autism

world oddizm day
- 8:34 am
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the stupid vs. the catatonic

In the November 2008 issue of Hallmark Magazine is a story by Ann Bauer titled "My Other Son". It's a fairly directionless trip down memory lane as a divorced parent with 3 kids, one of them autistic. What struck me hardest about the story was how briefly she was able to mention that her autistic son was not only misdiagnosed, but mistreated for schizophrenia to the point of catatonia and 'rescued' from his catatonic state with electroshock therapy. But the story was not about him. Was it? I sure couldn't tell. I think it was about the other son, who apparently 'got it' about his brother when no one else did (which wasn't very well brought to light in the story), begging to be with him and help ~as a person~ when everything else kept getting in the way. Like drugs. Institutionalization. Electroshock therapy.

There but for the grace of God go I. I read stories like that and just cringe at all the stuff I've gone through that *I* thought was bad, but some go through so much worse.

I'll tell ya, parents who feel the need to pursue 'fixing' autism to the point of a child's utter misery for many years is one of the saddest things I've heard of since medieval torture devices used in the judicial system.

The saddest part of that story, to me, was that the autistic child didn't get as much remorse or sympathy as the other child who had to deal with growing up without a father and having an autistic brother. And a mom who seemed to handle her problems by crying over several glasses of wine with a friend. (The story was so vague, it just begs for generalization like this.) I'm sorry, but that didn't invoke any sympathy in my mind for anyone but the autistic kid. Good lord, can you *imagine* someone forcing you to take drugs to the point of being catatonic and having to go through electroshock therapy over it??????? And I am guessing I'm supposed to feel sorry for the mom or something, I don't know. What was her motivation for writing this? To get autistic kids out of institutions? I think that point was completely lost in the attempt to play up the brother who cared, but that line of thought itself was so interrupted that I had a hard time with trying to figure out the other random things being brought up and discarded.

This really has to stop. I guess I was fortunate that my mother only tried to 'fix' me herself, to the point of such severe abuse that I was poisoned nearly to death at the age of 14 by her own hand. She was removing 'toxins' from my body with something so restricted that you can't even find it in health food stores. I went through continual 'fixing' throughout my entire childhood, and the only way I survived was learning to lie and not obey. Why? Because I was different. Not because I was the smartest kid in class or because I was a hard worker at chore time or because I had anything physically wrong with me. It was because I DIDN'T SMILE, and I DIDN'T HAVE FRIENDS, and I have weird habits and strange thoughts about God and couldn't help stimming and embarrassing my mother to the point of teachers begging her to take me to psychiatrists.

By the way, if you are a parent of an autistic child and are still freaking out about autism being caused by immunizations, would you PLEASE read these articles. There is proof out there that autism is global, it's a natural brain phenomenon, and it's NOT necessarily caused by agents from outside the body after the child is born. I find this stuff because I am Mennonite, I didn't have the immunizations, and I was born like this.

Asperger Syndrome - Anabaptist Disabilities Network

The Age of Autism: Oaklawn

And when you're done with that, see if you can comprehend this poem from
NaPoMo day 24—THE STUPID “Aspergers” by Cindy Earnshaw << pieces of linda

THE STUPID
“Aspergers”
Cindy Earnshaw
when they first
notice me in the world
or perhaps
second
I have already been
too smart
all hope for me
destroyed
there’s
no point of possibility
with them
the truth will
forever sound of lying
from my
too-smart
lips
they will steer towards where
I have somehow always
been
and I
will search
and search again to know
their algebraic paths
my massive mind
monstrously mocking brilliant me
they’ll
mock me too
standing there ahead
of them
and groping back behind
all the while
disbelieved
there in
the stupid.
© Cindy Earnshaw
If you didn't get that, we aspies feel like we are drowning in the stupidity of others. I would compare it to being locked away in a sort of mental concentration camp, with virtual razor wire and guns all around me, constantly judging that I am different. Would I have been better off being stupid? Being one of the people who believed that pressing someone to death under a pallet of stones or stretching them on a rack would make them more likely to be 'honest'? Because it wasn't that long ago, any 'smart' person knew that the lower classes couldn't help being dishonest criminals and witches.
Is there any difference now? Will the hocus pocus around Asperger's ever stop?
I am one of the very lucky ones. I can bridge the gap between two worlds with my words. But does anyone listen?
This will never end until parents learn that it's ok for people to be who they are. Down Syndrome children are understood and accepted, but autistic children need to be 'fixed'. If a Down Syndrome child went through overdrugging to the point of catatonia to the point of institutionalization and electroshock therapy, that story would be an outrage. Why is it ok to openly talk about how easy it is to torture people with autism and Asperger's Syndrome?
I can feel for parents of autistic children. I don't think Ann Bauer is a bad person. But neither was my mother, was she? She was only desperately trying to 'fix' me. She completely missed who I ~am~. And when I got grown up and was able to start trying to have real conversations about real things in life, I was shunned for not believing the world works the way my mother believed it works. There was no hope for love or forgiveness for being *me*. My brain works differently, so there is something 'wrong' with me.
I mourn for those who have been forced to the point of becoming catatonic and going through electroshock therapy in the name of mental health, only because they go deep in themselves for awhile.
My survival mechanism was one of desperation, trying to decipher years of punishment, find the pattern, find the escape route, find peace. There is no peace when people expect continual response, and every response has to be judged and found wanting, and every response feels baited, and every response brings emotional or physical pain of some kind, and there is no response that can buy peace and love and forgiveness.
Sadly, what I just described is not limited to autistic children. Children are abused everywhere because parents are stupid, single minded, blinded by something they believe or hear, fearful that something is wrong, or simply because the parents are mean or have mental illnesses themselves. This isn't just an autism problem, this is a PARENTING problem. This is a SOCIAL NETWORK problem. And when all else fails, ask who is making the MONEY on the problem. Health care, insurance, pharmaceuticals, social services, education- these are all big businesses with big money behind them. Question why the world says your kid ~has~ to be "NORMAL". Question why you are accepting what you are told and jumping through hoops instead of trusting your own instincts.
It's OK to just love your child. Get it?
- 8:17 am
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You May Be an Aspie If...

This list is all my own, from my own experiences. I got the idea from You Might be an Aspie If..., which I found so comforting and funny that I was able to more quickly adjust to enjoy being who I am once I found out I'm a mental aberration.

YOU MAY BE AN ASPIE IF...

...you run an entire wash cycle before you remember you forgot to load it-- twice. In a row.

...you really have used a paycheck for a book marker (like Einstein) and run into it by chance 3 months later when you remembered you were reading that book and decided to finish it.

...you check a pile of books out from the library, start them all at once, get halfway through, and renew them only because you really believe you're going to finish them, even though half of them are disappointing and the other half aren't addressing your questions after all, particularly if they are about physics or paranormal and astral phenomena. Then you renew them again because you forgot to take them back. Then you really do forget all about them and incur heavy fines.

...even with all this forgetting, you can remember in great detail several paintings you once saw in the waiting room of a doctor's office when you were six years old, among a number of other useless flashbacks that include the Herkimer the Homely Doll song on Captain Kangaroo (and wonder if the person singing it was Sterling Holloway), the smell of your lunch box in the first grade, and the heartbreaking disappointment of your first Valentine's day in the first grade. AND the Johnny Appleseed song, and the kitchen table in the first house you lived in, and the time you got a needle stuck in your knee when you jumped on the couch when your mom got up from a sewing project to go do something, and...

YOU MAY BE AN ASPIE IF...

...you wear the same clothes for 48 hours straight, to bed and back again.

...you forget you have makeup on and rub your eyes at work and discover it in the bathroom two hours later- *after* you've helped a dozen customers. And it doesn't freak you out. You just go, "Oh, yeah..."

...yet, in spite of this seeming lack of interest in your appearance, you obsess about the laundry. Or your shoes being clean. Or your eyebrows not exactly matching.

YOU MAY BE AN ASPIE IF...

...you wind up at the doctor's office a day early and are so convinced you've got the day right that they let you in anyway, even though the waiting room is packed and you're not sick.

...you convince a customer at the register that they still owe you $4.38 instead of the other way around, and all the cashiers around you stop what they're doing because even though they can hear the error of your ways, your argument is so convincing they can't help but watch in awe as the customer opens a change purse back up. (This after acing all your college algebra tests in pen.)

...you don't recognize a monthly older couple checking into the hotel where you work even though you can see in the computer that you were the one who checked them in the last 6 times.

...you forget you took lunch already and try to punch back out an hour later for lunch. (stressful day)

...you get lost in a Super Walmart.

...you have to leave the Super Walmart before you're done with your list because the noise and lights and people and overwhelming variety are causing enough anxiety to nearly pull your shirt off while you flap your long sleeves together reading labels. (Seriously, Scott caught me nearly pulling my shirt off once as I flapped. Egads, that would have been a treat for a few people, eh? I don't wear long sleeves to town any more.)

...you're so spaced out leaving a Hallmark store that you run right into the door and stand there wondering why it won't open while you slowly focus back and realize there is a sign saying "Use Other Door" and someone behind you is falling over laughing.

...yet in spite of ALL of this confusion in public and with the public, you are able to alert an entire hotel full of guests to a tornado warning and supervise them into a hallway and keep them calm while a tornado passes by two miles away, and you help clear a large department store of customers while the fire department investigates smoke and fire alarms and you find out you're the ONLY employee that not only remembered to grab a flashlight and fire extinguisher but also followed all the steps properly.

...and you even arrive first on the scene of an accident and save someone's life because you remember in detail everything you've ever learned about airway clearance and taking control of someone in a panic.

...AND you even get a 4-story hospital locked down as a housekeeper at 4 a.m. reporting an extreme error of contagion that a nurse made earlier calling you stat to the ER. (Aspies would make fabulous Star Fleet personnel. We kinda dig protocol and things like OSHA, NEPA, and other technoweenie stuff. Except we might wear our uniforms backward, or for several days in a row. And wind up in the wrong conference room.)

YOU MAY BE AN ASPIE IF...

...you find traffic so intimidating that you change lanes two miles ahead of time to be ready.

...you are terrified of merging on ramps.

...you have to map your route out in your head ahead of time like an inbuilt Tom-Tom, and having to change your route in the middle of it all means you have to reroute a new map in your head.

...you have the city memorized in a very two dimensional way, so you don't recognize where you are three dimensionally until you check the map in your head.

...you've been pulled over for going too slow in a school zone or on a highway.

...you've ever gotten into the wrong car at a store and wondered who left their sweater there or put the dangly thing on the mirror.

YOU MAY BE AN ASPIE IF...

...you happen to know more about an obscure bit of trivia on a map or about another country than the college professor.

...you don't 'get' calculus, but the professor tells you that what you're trying to explain, describe, or ask about is two semesters down the road.

...you get a joke someone tells in another language that you don't speak, but a joke in English stumps you.

...you can't figure out your fellow classmates to save your life, but you ace your sociology major and anthropology minor.

...a particular word consumes half your day, and you walk around pronouncing it in various styles and inflexions, ignoring the stares. pink, pink, PINK, pink, *pink*, pink

...a professor has to send a lower classman to find you, a grad student, on the first day of classes because you are lost, but when you walk into the room and the professor asks you to explain the scientific model to the class before you even find a seat, you jump on the chance to expound, much to the chagrin of the professor.

...you delight in arguing quantitative sociological analysis with a mathematics professor who doesn't agree with you that sociology is a science.

...finding flaws and holes in other people's reasoning is *fun*, no matter how unnecessary.

...a professor asks the students who they idolized growing up, and you say Mr. Spock.

...you got extra credit in a Logic class just for mentioning that you own a copy of Heidegger's "Being and Time".

...you'd rather watch the latest series on cosmology and physics on the History channel than anything else on tv.
- 9:14 am
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bluejacky

I've started transferring my survey posts over to Surveypalooza so people coming in from search engines on mobile devices will be able to see the surveys.

Apologies for the missing vids, another upgrade during the server migration swept through like a scan sweeping through the Enterprise. I'll fix those later, kinda busy...