ever videotape myself walking. But it's such a deep part of me, it feels like a huge barrier between me and everyone else.
For the past year I've been mildly crushing on a straight girl I don't really know, who has a jerky way of moving. I mentioned it to Noah--I mean, he knew that I liked her, but I was saying that it was a little bit about her being awkward, both as a person and the way she walks--and he said, "Oh--I didn't know if you could tell if other people are weird or not," and I said I could, and he said, "Do you know the way you walk is a little funny--" and I said yeah.
(I guess that exchange makes Noah sound like a jerk. I don't know. I find him an easy person to be with in a lot of ways. Sometimes when I see people I really like, I stretch my hand out towards them, and when I do it to Noah he imitates me and pretends to be a deejay.)
The way he moved was nice too. How do I say this? The shape of his smile, but mostly just the fact that he wanted to do things he wasn't doing. He waited for his aide to go in and talk to the nurse, and he started to twist his legs around, started to bend one of his legs up, but kind of stopped himself and put his leg back down.
His aide came out and sat down next to him. And the nicest thing happened--they looked at each other and grinned sneakily. I'd almost forgotten why I used to want to work with adults, but the potential for sneaky grinning is definitely the number one reason. (I'm probably going to work with adults because I think there's a greater need for sincere and ethical support staff when it comes to adults. But in light of recent events, i.e. Joe Cuteness, I've started feeling more reluctant about the idea of not working with kids.)
I wanted to talk to the guy, but I felt weird. His aide went over to the receptionist and he looked at a magazine. I felt like he was aware of my presence because he kept doing almost-stimmy movements with his hands, but when I looked up (I was sitting across from him) he would stop. So I said, "What are you reading?" and he said excitedly, "Good!" and I said "What's it about?" and he indicated that he hadn't really started looking through the magazine yet, and I said, "Well, what are you going to read?" and he looked through the magazine for a minute and then his aide came and got him to go up to the reception desk.
Cut to me feeling weird. Is it okay for me to bug other DD people and try to talk to them? And I mean, let's be honest--it may feel the same to me, I may feel plugged into them in a sense I don't feel with non-disabled people, but we're basically looking at an apparently normal person striking up a conversation with a person who (while almost passing when he doesn't talk) is moderately to severely intellectually disabled. Doesn't that seem patronizing, or something?
I wasn't being charitable. His way of holding himself warmed something in me. It's really, really nice to see other people who move differently--it's funny, because who knows if the way I move even looks that strange--I'm not masochistic enough to ever videotape myself walking. But it's such a deep part of me, it feels like a huge barrier between me and everyone else.
For the past year I've been mildly crushing on a straight girl I don't really know, who has a jerky way of moving. I mentioned it to Noah--I mean, he knew that I liked her, but I was saying that it was a little bit about her being awkward, both as a person and the way she walks--and he said, "Oh--I didn't know if you could tell if other people are weird or not," and I said I could, and he said, "Do you know the way you walk is a little funny--" and I said yeah.
(I guess that exchange makes Noah sound like a jerk. I don't know. I find him an easy person to be with in a lot of ways. Sometimes when I see people I really like, I stretch my hand out towards them, and when I do it to Noah he imitates me and pretends to be a deejay.)
26 February, 2010
And We Could Go in the Ocean
(This is for a class, and as I mentioned when you write personal essays you're supposed to make yourself sound as unpleasant as possible--so keep in mind I don't actually stare at girls in the shower in real life, I sort of put that in to make myself seem creepier. However, now that I turned it in, I can't believe I said that, and I feel like it kind of ruins the story because it's like, "why should I care about this CREEP?")
When I went to farm camp there was a girl, Abby, who I now think was schizophrenic. I mean, in psychology classes, I can’t help but think of her. When I was younger I didn’t think of these things in much complexity. I thought of her as “retarded,” I think. But I’d never met any kids who were actually retarded. I meant she had a sense of being guileless. And that I liked talking to her because it was like going somewhere else.
Our camp was a camp for kids with problems. Except for some kids who were going to Yale. In retrospect it sounds kind of messed up, like they were slumming, us and them—but it didn’t feel that way. You could maybe briefly pretend you were another kind of kid. How did the Group know if your parents had sent you here because they couldn’t control you, or if you were just interested in planting vegetables and living without light?
Except, Abby was apparent. In Group, the counselors would weirdly spur us to new heights of backbiting. For example one time we were told—all fifty of us—to go around and say something we thought was wrong with the way people acted at camp. We would work ourselves up into a fervor even if we didn’t want to. If we tried to say, “Um, people are cliquey?” we were told to say exactly who we meant. “Paca and Jake always sit together and I feel like it wouldn’t be allowed to sit with them,” we would finally get out, slowly, gnawing at the hems of our jeans with our hands. Then Paca would cry while Jake glared at us, trying to open his eyes wide as possible to look sincere. I mean, no one was supposed to be mad. But Abby became distraught, and when it was her turn she said, “We’re broken, we’re all shattered apart, in pieces. There’s been a schism, we’re everywhere. I’m very worried about the schism, I don’t know how we’ll find ourselves. We have to get back together.”
One time I was sent to get Abby because she didn’t show up in the morning to plant vegetables. Abby was in the creepy bathroom that caused me for the only time in my life to stop wearing makeup. She was taking a shower, her pink towel draped over the bar. I reminded her about crew but she said, “I’m taking a shower. I’m cleaning myself. I’m not done.”
Abby wasn’t concerned about the shower curtain and I could see her inside. I’d never seen a girl in the shower before. Abby’s body was skinny and calm and she looked different without her glasses. Later, digging holes for beets, we looked up and saw her coming slantily along the road, with the dawn breaking briefly, the trees starting to beam with yellow light.
I was the favorite girl of Becky, a tiny thirteen-year-old who had depression and anorexia and smoked cigarettes. There were two kids with Asperger’s Syndrome, Noah and me. I loved Noah because it’s always easier to forgive your faults in someone else and even find them charming. I defended Noah constantly to my friend Chase, who had a wide white face and dark hair, was openly against Group and wore Salad Fingers shirts. “He’s fifteen,” I remember Chase saying about Noah, “fifteen!” and I started crying and Chase apologized for making me cry. I think Chase was talking about how Noah should have the sense that other fifteen-year-olds, like Chase, had. I think Chase, in specific, was talking about Noah’s horrible unintentional love affair with the twelve-year-old Sara, who was tone-deaf with a face like a distracted frog. Sara just said they were in love and Noah didn’t say anything, just frowned or smiled to himself. It was hard to tell.
I miss Noah because he was like me, he blundered into problems and then spent time apologizing, over and over, for everything he might have done. Noah was so small he looked younger than Sara, which made it a little less creepy in my mind. I was seventeen but at farm camp I took advantage of whatever it was that made Noah and me pass for younger; I hung out with Sara for a while, letting people take me for a smart and mature fourteen-year-old instead of a hopelessly droopy and spacey almost-adult.
Noah’s face looked nearly deformed in its tenderness, his eyes like marbles behind round wire glasses, his tiny, pointy nose. Noah was just all-around tiny and pointy, certain counselors took a liking to him and would just hold him during Group, his small shoulders burrowed into Dave’s sweatered side, Dave’s hand on Noah’s arm. Noah was like a leech or a suction cup maybe. He was easy to love.
Maybe I also was and didn’t know it. It’s the apologizing maybe that shocks affection out of people when they least expect it. This girl who wanted to be a missionary was hugging me on the last day of camp, crying inconsolably and staring into my eyes, telling me not to be so hard on myself. My cabin told me I was brave.
So maybe it was stupid for me to imagine I passed. Everyone probably knew I was a Noah, an Abby. Although when I first met Noah, I didn’t know he was a Noah. We fed the pigs together one morning and talked about aliens, stuck our heads into the pen.
Once Jesse, the gay counselor, said in Group that he had something to say to me. Then in the art and music cabin, in the rain, he told me he was afraid to apply for a job at Banana Republic. He said he didn’t think he was good enough for anything, that it was hard to even look at people. Jesse had a clear voice and a deferential manner. Sara had a crush on him; she was loudly homophobic but very naïve. I had a crush on him too, kind of. I always used to get crushes on gay men and not understand it, but I guess it’s just like the way I love Noah, the surprise of seeing your problems in someone else’s mind.
Jesse said I was pretty and shouldn’t always go around saying I was fat. He started to tear up. I told him about my dogs and he recognized they were named after characters from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. We complained that people no longer watched it or knew what it was.
One day before Group started, Jesse complimented me because I was always writing down what was happening on my arms and legs. My parents were upset about me doing this, they sometimes cried and said people would know that I cut myself because I didn’t care about the state of my skin. Jesse explained how he was going to be a singer and he could tell because he sang all the time, everywhere, and I was the same.
I wanted to tell Jesse I was gay but I didn’t. Eventually I told my cabin and they said I was brave. Becky was excited and struck up the same kind of relationship Sara stuck up with Noah, but with less implied consent this time around. For a long time I thought farm camp was important because it was the first time people didn’t know I was gay, I could control it, because I could be a good person if people just didn’t know. I was sure a lot meaner to Becky after she found out.
However, my feelings about farm camp are now more diffuse. Sort of like when my dog Xander is curled into me during a thunderstorm, I wake up and there is this fleecey substance pressed into me, a wide, round heart beating hard against my own—and it’s like, why would you come to me? Don’t you know any better than to trust me like this?
23 February, 2010
reasons to have bangs/reading
I've never liked having eyebrows and today I decided to stop having them. There are kids at Oberlin who draw lines on their faces or grow half a beard, and I figure I won't be here forever. Maybe I won't even be able to have green hair when I'm older (that would be a tragedy but I'm slo-o-o-owly trying to adjust myself to the idea that maybe super-blond would look okay; red is definitely a trial and there's no way I'd ever go back to not dyeing it at all).
(I deleted the pictures because I think they're creepy.)
I'm also trying to give up makeup for Lent (to some extent). Although I just realized that drawing on eyebrows is going to take WAY more time. Argh.
Speaking of people who don't have eyebrows, I was thinking of writing about reading people. I mean, trying to figure out if people are Like Me (which means, I guess, ASD people, intellectually disabled people, and some people with mental illnesses, or people who are just sort of on the border of having something, but actually don't--well, if you know what I mean, you know what I mean, and if you don't, you don't). This is an activity that can be comforting and a lot of fun.
In Edinburgh there was this girl in my building who was also from America--an international student, a first year. I only talked to her a few times, but if you asked her a question, she would answer it and then say, "You?" I guess this is another thing that you either know what I mean or don't, but I wish I had tried to be friends with her. I wish I could have said, I know you plan out what you say before you say it, but you don't have to do that with me.
There is a way of being serious and concerned and planning things out, and if you pass to normal people, they fucking ride you about it. Don't be so serious! Don't get so upset! Why do you have to know exactly what's going to happen? Just be yourself! Just do whatever you feel like doing! Whatever I'm concentrating on is never as hard as hiding my look of concentration to calm the norms. Planning out what to say is not so bad, is even fun, but delivering it so it doesn't sound like a script is just--they frequently catch you, and if it's something that's supposed to be spontaneous, well--
What I'm trying to say is that even though I think Evelyn Evelyn is kind of a stupid idea, I wasn't that upset about it. I mean, I completely respected that other people were and admired them for saying so. However, then I saw this video (start at 2:20--however, a really good example is 4:10):
This video makes me feel upset because Amanda Palmer is using body language that isn't hers. I'm not into Jason Webley's music, so I don't know what his body language is usually like, but she doesn't move like that or make those kind of facial expressions or hold herself that way. There are lots of people who do have intense/scared/stiff/otherwise nonstandard body language who are musicians--like Jeff Mangum, Laura Marling, and Daniel Johnston. It's awesome that their fans like the way they move or don't move (in fact I'm a fan of all three of them, and love watching videos of them). But I've been a fan of AFP for years and her body language and expressions in that video are super fake.
It just kind of hurts my feelings as a person who actually moves/looks like that. Is that a weird thing to say?
ETA: I think when I shaved my eyebrows I was possibly in some kind of shutdown that I might still be in. I think I've been in it for like two days. The Longest Shutdown sounds like the title of a children's book or maybe something for the Guinness Book of World Records.
I think I might need to talk to someone, I mean I started doing this blog as a way of being absent because I didn't want to feel things that might make me hurt myself. For the past two months I've been returning, and that is an odd experience, like your blood coming back into your hands after you've been cold outside. I don't know. It would explain why I can't seem to get anything done, if there's actually something seriously wrong with me. When I think about the UK I almost can't remember being there. I think of time visually and it's just, August, Christmas. I know I was there but I can't see it.
(I deleted the pictures because I think they're creepy.)
I'm also trying to give up makeup for Lent (to some extent). Although I just realized that drawing on eyebrows is going to take WAY more time. Argh.
Speaking of people who don't have eyebrows, I was thinking of writing about reading people. I mean, trying to figure out if people are Like Me (which means, I guess, ASD people, intellectually disabled people, and some people with mental illnesses, or people who are just sort of on the border of having something, but actually don't--well, if you know what I mean, you know what I mean, and if you don't, you don't). This is an activity that can be comforting and a lot of fun.
In Edinburgh there was this girl in my building who was also from America--an international student, a first year. I only talked to her a few times, but if you asked her a question, she would answer it and then say, "You?" I guess this is another thing that you either know what I mean or don't, but I wish I had tried to be friends with her. I wish I could have said, I know you plan out what you say before you say it, but you don't have to do that with me.
There is a way of being serious and concerned and planning things out, and if you pass to normal people, they fucking ride you about it. Don't be so serious! Don't get so upset! Why do you have to know exactly what's going to happen? Just be yourself! Just do whatever you feel like doing! Whatever I'm concentrating on is never as hard as hiding my look of concentration to calm the norms. Planning out what to say is not so bad, is even fun, but delivering it so it doesn't sound like a script is just--they frequently catch you, and if it's something that's supposed to be spontaneous, well--
What I'm trying to say is that even though I think Evelyn Evelyn is kind of a stupid idea, I wasn't that upset about it. I mean, I completely respected that other people were and admired them for saying so. However, then I saw this video (start at 2:20--however, a really good example is 4:10):
This video makes me feel upset because Amanda Palmer is using body language that isn't hers. I'm not into Jason Webley's music, so I don't know what his body language is usually like, but she doesn't move like that or make those kind of facial expressions or hold herself that way. There are lots of people who do have intense/scared/stiff/otherwise nonstandard body language who are musicians--like Jeff Mangum, Laura Marling, and Daniel Johnston. It's awesome that their fans like the way they move or don't move (in fact I'm a fan of all three of them, and love watching videos of them). But I've been a fan of AFP for years and her body language and expressions in that video are super fake.
It just kind of hurts my feelings as a person who actually moves/looks like that. Is that a weird thing to say?
ETA: I think when I shaved my eyebrows I was possibly in some kind of shutdown that I might still be in. I think I've been in it for like two days. The Longest Shutdown sounds like the title of a children's book or maybe something for the Guinness Book of World Records.
I think I might need to talk to someone, I mean I started doing this blog as a way of being absent because I didn't want to feel things that might make me hurt myself. For the past two months I've been returning, and that is an odd experience, like your blood coming back into your hands after you've been cold outside. I don't know. It would explain why I can't seem to get anything done, if there's actually something seriously wrong with me. When I think about the UK I almost can't remember being there. I think of time visually and it's just, August, Christmas. I know I was there but I can't see it.
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