For those who haven’t already heard via other blogs about the subpoena that’s been sent to autism blogger Kathleen Seidel, please, do yourself a favor and read her post on it.
Seriously, this has practically left me speechless at the moment. I’ll definitely be posting more on this later.
But for right now, I just want to touch on some of the aspects of this subpoena that I found most ridiculous:
For those who hadn’t heard, today was designated the first ever Autism Awareness Day by the United Nations. And I really expected the worst from the media, being the cynical aspie that I am.
And to be fair, there were some bits of coverage that had me screaming at the TV. Like a certain evening talk show which covered the issue of vaccines and autism in what sounded to me more like a shouting match than a rational debate. And for that matter, I’m glad I don’t get the Sundance channel either, because they showed the extended version of a certain autism ‘awareness’ film that I’ve already criticized here in the past.
But yet, despite this, today was surprisingly not a total loss when it came to coverage of autism in the media.
You’ll probably notice a new button over on the sidebar. I figured, since I am planning on using this month to post about various autism-related topics, the least I can do is join the blog swarm that’s been created just for that purpose.
More to come later today, once I’ve gotten a bit more of a chance to digest all of today’s media coverage…
So I haven’t posted here in quite a while, a sad fact which, to be honest, I fully realize. I’ve just been so busy that I haven’t really had the time to think up any interesting material for posts, or even when I did have ideas, was just too tired to put them into words.
But that’s going to be changing this month.
Why? It’s not because I’m less stressed; far from it, in fact. It’s that time of the semester where everything starts building up all at once.
Rather, it’s because the month of April has been designated as Autism Awareness Month. And the whole reason I started this blog in the first place was to make people more aware of not just my experiences, but even my mere existence, as an autistic adult.
And that’s important. We autistic adults do exist— and for all this talk of awareness, there seems to be comparatively little awareness of this fact, and even less of an attempt at bringing awareness to it. When it is brought up by certain prominent autism organizations which make frequent appearances in media coverage of autism, autistic adults usually get a very minor mention, if any at all, in comparison to the very frequent focus on children with autism. Not that children aren’t worth our attention, but children do grow up, after all, and they don’t magically become un-autistic.
So yeah. It may be April Fool’s Day today, but I’m starting this month off here quite seriously— and I’m going to be putting my autistic perseveration skills to good use the rest of this month as well. 😉
First of all… no, I haven’t fallen off the face of the earth. I’ve just been both very busy and very brain-foggy lately, and haven’t exactly had it together enough to post anything meaningful here.
Second, sorry to anyone who’s tried to comment here in the last month and mistakenly been identified as a spammer.
It turns out that there was a bit of a glitch in the “Bad Behavior” plugin that I run here to prevent comment and trackback spam, which caused the plugin to inadvertently identify every IP address as that of a known spammer. Whoops.
And because I post so little, I didn’t learn of this bug until 20 days after it was discovered, when I tried to post to my other blog and was blocked from doing so. So yeah, it’s partly my fault for not blogging enough.
Sorry to anyone who might have tried to comment here and got flagged as a spammer! And I promise, I do plan to post more this coming year. It’s a leap year, after all; surely that extra day should be useful for something…
I’ll admit it: in a typical social encounter, I probably don’t seem that unusual. Perhaps a bit quirky, but lots of people are a bit quirky. But what this slightly quirky appearance belies is just how much effort is involved in keeping it up.
I liken it to the so-called ‘spoon theory’ described by Christine Miserandino in this post at But You Don’t Look Sick. Although the situation described by the author is not identical to that which I experience— Miserandino has lupus, not an autism spectrum disorder— the general idea of having a limited amount of energy to use in one’s everyday life nonetheless mirrors my situation quite nicely.
Simply put, a good number of tasks which are effortless for most people take a good deal of exertion for me to accomplish.
What sorts of simple tasks, you ask?
As many readers may know from my other blog— and others will quickly learn— I’m 24 years old, yet do not drive a car.
Simply put, I don’t trust my perception of what’s going on around me, even after years of practicing.
And despite the fact that most people seem to think I’m exaggerating, there’s good reason for this distrust of my perceptions.
From what I’ve found, I tend to be more easily overloaded by certain stimuli than do most people. The same tends to be true for a lot of others on the autism spectrum with whom I’ve talked, though it’s hardly universal amongst autistics.
So today, I thought I’d talk about what sensory overload is like for me.
First of all, it’s important to note what sorts of situations can actually make me feel overloaded.
Rather than writing about autism in general today, I’m going to write about one aspect of my own personal experience: specifically, some of the quirks in my perception of auditory stimuli.
Long before I had an Asperger’s diagnosis, I had been diagnosed with auditory processing disorder. For those unfamiliar with that diagnosis, what it essentially means is that my hearing is technically fine, but the way my brain processes auditory input isn’t quite normal.
[Note: This entry was originally posted at DailyKos; the original version of the post, with its comments, can be found here. I’m reposting it on my own blog, with some slight modifications so as to make it more timely and to reach an even wider audience.]
Imagine, if you will, that an organization existed by the name of “Womanhood Speaks,” which, on the surface, appeared to be in support of women’s rights.
Now imagine that the governing body of this organization only included members of the male gender, with not one female represented in its ranks. Imagine that its actual aim was to create a registry of all females and force them to become more masculine, completely disregarding the fact that a majority of females were perfectly content with their womanhood and even found it to be advantageous. Imagine that members of its leadership appeared on popular TV programs talking about the epidemic of womanhood and how it needed to be eradicated.
Doesn’t sound too appealing, does it?
This hypothetical situation may seem utterly absurd, but for one segment of the population— albeit a much smaller subset than that identifying as female*— it isn’t all too far from reality.
I’m speaking of autistics, and more specifically, of the organization known as “Autism Speaks.”
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