Sensory Issues

Something like this happens:

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

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

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

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

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

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

The person didn't mean it like that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

content warning for violence and racism

I don't expect this to change anyone's mind, because it is seeming to me that a lot of my fellow white people just don't care and refuse to acknowledge when an innocent black person is murdered by a white person for no reason. This isn't going to be a very good or original piece of writing, but I don't want to be silent about this either.

Mike Brown, Tamir Rice, John Crawford, Eric Garner, Renisha McBride, Trayvon Martin, and all the other black people who have been killed this way in recent months and recent years, were innocent people who did not deserve to die. The people who killed them were wrong and racist, as were people who defended their killers and the people who, in most of these cases, have allowed the killers to go completely unpunished.

Of course no human being is completely innocent. No one is an angel. This doesn't mean anyone deserves to die for being a normal imperfect human being, and attempting to "tell the other side of the story" by talking about the victim's drinking, supposed petty crimes, or social media posts is hateful. When people tried to defend George Zimmerman by showing that Trayvon swore and talked about sex on Twitter, all they did was reiterate how horrible Zimmerman's crime was by showing the average and infinitely complex young person whose life he cut off for no reason. Yes, Trayvon was "no angel," but only in the sense that he was a regular kid.

After Mike Brown was killed, the Ferguson police department went around looking for something that would make him look like a criminal. They have successfully convinced many people that Mike stole cigars from a convenience store prior to his death, and that he can be seen on video physically harassing an employee at the store. First of all, this wouldn't excuse his murder and it can't possibly have been the motivation for Darren Wilson to kill him, since Wilson could not have known about it at the time. But it is also unbelievable that Mike even did this. There is a video of Mike buying the cigars he supposedly stole and the store owner does not think that the person in the surveillance camera video is Mike. (There are sources for this in item 3 of this helpful master post about Ferguson.)

The situation with Mike Brown's "robbery" is very telling. It shows how if powerful people want to cover up a crime, they can find a way to make the victim look bad and they can make the public believe it. Not only are some white people already biased against black men, but when authority figures show the surveillance video and say it is Mike Brown, it can be hard to question them. It was hard for me to believe that the police were this dishonest in their attempts to protect a murderer--but they really were. The "robbery" brings home that any victim could be portrayed this way. Even if there existed a human being who was impossibly morally perfect, that wouldn't protect their reputation if they were a black person murdered by a cop. The facts could be twisted to convince the public that they were a bad person and somehow frightened their murderer into killing them.

Some of these victims had done illegal things in their lives; some had not; some were big and strong; and some were people who couldn't possibly have been physically threatening, like Renisha McBride who had just been injured in a car accident. But not only can some of these details be misrepresented, they are not relevant.  What these black murder victims have in common is that they didn't deserve what was done to them and their killers should have been unequivocally condemned by public opinion and the law. The fact is that over and over, their killers have been excused.

Disabilarchy?

I've noticed that some portrayals of the disability experience in fiction are pretty much diametrically opposed to the disability experience in real life.

In fiction:

• Employers have no choice but to hire disabled applicants even when they are not qualified, because they could be sued for not hiring a disabled person
• Disabled people's work is disproportionately rewarded even when it's bad, because people feel sorry for us or are just positively biased toward us
• It's easy and profitable to fake a disability in order to get disability benefits from the government
• Professors have to provide ridiculous accommodations for students who say they are disabled, when in fact those students are lazy or not smart enough to be in college
• People with mental disabilities are the perpetrators of violent crimes
• A "black transgender disabled lesbian" has a big advantage in life because people want to give her jobs and other opportunities

In reality:

• Employers often do not want to hire disabled applicants because of their mistaken ideas about what our disability means.  It's easy for them to discriminate against us because they can just say "We didn't think you'd be a good fit for the job" or something like that.  They also can fire someone for being disabled if they just pretend to fire them for a different reason.  Even if an employer admits that they are not hiring someone or firing them because they are disabled, suing someone is expensive.
• Some disabled people are legally allowed to be paid a fraction of minimum wage if their employer says they cannot work as fast as a non-disabled person. For example, Goodwill does this, and plenty of people think it is acceptable. (Articles about Goodwill: here and here, and many comments asserting that disabled people are not good enough workers to deserve minimum wage: here, here, and here; and saying that people who need accommodations do not deserve minimum wage, even though accommodations are their legal right: here).
• In the US and the UK, it is a lot of work to even apply for disability benefits (more work than some disabled people can do); many disabled people are denied benefits for stupid reasons; and the benefits are not very much.  You also then can't save money, or you will lose your benefits.
• It's a lot of work to get accommodations in college (again, more work than some disabled people can do; my post about that here); and even if you do all the work to get accommodations, a professor might refuse to give them to you if they feel like it.  This happened to someone I knew whose professor thought it was stupid for her to get a note-taker, so he dragged his feet on arranging it and then tried to arrange it in a way that revealed the disabled student's identity, which he was not allowed to do.  Many disabled students in college are struggling due to lack of support, and about half the (smart, hardworking) disabled kids I met in college had to drop out.  Still, some people imagine that disabled students are coasting through life on a fluffy cloud of accommodations (here).
• People with mental disabilities are disproportionately the victims of violent crimes and society often makes excuses for the criminals, causing this type of crime to seem more and more acceptable for potential murderers and abusers.
• A black transgender disabled lesbian has to deal with racism, transphobia, ableism, homophobia, and sexism; the intersections thereof; and feeling like an outsider even in minority communities.  Plus, she's constantly invoked as a joke to show how bad "political correctness" supposedly is.

So, you have to ask: why is being disabled portrayed as being so easy and coming with so many opportunities, when in fact it comes with a lot of disadvantages?  Watching TV (and hearing some people talk), you would think that we live in a society ruled by disabled people.

///

I've been writing about the idea that you can't forgive someone until they're sorry.  Obviously, this isn't a rule, it's just something that can be really hard to do and, I think, damaging to require.  I was reading some comments on a post about a parent who tried to murder her disabled child; obviously there were endless calls for compassion, and the commenters who wanted to focus on the crime were being told that they should focus on compassion for the criminal instead.  To me it's a similar thing.

The focus on dealing with any kind of abuse or violence cannot be that we should be nicer to the people who commit it.  It just can't be.

That doesn't mean that murderers, rapists, etc. aren't human, or that their behavior may not have partially come from something bad happening to them, or that maybe if someone had been a little nicer to them or made things easier they wouldn't have committed the crime.  Those things might be true in some cases but it's not an appropriate thing to focus on and in some contexts, it's downright terrifying.

It's terrifying because it implies that non-perpetrators should be walking on eggshells in dealing with perpetrators.

Maybe if people provided more help or compassion to this parent, the parent would not have committed a murder.  (There's also the fact, rarely said but undeniable, that if the victim hadn't needed so much help we wouldn't be having this conversation.)

Maybe if people dressed differently, drank less, or expressed themselves more clearly, someone would not have sexually assaulted them.

Maybe if people were more nice/open/compassionate to someone, that person would not have behaved abusively.

No.  Wrong.  This frames things so what happened is the fault of either the victim, or people who were not involved, instead of the person who actually perpetrated what happened.  People do a lot of bad things to each other and the way to address that is not to focus on how other people should be nicer or more understanding to people who do bad things.

For one thing, if the perpetrator is not sorry and plans to keep doing similar things, then being compassionate just makes it easy for them to keep on doing those things.  For another, if there's a big focus on how victims or other people should have behaved differently, then the perpetrator can use those things to get away with their behavior or even to control their victims.

I'm not against being kind or compassionate to people, even people who have committed violence or abuse, but there's a difference between personally feeling compassionate, and trying to tell other people that they're wrong if they're not compassionate for people who have done bad things.  They are not required to be.

Anna is not that nice

I work for a woman named Anna who people are always saying is sweet and nice. Her dad gave me permission to blog about her, but he might not have done that if I told him that when another client at her day program kept saying, "Anna's nice, she's a good girl," I said under my breath, "No, not really." I hope no one heard this because it doesn't sound very complimentary of Anna, but I don't think saying she's a good girl is very complimentary either. I can't fully explain why it annoys me when people who don't see her much describe her that way.

Obviously, my reaction isn't because I think Anna is a mean person. She's just fine on the sweetness/niceness scale, but it's not something I would say when describing her. I would say: she's very particular about doing the things she likes and having her favorite things around her. She's kind of dignified and she plays her cards close to the chest, maybe because of her disability or maybe just because it's the dignified way to be. There are a few things that she immediately reacts to, but usually when Anna meets someone or has an experience, she takes a while to process the situation and then shows how she feels later. She likes throwing things and ripping up napkins and paper.

First and foremost I would describe Anna as someone who likes to have her own way, which I think is not a problem because Anna's way is pretty cool and doesn't involve making bombs or setting people on fire. I like that her parents don't treat her as someone who has "behavior problems" just because she has strong preferences and is good at expressing what she wants. There is a lot to commend about a disabled person who is confident in herself--so many people think there's something sinister about a disabled person who really likes some things and really dislikes others. Even writing this, I feel like I have to shy away from triggering some stereotype of a person who will scream and break things because they didn't get to eat their favorite kind of sandwich. It seems like there are only two ideas about disabled people--an overwhelmingly good/sweet idea, and the idea of someone who has preferences, and is therefore totally dangerous or a burden on other people (because people have to accommodate them which is a fate worse than death).

Where's the middle ground for someone who has lots of preferences, but in a way that the people around her thoroughly enjoy? Or who isn't mystically "full of love," but is just as capable of love as everyone else?

I'm not really sure, and maybe I'm the one limiting Anna by scowling inwardly when people say how good she is. But it just seems like a way of describing someone that is fundamentally impersonal and ill-fitting, especially for her.

Official Reactions

(Notes: This post contains references, mostly nominal, to a few things that trigger a lot of people, particularly violence, meat eating, and “national tragedies.” It’s not a very “tight” post because I am trying to explore some ideas I’m not sure about. It’s also very US-centric and I don’t know if people act this way in other countries. Finally, I am not a trauma survivor.)

Is a horrified reaction to images of violence more important than your efforts against violence?

I believe it’s not.

It seems to me like people’s reaction to the sight of violence or graphic descriptions of violence is held up as a higher indicator of their ethics than anything they actually are doing or think. Really, it either indicates who they are emotionally or their willingness to conform to standards of appropriate behavior.

For example, I knew a guy who, when a scene of male on female rape appeared in a movie or TV show, would comment, “It’s so hard for me to watch things like this,” but not in the context of asking for it to be turned off. Obviously there’s nothing wrong with him feeling that way, but it seems like rather than just avoiding things they cannot watch, people announce that they can’t watch something as though other people need to know this, and they sometimes even continue watching.

It’s really not worth mentioning except for practical purposes. First of all, despite the common performance of not being able to handle certain images of fictional or nonfictional violence, images like violent murder mysteries, slasher movies, and “true crime” books and TV shows are very popular. If people really couldn’t stand to hear or think about violent events, then they wouldn’t be reported on over and over.

On the subject of things that are reported on over and over, I think it’s disingenuous for people to act severely personally affected by 9/11 when they are not from New York, didn’t lose anyone, and didn’t have mental health problems focused on the event. Sorry to be so blunt but I don’t see the reasoning for someone from California or Utah thinking that they can claim 9/11 as a universal American experience. It didn’t happen to them and it’s just a symptom of the idea that we have to perform the official reactions instead of our own.

Similarly, when “a nation mourns” or “a nation’s heart breaks” because of a mass murder, you can count me out. Any reaction that I have to hearing about people being murdered is personal, not national, and I also know that there are many more people who I don’t hear about because their deaths aren’t considered tragic in the right way. It’s more important to me to think about how murders can be prevented than it is to pretend my heart is broken by something unrelated to me.

I’m pretty self conscious writing this because it’s probably the most stereotypically autistic thing I’ve ever said. It would be really easy for someone to say that I feel this way because I don’t have empathy or don’t understand the emotions most people have. But I obviously can’t convince someone otherwise if they choose to perceive me that way. The truth is this performance of discomfort and grief bothers me because I think it accomplishes the opposite of what’s necessary to make the world better.

First of all, it alienates the people who should be supported the most. If someone is very familiar with violence or abuse, they might be used to “horrific” stories and images. They might not react to them with obvious distress. When they hear about a violent crime, they might immediately start thinking about how to prevent similar crimes, instead of expressing grief. They might make jokes about abuse or speak about it bluntly. People who act this way are treated like they’re insensitive, inappropriate, and tasteless. I’m not saying that everyone needs to emulate them, but it’s a problem when people who are actually survivors, and/or are working tirelessly to end violence, can be perceived as not caring about violence because they don’t have the same reaction as people who are less involved.

On the other hand, some people who have survived violence are very distressed by images and stories of violence. To some extent, other people will be sympathetic to the needs of a person like this. If someone survived a school shooting and has panic attacks when he sees school shooting related images, people in his life might respect that and not show him a movie or TV show with a school shooting. But this accommodation might be allowed more because he’s seen as a broken victim who needs to be taken care of, than because people think his reaction is reasonable.

If he acts too angry and “entitled” about his triggers-- “What the fuck is wrong with you? You saw this movie before but still told me it was okay to watch it!”--then he’s “taking it too far.” People generally think of someone who has serious reactions to triggers as a person who needs an unfair amount of support. He shouldn’t act like it’s his right for people to be sensitive to his triggers. If his trauma is less impressive--if it was a long time ago or what happened isn’t quite shocking enough, or God forbid he even refused to disclose it--then people see him as even more unreasonable and spoiled.

And even if they respect his feelings, he’s still an outsider in a discussion of school shootings, because his experience is so different from the average person’s and for some reason, the average experience is the most important.

I haven’t thought of this since I was 12, but immediately after 9/11 my school chorus began to prepare for a 9/11 tribute assembly where we would sing patriotic and inspirational songs. We were far enough from the city that only one student at my school, “Lauren,” had lost a parent. On the day of the assembly I heard another girl ask a teacher: “But what about Lauren?”

“Don’t worry, I’m sure she won’t have to go to the assembly,” the teacher said.

I remember thinking how weird it was for us to be having this assembly--presumably to show we cared about 9/11--when it seemed likely to upset the person at school who was most affected by 9/11. It should be obvious that vague communal responses to “tragedy” are not centered around the people who are most affected, but on the emotions of people further away. If not, why are the emotions of survivors inappropriate, insensitive, unhealthy, or, at best, the “special needs” of a minority who must be accommodated?

I think the fetishizing of the emotional-but-shallow reaction encourages unethical behavior. I’m not trying to pick on people who eat meat (I eat meat sometimes too), but I think it’s a serious problem how horrified people will act about the sight of a dead pig or the idea of killing a pig, when they see no problem with eating pork. I’ve even heard someone imply she was morally superior to people who didn’t get upset by the sight of dead pigs--again, she was someone who ate dead pigs. This has implications far beyond eating meat or not eating meat and it can easily be seen in how people have different opinions about the deaths of people they can relate to--children, white people, non-disabled people, Americans--and people who seem too far away to be upset about.

It’s probably natural to be more upset about the death of a child, or someone you had a lot in common with, or the type of person you idealize. I’d probably have more of an emotional reaction to the murder of someone who lived in my city and had the same interests as me and had a disability. The thing is though that this reaction is meaningless. I shouldn’t let it dictate my opinion, because I should care equally about the murder of someone across the world who had nothing in common with me, or if I don’t, I should act like I do.

If I care more about my reaction to something that doesn’t directly affect me than I care about the reactions of people who are affected, or the facts of what happened, or how to keep it from happening again, then it’s like my idea of how to be a good person is based only in having feelings about things--not listening to and respecting people, not paying attention and researching what’s going on, not working to make things better.

This may surprise you but I think people are pretty bad already. But a great way to make yourself worse is to believe that you’re good because you did something completely useless that took no effort.

yeah so I want to use the r-word in a story I'm writing

and I'm going to use it in this post so be warned.

I'm not actually going to use it in the story I turn in to my workshop, because last time I turned in a draft of this story it was the most awful experience ever. Basically I wrote a story about a 12-year-old boy who goes to a behaviorist school for kids with autism (but no disability-related words are used in the story, because no one has outright told him he's disabled). The boy is obsessed with lions and with the idea that he's slowly turning into a lion and will grow up to be one; his parents and teachers try to discourage his interest. He also has a lot of meltdowns and the story ends with him having a violent, swearing meltdown at school and having all his lion paraphernalia taken away as punishment.

So, everyone in my class got exactly that out of the story. A disabled kid doesn't understand he's disabled and can't control himself. (Some of them also made comments that outright assumed I wasn't disabled.) What I turned in was a really rough draft but I felt really positive about the germ of the story, and I felt depressed because almost no one reacted to it or related to it at all.

I sent the story to some of my friends who are good on disability stuff and asked them what they made of it. They got out a lot of the things I was putting in: the main character is faced with adults who try to control him, while his non-disabled twin is more wholly nurtured and accepted; identifying with lions is a way of feeling powerful and dealing with the fact that he feels like he's not human. My friend Laura wrote, "it seemed like he loved this thing/lions and nobody understands that it's something to just love and so they try to make it out to be a problem and to use it to get him to behave how they want him to... i think it seemed like a lot of it was about behavior modification and the loneliness of being told to act a certain way when you're just not naturally inclined to."

Which made me love her so much. I know it's only a workshop, but I've been in workshops for years, you know, and I've never had one hurt before.

I'm trying to write a more clear-to-my-class version of the story and the way I'm doing that is by having most of the story take place when the main character, S., is 17. The point of doing this is that by this age he would be aware of his diagnosis and stuff (in the original draft, I was trying to show that he hadn't been told about his diagnosis, but still sensed how he was being treated; but I think people just took it as typical "disabled person doesn't understand" stuff). It is also cool though because I get to address some issues of passing as ethics and passing as cure. I'm having trouble writing the story because I want S. to express his resentment of the way he was treated when he was a kid, but he's very isolated and doesn't have a lot of people he can talk about those things to. And he's also not quite sure how he feels about a lot of it.

But anyway, S. has been in a mainstream school for four or five years, and his main activity is selling his medication and making drugs for people. (The story has some magic realism elements so he's invented his own drug.) He finds this comforting, probably because he has something that other people want; he frequently accepts little or no payment even when he could ask for a lot of money. It's just what he does.

S.'s parents don't know about this and see him as a success. S. realizes that his mom has started referring to him and his sister as "the twins" when she never referred to them as a unit before. There is some anxiety about how S. is going to apply to college because his years in special ed may make him look "unstable" or like he's not capable of doing college work. But overall he has a sense of finally being someone his parents can be proud of. He goes to a normal school, he looks normal, he acts normal (with the kids he gives drugs to, he's intentionally weird and cold, and they see him as a creep; but he sort of likes that, because he's controlling their view of him).

But he is, you know, pretty masochistic with the whole throwing away opportunities to make money thing. And he doesn't really have any friends.

He desperately misses his best friend from special ed, but his friend is on a completely different life trajectory; he's still quite visibly disabled and needs help doing things. S. has no idea of what a friendship between them would look like now that one of them is supposedly normal. When he runs into his old friend, he lies to his friend's staff about how they know each other.

S. meets up with the head of his old school, and is overwhelmed by memories of trying to bite her, having her analyze and remake the way he walked, having her snap at him and take away his lions--but she's completely friendly, as if they are family members or old neighbors. S. falls into compliance, finds himself following her lead, trying to make himself sound even more successful than she already thinks he is. Wants to ask her why she cared how he walked or what was wrong with lions, but those kinds of questions don't belong in her world. He feels stupid even thinking them.

S.'s twin R., who is in boarding school and isn't around much, is the only person he's really close to. She's always known him roughly the way he is and when she comes home for Christmas he manages to tell her some of the things he's thinking about.

Anyway, for some reason I have this scene in my head: S. makes some comment about how he now looks normal. R. says, thinking nothing of it, that he doesn't. S. is really offended and scared. R. says that S. doesn't look normal to her because he's her brother, he just looks like her brother. And besides, he always says he doesn't want people to like him anyway, so it doesn't matter if he looks normal, right?

"That's retarded," S. says. "That's a retarded thing to say."

Now, the reason I won't really put this in my story is because I think people in my class may just throw this word around in their lives without thinking of it as hate speech. And I want S. to use it as hate speech. I will explain.

I feel a very intense urge sometimes to use the word about myself. Usually in some kind of school or work situation where someone is patronizing me or has failed to understand the nature of what I can and can't do. The sentence I want to say comes in two forms:

"I'm not retarded," when someone is explaining something they think I don't understand. And, more commonly:

"Yeah, I'm retarded, sorry" (little laugh)

because when things are really hard and someone is obviously kind of annoyed with you or thinks you're lazy or lacking insight/knowledge about basic things, you just...hate yourself. And them. And you're supposed to say, "yeah, I'm sort of slow, sorry," "oh yeah I'm kind of a space cadet." Like it's something small, and cute.

But it's not fucking small.

The word retarded is the most vicious word I can think of to quietly and passively explain myself. The reason I find myself wanting to use it is because it feels almost on the level of physically hurting myself or the other person, which are things I do not believe in doing (well the first one happens sometimes). And it doesn't seem like such a big deal to most people to say that word. But to me it feels like punching myself in the head, and sometimes I want to feel that way.

"this I used to believe"

When I was thirteen I went to school in a gauntlet. It took a while for me to understand what this meant. One went to middle school. One was intrigued by the new building and stopped to watch boys knocking each other to the ground in the middle of the hallways. One felt crowded because one didn’t like noise. One tried to scrape out a place for oneself, in class, by saying weird things and chasing Richard around, both hitting each other with math books (whatever math was then).
Back then, in sixth grade, one was still kind of shut away from the world in a particular wing, although one ventured out, for gym, for art. On sunny days, all the kids were let outside to kick balls and make out under the trees, except one who was writing poems and listening to some older teachers talk about a girl in seventh grade who made a hit list and got suspended, one teacher saying, “She’s a nice girl. It’s sad. They just tease her so much.” And one knew, sort of--one had always known one was going to be the kind of girl who makes a hit list. It was just a matter of time.

If I expected words as withering as the ones in movies, then I was watching the wrong movies, and if I expected violence, then I forgot I was a girl. What developed around me as I progressed, making the wrong moves or just moving wrong, was an explosion of words without meaning, and endless, endless motions never carried through.
By the latter I mean goosing, jumping at me, making as if to grab my crotch or my thigh, and laughing when I flinched. Or coming at me, wielding a pair of scissors and letting them get within a few inches of my eyeballs before turning them off course. This is what I mean by the gauntlet, a tremendous difficulty, a brittleness in one’s chest as one is getting one’s books together to leave for the next class. And one is older now, and not sequestered away; one walks out the door, and one plunges into the gauntlet. One is tested on one’s reflexes and one always fails.
There are verbal reflexes, and that’s what I mean by the former, which is boys asking me on a date, even though I’m known and know myself to be not the kind of girl people ask on a date. Pale and flabby and ageless, I think, trying to fend off Taylor’s oh-so-ironic proposal: “Please, please, go out with me, come on, Amanda, just one time,” and finally, “If you go out with me, I’ll give you a dollar. You can buy a dildo.”
But that is not what I mean, and neither do I mean being accused of jerking off during the school play because I was rocking back and forth in my seat. Because the sexual stuff was always the cleverest stuff, and what I’m really talking about, besides people hitting my backpack so I slightly fell forward, is just a collection of words that are neutral and even cute--“bookworm,” “stairwell girl,” and most permanently my own last name called out to the extent that when I heard it said, at the doctor’s office or on our answering machine, I cringed. I’m still hoping I can marry out of it because it always feels like an itchy second skin, an epithet that for some reason is typed out on my birth certificate and my student ID.

But never mind. Christine was minor league, back in sixth grade--all those people who write books about how mean girls are to each other have never experienced the gauntlet, which is almost always populated by boys, the only people vicious enough, most of the time, to lean out and snarl into your face about how ugly you are when you are twitchily picking your way from art to math. Christine was just part of the pre-gauntlet situation, which maybe explains why in seventh grade, during the development of the true gauntlet, I distracted myself by making a new screen name and anonymously messaging Christine, telling her I was going to come to her house and kill her. I was with Megan, a friend from fifth grade who now went to Catholic school and was CCD enemies with Christine from way back. Megan and I were giggling. I don’t think we thought of what was going on as evil, or thought that Christine could be scared, although in retrospect we should have been able to see that she was getting increasingly terrified.

I was always taught never to swear when I was a kid, and I believed in it so hard that sometimes I would swear accidentally, compulsively, when I was alone, and then break down in tears. I don’t know why you would tell a kid like me something in such a serious tone of voice, but I guess my parents had their reasons.
I generally believe what I see. It’s not that I don’t believe in other people’s humanity, but that I had to meet it first. And the first time I said fuck you to one of the kids who was goosing me, I thought the world was going to explode, but he just laughed and imitated me in a high, lilting voice. This was not a meeting. And it also wasn’t a meeting when Christine said pleasantly, after some sort of encounter in which I had been asked how much I weighed and why my hair looked the way it did, “Come on, Amanda. You pretend you like being weird, but everyone knows that you wish you were pretty and had a boyfriend.” Which I did. She was joking, kind of, we were kind of friends--but as I said my verbal reflexes were poor, and as those books point out, as if they’ve thought of it for the first time, friends can treat each other badly.
Anyway, her mom called the police, and I was shocked when I found out that Christine had a mother and that she could cry. That’s when I started believing in her insides again.

For the rest of school, I’m not embarrassed to say that I sometimes imagined holding down the boys of the gauntlet with guns to their heads or cutting off pieces of their ears. I wanted to believe in them. I wanted them to wear it on the surface, like I do--to be reduced to squirming, to begging, to flinching. To swear.

Something I posted elsewhere

In response to a post about this (an article about a guy with Asperger's who ran over, raped, and stabbed a woman; it has been decided, because of his disability, that he won't be sentenced to death, with rulings about intellectually disabled people being cited).

So of course the post is full of comments saying "WHAT? Asperger's isn't the same as mental retardation! Maybe he's retarded too?"

I said this:

Okay, I'm commenting again because I have more time than I did before, and also the "well, it would make sense if he was retarded" comments are really baffling me. Do the people saying that actually know anyone who is retarded?

There is a way that I think autism spectrum disorders and intellectual disabilities can cause people to be violent. This is when a person experiences rage that comes from being overwhelmed and not knowing a good way to deal with it. For example, I know a severely intellectually disabled guy who sometimes gets upset for reasons he can't explain (he doesn't really talk), and when this happens he will sometimes kick or hit people or break things. His actions are no more evil than a child's tantrum, but they are more dangerous since he is 30 years old and fairly large. On the ASD front, when I was a kid, I would get very upset when I thought that people didn't respect me, were interrupting my routines, or were touching me too much or standing too close to me, and I would react by hitting them very hard. Fortunately I have learned better ways to deal with these problems. But I understand that some people with ASDs and intellectual disabilities can be overwhelmed by this kind of thing and become violent.

But it doesn't seem that this is what's going on in this situation. It seems like this guy went out of his way to hurt someone, and kept hurting her for a long period of time, and killed her on purpose. So I don't see how it is related to his disability.

As I'm sure I've said before, all this "ASPERGER'S PEOPLE AREN'T RETARDED!!!" stuff really grosses me out. Maybe because I get along with intellectually disabled people well and find that some of the ID people I know are more like me, in terms of personality, than anyone else I know. Especially the guy I used as an example. The way he reacts to certain colors and images that he loves is something I can really relate to, and I can relate to his anger and his strong emotional attachments. There are some intellectually disabled people who I feel more myself with than I do with anyone else. I feel that a lot of my struggles, in school for example, relate to issues that are similar to those many intellectually disabled people have. I understand that our IQs are really different but at the same time, I don't find them to be especially foreign to me and I feel very bound up in that community, if not actually a member of it.

But you know, that's not even it; I don't even think it's just my personal experience. It's just like, how can you be advocating for your own rights while dumping on another group of people. Implying that it would make sense if he had an intellectual disability! Like intellectually disabled people go around raping women and running them over with cars.

The Sound and the Fury

"It is a tale/Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury/Signifying nothing."

Even if you haven't read The Sound and the Fury, you probably know it is named after a line from a Shakespeare play. But if you haven't read the book, you might not know that one of the protagonists is a literal "idiot"--that is, a severely developmentally disabled person who expresses himself with loud, wordless moans.

I'm not sure Faulker thought about the title of his book, beyond thinking it was a clever literary reference. Because it doesn't really fit where you would expect it to. It's clear upon close reading that Benjy's wails and rages don't actually "signify nothing"--they make at least as much sense as any other Compson's behavior, if not more. Benjy lost his beloved sister, one of the only people who was kind to him. Her name is a very common word, and whenever he hears that word, he gets upset. It is popular to explain this by saying "Benjy has no sense of time, and doesn't understand she is gone"--but in fact, if he didn't understand she was gone, he wouldn't moan when he heard her name. It is very easy to understand why Benjy acts the way he does, and anyone who would describe his behavior as senseless is simply too lazy to engage with him. Instead of claiming that he doesn't understand time, it would be more accurate to say that Benjy feels the events of the past very keenly and hasn't gotten over them. This is true of most of the characters, disabled and non-disabled.

When ableist people try to argue that ASD rights advocates are worlds away from "real autistic people," they invariably invoke people like Benjy--archetypes of violent, nonsensical children and adults. This is supposed to make high-functioning ASD people see low-functioning people as the Other. We're supposed to feel guilty and disgusted, and rush to separate ourselves from them.

But the truth is, violence is a perfectly understandable reaction when you are in pain and don't know what to do. I was a violent kid, in large part because I hadn't learned to cope with my ASD. If I had been more severely affected, I imagine my pain would have been worse, and I would have had more trouble figuring out how to cope. So I imagine I would have been more violent, and violent for longer. I would have needed more help. Hopefully the people around me would have understood what kind of help.

Because I understand where developmentally disabled violence comes from, the fact that someone is violent doesn't make me think they're an "idiot," baffling, irrevocably different from me. Benjy's sound and fury signified that he was in pain.