At all times

Previous (Part C)

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Indistinguishability isn’t a moment though […] it is unending

Kassiane Sibley

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[…] That’s reasonable […] The same can be said of a lot of professional situations.

Teachers, for example, are usually expected to be more emotionally expressive and intuitive of their students than a stranger on the street would be.

The problem is, for a lot of people with flat affects or atypical body language, we’re expected to keep up that mask of extreme and regulated emotional expression at all times, and around all people.

Not just the people we’re working with or the people under our care, but our peers, friends, and family.

And worse, we’re expected to keep it up around the people who should, by rights, be taking care of us: parents, bosses, cops, and yes, even doctors and teachers.

The constant demand to perform emotions in ways that aren’t natural to us at all times leads to genuinely destructive problems with our abilities to self regulate.

intersex-ionality

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I fear your excitement over my As and my Bs. Like a giant bird, it clutches and carries me too close to the sun.

Beneath the height of your As lies the abyss of your Fs.

Out of context, Anastasia Basil

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Chance

Previous (Part B)

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[…] Well, so what if they don’t understand? How do you know if you don’t let them even try? Is it the end of the world if you give someone a chance to engage with the same material as their age-mates and they don’t understand?

They might not, but what if they did? What if they would, but you wouldn’t even give them a shot?

We have to be allowed to not necessarily understand perfectly, not understand everything, not understand right away, or to try and not understand at all, without being declared forever incapable of understanding, if we’re going to get a fair chance to understand. Those have to be acceptable possibilities.

chavisory

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Well, the first part of presuming competence is presuming capacity. […] Please, keep believing that I can do things, or at least should be able to give them a good honest try before […]

But. I have failed a lot in my day.  There are things I just cannot do. […]

When I tell you I cannot do something, presume that I am competent to understand my own limitations. […]

We all have inabilities. It’s ok to have inabilities – unless, it seems, you are disabled.

Acknowledging a difficulty is not the same as presuming global inability. It’s part of seeing me as a whole, really real person.

Really real people are allowed to not be able to do things.

Kassiane Sibley

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Next (Part D)

Normally

Previous (Part A)

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It is pretty interesting, if reading other people and changing your behavior to fit them is such a basic skill for people without autism, that people need to even be told about floortime or related methods at all (and that an abnormal person like me finds it really intuitive, at least in its purest forms).

I do think reading Greenspan has been helpful for me because it gives specific examples of how to apply this philosophy, but when I hear people acting as if floortime (and its less awesome and inexplicably expensive counterpart, Son-Rise) is some kind of complicated scientific theory, I wonder how those people normally treat other people in their regular lives.

I mean seriously, it actually makes me concerned that people think there is something weird or groundbreaking about such a basic way of relating to other people.

This stuff doesn’t always have some amazing effect (it definitely doesn’t ‘cure’ anything like Son-Rise claims, which is why Son-Rise is so dumb) but I have had lots of nice interactions/connections with nonverbal people who, if I was stupid enough to go up to them and ask “Hi, how are you?” and expect eye contact and a handshake, would probably strike me as not being interested in people.

Amanda Forest Vivian

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Next (Part C)

Own world

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Learning to communicate is really hard, even for typically developing kids. […]

Disabled kids need *more* exposure to adults who want to listen to them, and *more* support in understanding their feelings – but they often get less of both. […]

All too often, kids with disabilities learn young that no one wants to listen to them. They often try their best to communicate, only to have their attempts interpreted as random meaningless noise or deviant misbehavior.

Ruti Regan

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Here’s the thing: I engage with [Tangles]. I don’t just talk around her or at her or even to her (although I do all those things at times)… I converse with her. [Rhythm and I] hold conversations in patterns of interactions in nonverbal ways […] We share attention and direct each other’s attention to things – feeling textures or watching patterns or listening to sounds together.

These things are interactions, and without them they have no reason to even TRY communicating with me.

Parents often speak of their autistic children as being “in their own world” – but all children are. The difference is that for NT kids there are standardized bridges into their worlds.

Restless Hands

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Next (Part B)