autism

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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inquisitivefeminist:

brin-bellway:

sinesalvatorem:

I just watched Mean Girls! Damn, that movie is so Problematic I love it.

Mean Girls confuses me greatly.

It seemed to me like standard pro-homeschool propaganda, though with a bittersweet ending tacked on over the usual bad ending. It’s the cautionary tales homeschoolers tell each other, converted to movie format.

A movie like that is inherently niche: it can’t have mainstream appeal because the mainstream itself is the villain.

I watched it at a party with a group of public schoolers once, and I was boggled that they liked it. A movie that hated them, that called them animals (and not in the technical sense), and yet they were enjoying it.

Is this that “you aren’t stuck in traffic, you are traffic” thing? Nobody’s bothered by anti-public-schooler sentiment because everyone thinks of themselves as not counting, that the sentiment is directed at all those other people?

(Or maybe I was supposed to pattern-match it to Relatable Stories Reminding Me of My Own Life, and enjoy it on that level? But since I never went to public school, the thing in my life it best pattern-matched to was propaganda rather than personal experience, completely changing my perception of the film?)

What strikes you as homeschool propaganda, the thing where Cady is Corrupted By Popularity and ends up changing her whole personality?  Or the thing where the movie talks about how High School Is Like A Jungle/otherwise terrible?  Because both of those are very common teen movie tropes, and I’m curious if you’d react in a similar way to similar movies.

#I can think of way more examples for the first one  #I think the second one is more common in like books  #(and adaptations of books)  #probably to appeal to Sensitive People Who Read  #but it’s still definitely a common cultural trope

Both of them are also common tropes in cautionary tales about why you shouldn’t go to public school. Corrupted By Popularity is more disturbing when you’re a kid hearing these stories, but as I’ve gotten older I find High School Is Like A Jungle getting worse because of that…that knowing superiority embedded in it. “Yes,” it says, “we’ve all had times where we looked at a group of public school kids and saw a pack of lesser animals for a moment before they resolved into people. Most, perhaps all, of us have had times where they never resolved into people at all. It’s okay; not only okay, but worth encouraging.” And that’s…not…okay? It’s sure as hell not worth encouraging. Like, yeah I’ve done it, and I don’t feel inclined to beat myself up over it, but these days I try to actually see people as people? Not seeing people as people has a pretty bad track record in general.

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@sinesalvatorem​

“Yeah, I think public schoolers see it and think ‘Oh, yeah, I remember that shit at my school’.

ie: It’s not anti-public-school propaganda any more than people think the
average sit-com is anti-family propaganda. It’s a dramatised and
exaggerated version of their /actual lives/.”

#i mean i went to school in a completely different culture  #and still spent that movie going ‘oh yeah i remember that’

…huh. I really liked sitcoms as a kid, but I liked them to the extent that they did not remind me of my own life. They were–rather like Mean Girls, actually–glimpses into other ways of being.

I did once hear that Roseanne was so popular because it reminded people of themselves, and that surprised me. I liked Roseanne best because, as an upper-middle-class homeschooled kid, the lives of the Connors were completely alien to me, and I thought that was fascinating. I mean, it’s certainly possible to have a more alien-to-me life than they did–hell, I’m pretty sure you have one yourself, Alison–but people more foreign than them are generally portrayed as foreign, as people who are interestingly strange rather than interestingly identifiable-with. Roseanne portrayed itself as normal, as a story made by and for an alternate universe where people actually lived like that, and that was why it appealed to me.

—

It may be worth noting that IME, homeschooled minors generally do not date. Teen relationship drama pings as foreign to me, because…look, one time I heard through the grapevine that some sixteen-year-old in the community was dating someone, and the reason that got passed through the grapevine was because it was unusual for a sixteen-year-old to be dating at all. Another time, we got this one age ~14-15 kid who’d started out in public school and only recently switched to homeschooling. Apparently he flirted with the other kids around his age, most of whom didn’t notice and the remainder were weirded out. I honestly don’t know whether he flirted with me or not; I was in the oblivious majority, and I only know this was happening because I heard the parents talking about it.

Bear in mind, this was all among secular homeschoolers.

Mind you, even with the cautionary tales it’s very common for kids to switch to public school later on, especially at the middle-school/high-school transition, and the kids who do this tend to be more otherwise-normal than the kids who don’t. The weirdness level of homeschooled kids thus becomes more concentrated the older they get; in particular, groups of homeschooled teens are frequently upwards of 50% autistic. There are confounding factors and probably complicated feedback loops when it comes to which differences in homeschooling culture are actually cultural.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #homeschool

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ozymandias271:

meaninglessmonicker:

funereal-disease:

earlgraytay:

How does one explain how important a special interest is to neurotypicals?

Fuck if I know, but I’ll signal boost in the hope that maybe someone else does.

An attempt: Imagine if the only thing people around you were genuinely interested in was the shade of white wallpaper. You’d learn to think about wallpaper in a complex way, hold down cobversations about eggshell versus alabaster, but ultimately, in your own time, you won’t spend a huge amount of time researching wallpaper, you’ll be learning about physics or celebrity gossip or whatever tickles your fancy, even though there’s been a hundred thousand times more ink spilled over wallpaper than anything else.And people will look at you funny for your obsession with non-wallpaper, but you’d just shrug and say “it’s what I’m into.”
And whenever the conversation shifted to a topic you knew something about, you’d go on and on about it, and the people you’re talking to might humor you or ignore you but ultimately they’d just want to get back to wallpaper.
Now imagine non-wallpaper is star wars or trains or whatever

it’s like falling in love with something that isn’t a person. 

The nice thing about the falling-in-love comparison is that it also works the other direction, should you ever be attempting to explain limerence to an autistic aromantic.

(This is a large part of why, as an autistic aromantic, I’m not really worried about missing out on the experience of limerence.)

Tags:

#autism #aromanticism

What Universal Human Experiences Are You Missing Without Realizing It?

Link ~ ~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{Title link: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/17/what-universal-human-experiences-are-you-missing-without-realizing-it/ }}

scientiststhesis:

Remember Galton’s experiments on visual imagination? Some people just don’t have it. And they never figured it out. They assumed no one had it, and when people talked about being able to picture objects in their minds, they were speaking metaphorically.

And the people who did have good visual imaginations didn’t catch them. The people without imaginations mastered this “metaphorical way of talking” so well that they passed for normal. No one figured it out until Galton sat everyone down together and said “Hey, can we be really really clear about exactly how literal we’re being here?” and everyone realized they were describing different experiences.

I thought about this recently during a conversation with Ozy:

Ozy: I am currently eating chickpeas and rice and I am _delighted_ by the fact that I can eat this _whenever I want_ The nice thing about DISCOVERING YOUR FOOD PREFERENCES is that suddenly all the food in my cupboards is food I like and am looking forward to eating. and usually I get food I like by, like, luck? So this is excitement.

Scott: I don’t understand, why didn’t you buy things like that before?

Ozy: It took me a while to have enough of a sense of the food I like for “make a list of the food I like” to be a viable grocery-list-making strategy.

Scott: I’ve got to admit I’m confused and intrigued by your “don’t know my own preferences” thing.

Ozy: Hrm. Well, it’s sort of like… you know how sometimes you pretend to like something because it’s high-status, and if you do it well enough you _actually believe_ you like the thing? Unless I pay a lot of attention _all_ my preferences end up being not “what I actually enjoy” but like “what is high status” or “what will keep people from getting angry at me”

Scott: How does that apply to food?

Ozy: Well, sometimes people will tell you a certain food is high-status or healthy or a thing that everyone enjoys, and then I would like it. And a lot of times I just ate whatever was in front of me or ordered whatever the cheapest vegetarian thing on the menu was. And I… sort of vaguely had a sense that some things were more pleasurable to eat than other things but I didn’t like _keep track_ of what they were or anything. Because if I knew I might like the _wrong things_. And also because I didn’t intuitively grasp that the “liking” thing everyone was talking about was related to pleasure and not to like popularity/status.

So the fact that people talk about what foods they like about a zillion times a day isn’t enough to make everyone realize liking foods is a thing.

But it gets worse. A high school friend posted on Facebook a link to a really interesting answer on Quora. It makes you log on, so I’ll copy the relevant part below:

I have anosmia, which means I lack smell the way a blind person lacks sight. What’s surprising about this is that I didn’t even know it for the first half of my life.

Each night I would tell my mom, “Dinner smells great!” I teased my sister about her stinky feet. I held my nose when I ate Brussels sprouts. In gardens, I bent down and took a whiff of the roses. I yelled “gross” when someone farted. I never thought twice about any of it for fourteen years.

Then, in freshman English class, I had an assignment to write about the Garden of Eden using details from all five senses. Working on this one night, I sat in my room imagining a peach. I watched the juice ooze out as I squeezed at the soft fuzz. I felt the wet, sappy liquid drip from my fingers down onto my palm. As the mushy heart of the fruit compressed, I could hear it squishing, and when I took that first bite I could taste the little bit of tartness that followed the incredible sweet sensation flooding my mouth.

But I had to write about smell, too, and I was stopped dead by the question of what a peach smelled like. Good. That was all I could come up with. I tried to think of other things. Garbage smelled bad. Perfume smelled good. Popcorn good. Poop bad. But how so? What was the difference? What were the nuances? In just a few minutes’ reflection I realized that, despite years of believing the contrary, I never had and never would smell a peach.

All my behavior to that point indicated that I had smell. No one suspected I didn’t. For years I simply hadn’t known what it was that was supposed to be there. I just thought the way it was for me was how it was for everyone. It took the right stimulus before I finally discovered the gap.

So I guess you can just not be able to smell and not know it.

This makes me wonder what universal human experiences I and my friends are missing out on without realizing it.

I know one friend’s answer. He discovered he was color-blind sometime in his teens. This still surprises me. People are always taking Ishihara tests (those colorful dotted circles with numbers inside of them) and discovering they’re color blind. Going through life with everyone else saying “The light was red, but now it’s green” and thinking it was weird that they were making such a big deal about subtle variations in shades of brownish-gray, but it was probably one of those metaphors.

As for me? I took a surprisingly long time to realize I was asexual. When I was a virgin, I figured sex was one of those things that seemed gross before you did it, and then you realized how great it was. Afterwards, I figured it was something that didn’t get good until you were skilled at it and had been in a relationship long enough to truly appreciate the other person. In retrospect, pretty much every aspect of male sexual culture is a counterargument to that theory, but I guess it’s just really hard for my brain to generate “you are a mental mutant” as a hypothesis.

But even bigger than that, I think I might not have had emotions, at least not fully, for about five years as a teenager when I was on SSRIs. I even sort of noticed myself not having emotions, but dismissed that as an odd thing to happen and probably other people were just being really overexuberant about things. Later I learned emotional blunting is a commonly reported side effect of SSRIs and I was probably just really not experiencing emotions. When I came off them it took me several years to get used to having normal-intensity feelings again, but it wasn’t a sudden revelation, like “Wow, I was missing a fundamental human experience for the past several years!” Just a sense of things being different which was hard to cash out.

As always, I wonder if a lot of what other people interpret through vague social things might be biological, or at least more complicatedly social. I can’t enjoy jazz music even a little – the best I can do is pick up something sort of like a beat and half-heartedly feel like maybe I could snap my fingers to it if I could build up the energy. My brother fell in love with jazz as soon as he heard it and is now a professional jazz musician who has dedicated his life to it. Are we listening to the same thing when we hear a jazz tune? Or am I like a guy who can’t smell trying to appreciate perfume?

 

comparativelysuperlative:

It took me approximately forever to find out I was faceblind.
In retrospect, the incident with telling someone she looked like Evil Galadriel from the FotR movie and having everyone including her deny it…makes a lot more sense.

#prosopagnosia  #that is such a boring tag; does anyone have more interesting suggestions?

“You humans all look alike to me”?

(I was thirteen myself. Since autism and prosopagnosia are often found together, when I started reading autism neurodiversity blogs it came up early and often. I was occasionally confused as a kid when others could not only tell people with the same hair colour and style apart, but expected me to do the same.)

As for the article, I do wonder what experiences I might be missing. I have gradually figured out over the course of my life that my emotional range is non-standard: I appear to be missing awe entirely, I don’t feel limerence but I do feel perseveration* (which I’m told is both a similar feeling and one that most people lack), I have most** of the sex-related emotions but in such a way as to make them nearly unrecognisable (so I’m missing out on other people’s experiences of them, but everyone else is missing out on mine), my mother says that she experiences frustration as an emotion all its own rather than a sub-type of anger so apparently that’s a thing. (There might still be other emotional divergences I don’t know about yet.) I don’t know what thorns sound like (though I do know what eths sound like). I’m not entirely convinced that sour and bitter are actually separate flavours to me; I’ve been meaning to investigate that further. There’s probably others I don’t even suspect.

*Well, I did, and I still could if I allowed myself. The beginning stages are so unpleasant that once I figured out how to nip it in the bud (also age thirteen, as it happens), the temptation to do so was overwhelming.

**I don’t seem to have anything even resembling “looking at someone and wanting to fuck them”, not counting extenuating circumstances like the person being in a sexually suggestive pose.

Tags:

#is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #’I’m missing out on everyone else’s experiences of sexuality but everyone else is missing out on mine’ #is why my kink tag is ‘sexuality and lack thereof’ #which (tying in with Nate’s tag) is one of my few tags that isn’t completely obvious #I think that and the country tags for my countries of citizenship #(‘our home and cherished land’ and ‘home of the brave’) #are pretty much it #the wondrous variety of sapient life #(well maybe that’s also non-obvious but it’s actually *supposed* to be vague) #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #reply via reblog

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gayalienspacerocks:

iqagency:

Meet Cradle.

This rocking chair is named “Cradle” was designed for creating a safe, comfortable, and relaxing space in which the user can dissipate the overstimulation of their senses. The design was heavily directed by a synthesis of research into Autism and children with Rhythmic Movement Disorder (RMD) as well as safety, sustainability, function, and aesthetics. We had a strong focus creating a solution for sufferers of RMD but the chair is not exclusively for them and will bring relaxation, comfort, and calmness to anyone who uses it. 

oh god I want it

Tags:

#love the decor fandom

Light It Up Blue is an annual reminder that Autism Speaks can’t make us go away

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realsocialskills:

Today is Autism Acceptance Day, and April is Autism Acceptance month. It’s also an annual reminder that we are strong, we are still here, and that attempts to eliminate us are failing. When they light it up blue, they’re admitting that they’re weak and they’re failing.

Autism Speaks and others who wish that autistic people didn’t exist think that it’s Autism Awareness Day. They’re calling us a public health crisis, and they’re trying to get others to agree with them and give them money. They want to get rid of us. They try to pretend they have any chance of succeeding.

I realized today that April 2nd is actually an annual reminder that, no matter how hard they try, they can’t actually get rid of us. When Autism Speaks supporters are turning on blue lights, what they’re really saying is that they have just spent another year wasting a lot of money in a completely futile attempt to get rid of us. They are acknowledging with those blue lights that we are still here, and that we’re not going anywhere.

We are more powerful than they want us to believe. We have persisted in existing despite their pervasive attempt to eliminate us. We are succeeding in spreading love and supporting one another in power and pride.

We are speaking up. We are being heard. People who care about autism, autistic people, education, and communication are listening. The tide is turning.

Their hate symbols are a sign that, even though we have far less money and far fewer resources, we are more powerful than their ineffectual attempts to make us go away. We are right, and we are strong, and we will be here long after Autism Speaks is gone. We ought to keep that in mind when we see the pathetic hate symbols they’re displaying today.

Tags:

#Autism Acceptance Day #the wondrous variety of sapient life

Video ~ ~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

lb-lee:

kumquatwriter:

divineirony:

Penn & Teller kill the anti-vaccination argument in just over a minute.

This is why Penn & Teller are personal heroes

Probably the educational comic I’ve had to link to most is The Facts in The Case of Dr. Andrew Wakefield, by Darryl Cunningham, which is a total deconstruction of the bullshit that STARTED this whole idea.  It’s a fascinating read!

The “vaccines causes autism” lie was research sponsored by a company wanting to discredit their competitors (you know, the Big Pharma anti-vaxxers are so het up over), issued horribly painful, invasive procedures on children against guidelines, and was generally Very Bad Science that did NOT actually care about the well-being of children.

However, it plays into people’s fears about autism, science, and vaccines, and so people risk the health of CHILDREN AROUND THEM to satisfy their completely irrational fears. (This is why the “they’re just trying to protect their children!” argument holds no water with me.  You want to protect children?  You ain’t doing it by purposely denying vaccinations to your healthy child, thereby exposing immune-weakened kids, the ones who really CAN’T get vaccinated, to possibly fatal, crippling diseases.  You’re sacrificing other people’s children FOR YOUR SELFISH DESIRES.  You fucking prick.)

Despite being taken down and proven wrong again and again, people continue to BELIEVE this bullshit because it FEELS real, because it’s been around so long it MUST be true.  They knew this autistic kid once who became autistic after their vaccinations, so correlation MUST be causation, and also autism is totally worse than fucking measles. (Cluebat, people: it ain’t.  Not even CLOSE.)

Tags:

#vaccines #lying bastards #as it happens I got my annual flu shot and my decadal tetanus shot yesterday #both of my upper arms are sore but it’s *completely* worth it

Call for Autistic Self-Advocates in the Denver/Boulder Area

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

andromedalogic:

Hello! My name is Meda, I am an autistic self-advocate located in Boulder, CO, and I am looking to start a chapter of ASAN in my area. ASAN is the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, a disability rights organization, and you can read more about them here.

There are many ASAN chapters across the country but none in Colorado. I just got back from a leadership program run by ASAN, and they urged me to start a chapter here.

PEOPLE I AM LOOKING FOR: All you have to do is be autistic, or an autistic cousin. It’s fine if you have no formal ‘advocacy’ experience. I myself have literally a week of training.

NT allies are welcome. You cannot hold leadership positions in ASAN, but there are many jobs you can do for us, especially if you have another disability and/or are active in cross-disability rights.

This post is a preliminary action to see if I can find people near me. If you are autistic and you exist in Colorado, please reblog this and say so, or message me! If you do not fit these criteria, please signal boost.

I hope that we can form an IRL autistic community here and work to change things.

Tags:

#autism #interesting #signal boost

Cousins, ACs, autistics and cousins, autistic cousins, etc.

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youneedacat:

We used to have a term in the autistic community, we called it ‘cousins’.

It started when Xenia Grant was talking to a guy who had hydrocephalus and had a lot in common with autistic people, but was not autistic.  She took a look at him and happily exclaimed, “Cousin!”

(I like to keep track of who coined terms.  It can be meaningful.  Xenia is the friendliest person I’ve ever met, autistic or nonautistic.  That’s the spirit that ‘cousin’ started in.)

Back when NT meant a nonautistic person, another abbreviation cropped, up, AC.  AC meant “Autistics and Cousins” and covered autistic people and… cousins.  So you’d talk about “ACs and NTs”.  But who were cousins?

Cousins were people with a neurological condition other than autism, but it gave them important things in common with autistic people.  Especially sensory processing, cognitive, and social traits in common with us.

Cousinhood wasn’t something that was based on a condition.  It was based on how that condition worked for a particular person.  So while sometimes we’d talk about ‘cousin conditions’, there was no condition where everyone with it was a cousin.

But some common cousin conditions included:  Tourette’s, hydrocephalus, OCD, schizophrenia, and AD(H)D.  Just as some examples.  Not everyone with those conditions was a cousin, but lots of cousins had those conditions or related ones.

The cool thing about cousin was that it dealt with the ambiguity of life.  It made it so that it wasn’t just ‘us and them’.  There was a broad hazy area around autism where people could be considered in many important ways ‘like us’ without being autistic.

Two people on tumblr that my brain automatically classifies as cousins are karalianne and lichgem.  (That’s assuming they’re not unknowingly autistic, of course.  Some people think of themselves as cousins but turn out to actually be autistic.)  I don’t see them as outside of the circle I draw around ‘autism’ for social purposes, because I draw that circle at the ‘cousin’ level rather than the ‘autism’ level.  

I kind of wish that most identities had this ‘cousin’ thing going, because it would resolve a lot of boundaries that people want to be strict and are not.  It deals with people who are a lot like a certain type of person, without exactly being that type of person.  And it does so in a really friendly and welcoming way.

I know that Tourette’s has a similar but not quite the same idea, called “Tourette’s Plus”.  Where the “Plus” conditions are conditions that people with Tourette’s often have in addition, like autism or OCD.  Not quite the same idea, but similar.

Eventually people started deciding that the problem with ‘cousin’ was that it made ‘autistic’ the center of the neurodiverse landscape, and that this wasn’t fair.  And maybe it wasn’t fair.

But still, I miss the days where you could say “AC” or “Cousin” and people would know what you meant, immediately.  And where cousins were considered an actual inside part of the autistic community, not just “allies”.  I know there are parts of the autistic community where all of this is still the case.  But not nearly as many as there used to be.

So I’m throwing the idea out there just in case anyone likes it as much as I do.  It’s not my idea, I didn’t think it up, it existed long before I even knew there was an autistic community (and I go pretty far back compared to a lot of people these days).  But I think it’s a useful idea, in some contexts, as long as you do keep in mind that autistic people aren’t the center of neurodiversity.

(But honestly I think if all neurodiverse people used the ‘cousin’ idea in their own communities, then it wouldn’t be about autism-at-the-center anymore it would just be a useful idea for people who are very similar to you in important ways without being quite the same.)

Anyway… Karalianne was talking about how she feels sometimes like she can’t even talk about certain things without qualifying them a lot, because she’s not autistic, and she’s afraid of encroaching.  And I remember a time when she was not considered encroaching because everyone knew she was a cousin and that was her place in the community and nobody (that I know of) ever questioned it back then.  And it upsets me that this is not the case anymore.  Because she totally is one of the first people to spring to mind when I think ‘cousin’.

And I wish that Xenia’s exuberant friendliness would somehow infect the term ‘cousin’ once again, because it needs that push.

​

karalianne:

I honestly think that the concept of “cousin” is part of why I have no problem with people self-diagnosing, like totally aside from all the practical reasons people don’t get officially diagnosed (and the fact that self-diagnosis is often the first step to formal diagnosis). And it’s why, on the ADHD blog, I tell people that even if they don’t actually have ADHD, they should feel welcome if they identify with the difficulties we have, because maybe some of the tricks ADHDers use will be helpful for them. The blog is for people who actually have ADHD, regardless of whether they’re self-diagnosed or formally diagnosed, but I will never turn people away if they have another thing going on that causes the same problems. Executive dysfunction without ADHD is a thing (like, an actual diagnosis); autistic executive dysfunction is often very similar to ADHD executive dysfunction (that’s how I first learned about it and how to deal with it, after all); anxiety and depression can cause executive dysfunction and attention problems. And so on and so forth. Heck, PTSD and brain damage can cause ADHD symptoms and ADHD meds are often really helpful for those people, so our tricks could be helpful too!

I still remember learning certain social skills via ASA. Everyone there was so welcoming and kind (welll, most people were) and willing to share knowledge and explain why people reacted to things the way they did. It was the first place I really felt like I belonged somewhere – online or offline. (Offline came with the love of the NaNoWriMo participants I started herding back in 2005. The faces have changed but I do feel like I belong in the group when we meet in person, and not just because I’m the “leader.”) I miss usenet just for that.

I think part of the change, for me, is that I did shift my focus over the years. I stopped focusing on autism so much. I started focusing more on ADHD. (That makes sense, of course.) I stopped working with autistic children. My life changed, and I changed, and I lost some of the connection to the community that I once had.

And I understand being wary of someone you don’t know. I faced it a lot when I was actually doing ABA for a living. I am wary of people I don’t know, too. I don’t blame anyone for anything, it’s just how it goes.

I do miss the term “AC” because it is a really helpful term to have. It’s better and more inclusive, I think, than “shadow syndrome.” And it gives people more of a sense of commonality and community and inclusion. It says “there are differences but still a lot of similarities and we can relate on that level and we are family.” (Family in the Lilo & Stitch way I think.)

​

flutterflyinvasion:

Let’s try this again, since Chrome bugged out.

I feel the same way, like every time I open my mouth I’m encroaching on autistic territory.  I do feel like like some of the ways my brain is wired due to my CP (and the assorted anxiety/depression conditions) is similar to autistics.  And I do consider myself neurodiverse.  So I really really like the idea of autistics and cousins.

(ALSO HI KARALIANNE YOU SHARE MY NAME EXCEPT I SPELL IT WITH A C!!!)

​

youneedacat:

FWIW you’re another person my brain automatically throws in the ‘cousin’ category.  Like it’s not a category I’m even conscious of having, it’s just like out on the borderlands of autism somewhere, but still ‘inside’ enough that I read it as ‘like me’.

​

slepaulica:

i still don’t know if I’m autistic or not (currently thinking it’s more likely than not, however), but I think I’m definitely a cousin. :)

Oh dear, “cousin” has fallen out of use? I always liked “cousin”, for pretty much the same reasons stated above.

Tags:

#autism #I spent a lot of time in the neurodiversity blogosphere around 2007-2008 #but not so much in the past few years #I suppose it’s not too surprising things have changed #but why change *that*?

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

silversarcasm:

It’s April!

Whilst I’m sure you all mean well, please remember not to support or donate to Autism Speaks this month (or any month for that matter) as they are a terrible organisation who hurt the autistic community

Instead I recommend actually taking time to look at writing from autistic people and learn from them and, if you really want to help and donate, consider ASAN instead

Thank you xx

Tags:

#PSA #the wondrous variety of sapient life