Monthly Archives: April 2012

oddcog to ‘I Wish I Didn’t Have Aspergers’: #AutismPositivity2012

Posted on by
2

This post is part of a flash blog event. It’s a response not just to the specific person who googled ‘I Wish I Didn’t Have Aspergers’, but to any and all people who subsequently search for that term.

I’m not sure where to start, I know absolutely nothing about you, but at the same time I understand how you were feeling when you entered those search terms… holy crap, I knew how you were feeling, go me! ;)

Honestly, I really know how you were feeling. That horrible drowning feeling when you just want to shut out a world that you don’t understand, a world that is too noisy, a world that can leave you feeling very broken. That feeling was why I began to search for answers and why I eventually sought a diagnosis. Being diagnosed has helped me a lot, having names and words for stuff has allowed me to understand and learn about it, to discover that there are lots of people out there who experience the world in exactly the same way I do and just as many who don’t experience the world the way I do and yet who are still willing to accept me just the way I am. Sometimes I think of being autistic as having a super power and other times I hate it. It is a part of me though and even if I could remove it, I wouldn’t, because then I wouldn’t be me anymore. You just have to remember the times when you felt like a superhero, for the times when you feel broken.

So in summary, get on twitter and get a cape. *fist bumps*

Johnny 5

Posted on by
4

I love learning new things, acquiring new knowledge, it is fun and interesting. I like knowing how and why things work, it gives me a sense of being in control and keeps me calm. Once my brain latches onto something I snap into what I can only describe as Johnny 5 mode, I will research the “thing” until my curiosity is satisfied.

Last week Lil’ Feet sent me a text that said “A-Okay”. I knew what this expression meant, but after examining it in my mind for a bit I could not come up with a plausible etymology. Luckily wikipedia was able to help me out.

My brain is to thoughts what sofas are to change and remote controls.

Sometimes people seem annoyed when I regurgitate facts and sometimes people are amused by the random nature of my knowledge.

2 Roys and 1 Panda.

Posted on by
2

One of the reasons that I was given for the reluctance to diagnose autism in adults is a fear that the person being diagnosed would stop challenging themselves, effectively climbing into a box labelled “AUTISTIC”, pulling on the lid and giving up on life. I knew this was never a risk with me because I wanted a diagnosis specifically because I wasn’t ready to give up, I wanted to be able to say to people “Look, I’m trying, I’m trying really hard, and sometimes I’m failing, so just cut me a bit of slack.”.

I saw a few weeks ago that there was a programme coming on Channel 4 called “Undateables” and that amongst other people it featured an aspie guy. Just the name of the programme was enough to piss me off. I don’t care how nice Channel 4 think the programme was, it immediately reminded me of a comedy sketch (might be a Mitchell and Webb one?) called “The boy with an arse for a face”. The programme was never going to raise awareness, it was only ever going to be an excuse for people to have a laugh at people who are different. Just following the trending topic on twitter for a few minutes was enough to prove that I was right.

I spent a great deal of time thinking about this programme before it came on. When something gets lodged in my brain like that I tend to over think it and then when the thought escapes from my brain it inevitably comes out all messed up and garbled. This is precisely what happened when I tried to explain my thoughts on this programme to a friend who I’ll call Roy. Roy assured me that no programme was going to change her opinion of me. I think I made it sound like I thought she specifically was susceptible to being swayed, when in fact I was trying to explain that I was generally concerned that the programme would be a massive backwards step for awareness in general and would change perception of people with Asperger’s at a time when I was still in the process of telling people.

This week I had an interesting conversation about labels, specifically about my usage of the terms NT and aspie. My friend, lets call him Roy, enquired as to what NT meant. Having answered his question, Roy went on to challenge me as to why I used those terms, why did I use those labels. To him, I’m not an autistic person, I’m just me, he doesn’t treat me any differently post diagnosis to how he did before. This is true, me and Roy still talk the same now as when we first tweeted each other about a hypnodisc clone that appeared on The Gadget Show many episodes ago.

This conversation also got me to thinking. Differently wired means just that, we think, feel and communicate differently. When I use the terms aspie or NT it is only as a way of alluding to a group of people that I’m talking about. To differentiate between two groups of people. That doesn’t mean I think either group is better or worse, just that I acknowledge that they are different. I have never heard an autistic person talk about curing neurotypicalism, or using genetics to eliminate neurotypicals from the world, but this is the sort of language that autistic people often have to accept.

April 2nd was World Autism Awareness Day. I realise I’m very lucky to have people in my life who only see me as me and so I said thank you to them all on that day. I guess they don’t realise how valued they are because they all expressed surprise at me thanking them, suggesting that I had nothing to thank them for. Well, you’re all wrong, you rock!

Author’s note: Why the fuck couldn’t I have explained it this way to my friends? In my defense, use of metaphors that only mean something to the speaker is fairly common amongst aspies. Damn you brain! :) #TheGiftAndTheCurse

Think inside the box

Posted on by
3

Okay, so I guess I start with what the boxes are, well they are all Nike AF1 boxes. I like trainers [a lot] and so I always have an abundance of boxes lying around. They’re not lying around, they are actually neatly stacked in size and age order in the corner of my room. As I said, the boxes contain my happy thoughts. I think in pictures and my brain is like a massive PVR, looking through the stuff in these boxes allows me to tune out reality and jump right back to the moments in which the thoughts were recorded. I’m sure that anyone else looking through the boxes would wonder what half of the stuff is, but I assure you that I know exactly what each thing is and where it is from. I’m not sure if my interest in cataloging stuff is an aspie thing, I think that lots of people make memory boxes, but I’ve been told that it’s a little bit weird, so I don’t know? I didn’t plan on making any of these boxes, I just started accumulating stuff and eventually I had so much that boxes were required.

The oldest of the four boxes is my Florida box (the most ancient item is from 1988), I’ve been to Florida a number of times since I was a child. I love it there. It is my happy place. Even when things were really tough at home, the couple of weeks spent in the warmth, shopping, going to theme parks, relaxing where none of the stresses of home could touch me, well it was just perfect. If I ever run away from home and take my passport with me, you need only look for me at the entrance to It’s a Small World. If I don’t take my passport then there are only two places I would be and, I’m sorry, my brain went on a bit of a tangent there, but I thought I’d leave it in for authenticity. Anyway, I started collecting things from my trips to Florida as a way of feeling like I was there even when I wasn’t. The boxes/memories and my monthly supply of Gatorade (imported) help to keep me sane.

The three other boxes are all much more recent. One of the boxes contains memories associated with my TWIT family, my bros and my sister who I met on twitter. I don’t get to see them anywhere near enough and so again, I guess the boxes help me to feel closer to them. I somehow managed to combine two of my favourite things this year, the TWITs and Florida, that totally warranted a separate box. The final box is my Lil’ Feet box, she’s tried to explain that she thinks it’s a bit weird that she has a box all to herself, but I don’t think she understands that I would totally freak if I mixed up stuff that didn’t belong together. One day I’m going to take her to Florida and then she will have stuff in one of the other boxes. (Lil’ Feet, we can argue about the Florida thing another time, just leave me in happy ignorance for the moment :) )

If I’ve learned anything from all of my trips to Disney, it’s that in order to fly you need a happy thought. These boxes contain my happy thoughts.