To people who have trouble going to religious services

Something to remember: God doesn't think you're normal, ever.

I missed church because I spilled a bottle of soda on my desk so I decided to go to student mass. I don't have much experience pretending to be Catholic and throughout the day it was an unpleasant prospect. I decided not to go a million times. As I was walking there, I decided to call Clayton and talk to him instead, but he wasn't there, so I decided to call Noah and hang out with him. Noah is always there but this time he wasn't. By the time Noah was done not being there, I had arrived at the chapel, and I just went in.

It is really hard for me to go to church since I wasn't raised going to church and I never know what to do and also have to worry about stuff like people maybe talking to me. But I just tried really hard to remember that Passing is Not Ethics. Basically, fucking up in church because I wasn't raised going to church, or because I'm a freak in general--I mean, God knows.

I forgot to genuflect when I went into my pew and it was like, okay, no one's watching me, and even if someone was, God knows why I forgot. I really liked going to mass. I just faked knowing what to say and stuff. I just sort of moved my lips. And I just have to remember that God knows why I do things wrong or right.

This isn't totally related, but I found it a few months ago and it makes me really happy: Suggestions (with many examples) about how to help ASD kids go to religious services.

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?

This woman is a delight; and, On Speaking Badly.

Andrea Fay Friedman, the woman in this video, portrayed a character on Family Guy who has Down Syndrome and, when asked what her parents do, says, "My mother is the former governor of Alaska." Palin had a shitfit of course, and then Friedman did some interviews saying that she thinks it's funny and Palin should get a sense of humor. In this video she becomes visibly upset about the fact that Palin is using Trig's disability to get attention. Friedman emphasizes that her parents gave her a normal childhood and that's what Trig should be able to have too.



(Transcript by Tlonista here at FWD/Forward.)

Some person commented and said that Friedman obviously didn't understand the situation because she said Palin was trying to use Trig to get "votes." Argh, why does it matter whether she used exactly the right word for what she was trying to say?

I remember that I used to have this reaction to videos of intellectually disabled people talking with other people, where if they didn't talk that much, or spoke in a cliched or prepared-sounding way, I would think that maybe they weren't expressing their own opinions. Specifically, I'm talking about videos where the star of "Retarded Policeman" would appear with a non-disabled friend or family member, and express that he was okay with being in the show, and that people shouldn't get offended on his behalf. (There was also a video saying that he was okay with the word "retard" in Tropic Thunder.) This is the first video, where he appears with his sister:



Ponce: Hello, world. Josh "The Ponceman" Perry here, with my sister Stacey.
Stacey: Hi, guys. We've been reading a lot of your comments and wanted to clear a few things up about Josh. Josh is an actor.
Ponce: And I am hilarious!
Stacey: He is hilarious. And he loves acting.
Ponce: And I want to do this for a living.
Stacey: So just sit back...
Ponce: And enjoy it.
Stacey: And to all you people who have a problem with Josh acting, or even if you find it offensive in any way...
Ponce: I just want to say, I have Down Syndrome, but you people are fucking retarded.
Stacey: As the Retarded Policeman would say...
Ponce and Stacey: (in Retarded Policeman voice) Bye!

Ponce and his brother Scott (who writes and acts in short films with Ponce, and also wrote some of the Retarded Policeman videos) ended up refusing to make any more Retarded Policeman videos because they said that Ponce wasn't being paid enough given how successful the videos were, and made a video about that.



Josh: Hey people.
Scott: Hey guys. The reason Ponce and I are doing this video is because, over the past year, we've had a ton of our friends and fans ask us why we're not doing Retarded Policeman anymore, and why there's no new episodes.
Josh: I love the show and I liked doing it.
Scott: Yeah, in all sincerity, we absolutely loved doing Retarded Policeman. It's one of our favorite things. However, the simple answer as to why we're not doing it anymore is that we had an agreement with Mediocre Films that has not been honored. That's really all I want to say about it. Um, we, um, we put a blog up about that if you guys want to check that out, it's http://theperryboys.wordpress.com, we'll put the link here, and put the link in the side there. But believe me when I say that we have tried everything that we could for this past year--basically, all year, trying to work something out and make things okay so that we could continue, but we've sadly reached an impasse--like, we know we're not gonna work things out. Uh...that's it--anything else?
Josh: I just want to say, from the bottom of my heart, I loved doing Retarded Policeman, and I love all your comments, and I just want to say, from the bottom of my heart, it breaks my heart.
Scott: Okay. Just leave us comments, you know--we love your comments here, we love your comments there. That's it, we're gonna move on, we're gonna do bigger better things, we're gonna keep doing what we do, and that's it, right? Out and out.
Josh: (in Retarded Policeman voice) Bye!
Scott: (snickers) Nice.

When I first watched these videos I felt uncertain. If Ponce was really expressing himself, then why did the things he say either sound scripted, or sort of unfocused; and why did he generally not take the lead in expressing points? Then I realized how dumb my reaction was. If I was making a video like this, I would want someone else to express the big points. I'm not such a good talker myself, and it sucks when people think that (because I say "like" a lot or lose my train of thought or have to prepare what I'm going to say) I'm not sincere. Sometimes I even start thinking that I don't know what I'm talking about, just because I can't produce an immediate response when someone says something. So I couldn't believe that I would judge whether someone else was expressing their own thoughts, just based on whether they talked "well."

Andrea Fay Friedman is obviously emotionally affected by the idea that Trig isn't being allowed to have a normal life. As a person whose parents were told to put her in an institution when she was born, Friedman doubtless has a clear idea of the prejudice that people with Down Syndrome face, and the pity and admiration points a person can rack up just for having a kid with Down Syndrome. So why the fuck isn't Friedman allowed to say that she thinks Palin is exploiting that, and that Trig deserves to have parents as good as Friedman's? Who cares if she uses the word "votes?"

(In the event that Ponce/Josh Perry is one of those people who Googles himself all the time, and finds this: Dear Ponce, I hope that you don't think I'm insulting or criticizing the way you talk. Just trying to explain how stupid it is to judge people by the way they talk. I really like the videos you and Scott do, especially the Paranormal Activity one.)

the blog schism

so I always feel bad when I post about my dumb attempts to give myself a haircut or something, and/or evidence of Vincent Kartheiser possibly being a baby llama pretending to be a person--however, I never want to post anything on my 5-year-old livejournal, because there's way too much boring/annoying stuff on it, and even though the haircut stuff is not exactly important, I think it's too entertaining to be on the Awful Livejournal, so it has a new home:

[deleted 8/9/10, not doing that tumblr anymore]

in other news, my weird shutdown that started Monday is sort of coming and going. Is that even possible? My head just always seems to be hurting and sometimes I take such a long time to understand anything and can't think anything through. There have been some moments of not-shutdown, though.

I'm going to go to Student Counseling. I just feel stupid because I'm presumably traumatized from going to another country where I didn't talk to anyone? I just feel embarrassed because some people have real problems. But when I really think about it, as long as all the appropriate sensory factors are in place, I haven't really had sleep problems for several years. And now I wake up in the middle of the night on a regular basis, often feeling really freaked out.

Sorry this is navel-gazing. I actually am going to try to be pious/academic and not post on here. And when I do, thanks to the tumblr sublimation, it's always going to be these really serious and in-depth disability-related posts! It's going to be amazing!

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.

Living in the pregnant pause

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Passing As Ethics is a World

Or, the Only Useful Thing Glee Ever Did

Disability Blog Carnival #63--Relationships
(due tomorrow, you should write something!)

Autism is not all about being bad with people, even though that's what most people think (once you can talk). A lot of people are bad with people in different ways, but they only want to talk about us. How they can make us better. What they don't know is that being a person who was once bad with people is its own punishment. That is, it's a whole new way of being bad.

I suffer from a syndrome. It's called Passing As Ethics. I made it up, though, so I can call it whatever I want. Sometimes I call it Us vs. Them or Them vs. Me. None of these names do a good job explaining the whole thing, just parts of it. It consists of a collection of false beliefs. Or, exaggerations. Conclusions badly reached.

Fact: Autism Spectrum Disorder people look sort of weird to normal people, and some things are harder for them. To a Passing As Ethics sufferer, this means: the way ASD people do things is worse than the way other people do them--->ASD people should feel guilty if other people can tell there's something weird about them--->ASD people should feel guilty for stimming--->if a normal person isn't interested in something an ASD person says it's because the ASD person is monologuing--->if an ASD person isn't interested in something a normal person says it's because they have no empathy--->a friendship where one person talks most of the time is not a real friendship--->if a normal person doesn't like something an ASD person does, the ASD person should stop--->the opposite is definitely not true--->well, I think you get the idea.

All kinds of people can suffer from Passing As Ethics. A mother who brings her extremely sound-sensitive kid into a grocery store, then gets angry at him for crying, is a PAE sufferer. A teacher who tries to behavior-modify kids out of stimming or using big words, because it's "weird," is a PAE sufferer. And an ASD person who is unable to speak up when her classmates are saying things about ASD people that aren't true, because she doesn't think she can explain in less than four sentences, and she's interested in ASD rights, so if she talks a lot about something she's interested in, that would be monologuing, and that would be wrong--well, I prefer to say I have PAE, it doesn't have me. Who the fuck am I kidding, yeah it does. It has me really bad.

This post isn't about PAE in general, though. It is about how my disability affects my relationships. I think that talking about PAE in vague terms would be confusing, so I will just use specific examples instead.

Like most people who are writers, I like to talk about things I'm writing and things that have happened to me, especially if something is a good story. In a writing workshop, I met a boy named Noah who thought I was a very good writer, and I felt the same way about him. Noah and I haltingly came together out of mutual admiration, and began spending a lot of time together. We told each other about things we had written and interesting things that had happened to us. Although, I guess I talked more.

The semester came to an end and Noah didn't apply for another workshop. He said that he didn't feel ready to be in a workshop again. Early in the next semester, Noah decided that even though he wanted to be a writer, workshops made him feel self-conscious, and he was going to major in Psychology instead of Creative Writing. I bugged Noah about this, both because I wanted to be in more classes with him, and because I felt like it was what I was supposed to do. I always worry that I'm not as interested in other people as I should be, so I felt good about myself for being such a fan of Noah's writing. I made an effort to express this as much as possible; for example, I would introduce Noah to people by telling them that he was a good writer.

I started sleeping in Noah's room because my roommate and I were proving not to be compatible. Noah went to bed early and got up very early. When he got up, he would write for a while on his computer. When I asked to look at what he wrote, he said no. One night when Noah was asleep, I opened his computer and read his stories. A few days later I said, "Hey, Noah, would you be mad at me if I went on your computer and read your stories? Because I did and they were really good."

Noah felt very uncomfortable about what had happened. He told me that I couldn't stay in his room anymore, and for a while we didn't see each other very much. I was very upset of course, but I was also stunned. I hadn't imagined that Noah would be so upset that I had read his stories--and if you insist on reading this as a typical ASD lack of empathy, then I can't stop you. But the reason I was stunned was that I had a conviction that showing interest in another person was morally right. I had been worried about my friendship with Noah because I thought that I talked too much about my writing, my life, and my interests, and Noah mostly listened. I thought that I needed to make the friendship more balanced by learning more about Noah.

Well, I guess this does show a lack of empathy, but it's the PAE kind. The same lack of empathy that a mom shows when she takes her sound-sensitive child to the grocery store is what I showed to Noah. I expected Noah to react like my idea of a normal person, to react positively because I'd done something normal. This expectation was horrible because it showed no understanding of the person Noah actually was--a person who was self-conscious about his writing, and furthermore had actually said he didn't want me to read it.

This is one of the shittiest things I've ever done to another person, and is probably my best PAE story. However, lots of little PAE events occur when I interact with my roommate, Laura. I say things to her, and she doesn't answer me. When this happens, I think that Laura hasn't answered me because I was monologuing or saying something weird, and she thought it was boring or annoying. This makes me feel guilty and embarrassed. Then I feel annoyed at Laura for making me feel that way. I think that she's lording it over me because she's a normal person and I'm a freakish ASD person who doesn't know how to say the normal thing. Sometimes I just feel bad inside my head, but other times, if Laura expresses surprise about something I already told her about, I snap, "I already told you; if you didn't want to listen, that's your problem."

In my nonfiction workshop, they say you can't worry about making yourself look bad. Here goes: Laura is actually deaf in her left ear. I've lived with her for ten cumulative months in freshman and junior year, and I've known about her deafness since probably the first week. Yeah, that's right--I get mad at someone for not listening to me, even though if I actually thought about it, I would know it's because she can't hear me. I feel like there's some Normal Person vs. Freakish Disabled Person conflict going on, even though the lack of communication is actually caused by the normal person having a disability, and not even knowing that communication is being attempted.

I never thought of Laura as having a disability until I saw a person like her being insulted in an episode of Glee, a show that basically exists to insult disabled people. It turned my head around. The sheer irony and ridiculousness of me being embarrassed and angry about being disabled when Laura doesn't answer me because she's disabled is starting to make me realize how bad my PAE is, and how much I want it to stop. Well, I've been working hard at not noticing whether I'm normal or not, and Noah is helping out, too. "If I have something to tell you, I'll tell you" and "If I want you to leave, I'll tell you" are now staples he uses when talking to me. The other day I told him about ASD stuff, for hours. Apparently this is interesting. The whole time I was waiting for the other shoe to drop, but it never did.

Passing As Ethics doesn't just affect the sufferer. If you have PAE, all your friends have PAE too. But there is hope--with the right support, individuals with Passing As Ethics can improve and actually treat people like humans instead of Normal People to fear and resent.

I am trapped in my world of Passing As Ethics. But my friends are trying their hardest to pull me out.