Society: I have made an NT-passing child
Me: You fucked up a perfectly good autistic kid is what you did. Look at it, it’s got anxiety
You have to cheat. Ask for as many extensions on papers as you possibly can. Pretend your computer is broken. Use your charm if you have any. If you’re going to cry, don’t wait until you’re out of the room—do it where the people in power can see you. Eat the same food every day if you can’t think of anything else to make. Put other things ahead of taking a shower, even if your mom said you have to take a shower every two days. Sometimes people won’t notice you’re cheating but even if they do and are annoyed you might still get by.
My mom goes to workshops for people with ASD and then gives me the really long printouts that go along with them. The printouts tell me to sit down and make a list of everything I have to do. When I am anxious, as I have been this year, it’s hard to think about these things so I hold on to the printouts out of guilt but don’t actually read them. Then my mom finds them and gets upset that I haven’t read them and says that I’m not ready to live on my own.
But I am ready to live on my own. Badly. Just like I can hold down a full-time job. Badly. Just like I am getting my homework done. Badly. And I forget to balance my checkbook, which none of my non-disabled friends do because you can get it online, and my mom says, “Well it’s different for you because they would be able to do it if they needed to, but you wouldn’t, so you have to do it.” Theoretically I understand this is true, but my checkbook remains unbalanced.
Which is bad. And I feel bad. I do! At this rate I’ll never be able to go to college. But I do go to college. At this rate I’ll never be able to have any friends. But I do have friends. I just don’t do everything right with them all the time.
For people whose lives are controlled by executive dysfunction, I firmly believe the difference between getting stuff done and not getting stuff done is not caring about doing things right. You cannot always make a list all the time and be early for everything. You just can’t. Hopefully you’re good-looking or funny or you remind someone of their niece. Exploit all opportunities. Do not do what people who are not disabled tell you to do (unless you want to, of course).
All too often I find myself waiting for the day when I can do shit properly, which more or less amounts to waiting until I’m not disabled anymore. Then I can feel good enough to deserve everything I want. Well my cure is slow in arriving, so I’m just going to do everything I want now, if that’s okay with you.
me: cannot understand at least half of what people are saying, mishears everything if it’s heard at all, constructs reactions based on body language alone
me: ears finely tuned to the horrible buzz of a house fly in another room
My son (age 4) needs to get his hair cut. He doesn’t want me to comb or brush it and he can’t quite coordinate doing it himself. He doesnt want me getting anywhere near him with scissors or clippers either. It’s becoming quite unmanageable and I’m worried that it’ll get tangled to the point that it’ll become a sensory problem. Any advice?
will he let you take out tangles with your fingers? This is a bit of a time-consuming solution, but might help keep the tangles from getting too bad while you try to figure out a more permanent solution. (When my son had long hair, I would alternate brushing with finger-detangling if the tangles were sufficiently large.) Satin pillowcases also allow hair to slide around instead of tangling while he’s asleep.
Some children at 4 are able to hold up their end of conversations about things like this. If you phrase it as a “if we cannot do brushing, we will NEED to do cutting” kind of thing, is that something he can respond to/ make a choice between?
Can he tell you the reasons he doesn’t want brushing and cutting? if they’re things like “the brush feels weird on my head,” that might be fixable with a different style of brush. if it’s “the clippers are really loud,” maybe ear guards? (you’d have to move them around to cut the hair near his ears, but it’s a start?) Scissors are scary for a lot of children this age, both neurotypical and non – stories about hair-salon tantrums are practically a trope.
Also, maybe get him a long-haired doll to practice brushing on? It’d be easier to practice brushing in front of his head before trying to do it on top of his head…
Do any other autistic people have anxiety about consuming new media?
I have a weird unease about seeing new movies because I like to watch what I’ve already seen so I know what will happen. I like to play parts of movies over and over until I memorize them.
yessss. i always read episode and series descriptions before i watch anything, it makes it easier
music is more stressful tho. i just have to lose some spoons in order to find what i want
This is a HUGE thing with me, especially with movies (although to a lesser extent with other media. People who spoil clickbait titles are my heroes, for example).
Watching movies with people was a major stressor in my life until i finally got up the courage to say “look, i will only watch movies with you 1) at home, 2) if you have seen it before, and 3) if you agree to IMMEDIATELY answer EVERY SINGLE QUESTION I ASK about what is happening/ going to happen. The first time i hear ‘just wait two minutes for fuck’s sake’ I’m out.”
Honestly i expected it to be a dealbreaker, having gotten the “oh for fuck’s sake” response most of my life. but my girlfriend actually cares more that i enjoy the movie than that i experience it “correctly”, and it’s meant that I’ve been able to watch and enjoy a lot of movies i never expected to be able to sit through.
“Particularly interesting is the unpublished observation that in girls with autism, the social brain seems to communicate with the prefrontal cortex, a brain region that normally engages in reason and planning, and is known to burn through energy. It may be that women with autism keep their social brain engaged, but mediate it through the prefrontal cortex—in a sense, intellectualizing social interactions that would be intuitive for other women.
“That suggests compensation,” Pelphrey says. It also jibes with women like Maya saying they have learned the rules of social interactions, but find it draining to act on them all day. “It’s exhausting because it’s like you’re doing math all day,” Pelphrey says.”
The constant ignorance of women with autism is something that seriously needs to stop.
My shrink used to talk about this, and it certainly seems familiar from my own experience. I’ve learned how to perform socially, but it took me a good long while, and it certainly got much easier once I figured out I had to – and was ALLOWED to – approach it like any other kind of study instead of just castigate myself for not being able to intuit it all.
These days… it works kind of like doing everyday math. When I’m toting up this much per hour times this many hours plus this much bonus minus this much in income tax, I’m not consciously thinking about the rules of math – and when I chat with someone, I’m not consciously thinking about “they made a self-deprecating remark, therefore right now my choices are to commiserate and encourage, or to turn the whole thing into a joke”, but those kinds of calculations are still going on, and using up a lot more processing power for me than they would for an allistic person.
Kimchi and Justice 