Daily Archives: January 8, 2013

Civility / Politeness in the ASD Community

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Pretty big post for my second one, but some of the other posts I’ve been reading have prompted me to put this on my own blog. Most of this post is actually written in response to two other posts, in Flappiness’s blog: Silencing Ourselves: A Plea for Civility in the ASD Community; and Civility is Simple, not Simplistic: A Response. Check them out; they have some really good points.

So, without further ado:

Just because people disagree with what you think is no reason to throw civility out the door. And yes, when you’re civil, it’s a lot more likely that people will listen to you, and at least consider your point. If you call people names, etc., they’ll feel hurt, and they’ll ignore you and whatever you’re trying to say. Which can be quite damaging when you’ve got a good and / or important point to make.

But there’s another element to that in the ASD community. Read on to understand

First Post

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Okay, this is my first post on this blog, although I’ve been using LiveJournal for a while now. But rather than the general stuff and fiction of my LJ blog (now at tag’s Haven), this is going to concentrate on my life; the difficulties and achievements I have in this life.

I was inspired by two blogs on WordPress to get this done, and a third confirmed that I was doing the right thing. Flappiness and The Third Glance were the ones that inspired me, and Aspects of Aspergers essentially told me I was doing the right thing, just by reading through their blogs.

So, a bit about me.

Currently I work as an intern with the Independent Living Resource Centre, which is a cross-disability organization that aims to help people with disabilities live fulfilling, independent lives.

Independent Living is as follows:

Independent Living is about having choices, making decisions, taking risks, and taking responsibility. Independent Living is about having control over one’s own life.

“Independent Living is not measured by the quality of tasks we can perform without support, but by the quality of life we can have with support.”

–from the ILRC Website

The other things you need to know about me is that I write SF and Fantasy, both fanfiction and original, and I hope to get published sometime within the next ten years at most; and that I love cats, especially the one who happens to be my avatar, Imber.

[edit Jan. 08/13]

Before you finish reading this post, I’d like to make a note about my life, and I want everyone who reads this blog to take it seriously, please. My parents made some mistakes with me as I was growing up. But every parent does that. And mine didn’t have the advantage that many parents have today of knowing that I was autistic (let’s not get into issues of denial and problems accessing services, okay?). I had an advanced vocabulary from the time I could talk, which was at an about average time, and never showed any indications of problems before I entered kindergarten. Back then, that was too late to be considered an ASD. They didn’t even find and acknowledge Hans Asperger’s papers on AS until three years before I graduated high school, and it wasn’t an official diagnosis until the year I graduated. So my parents did the best they could with what info they had. And they went to bat for me with school officials, which wasn’t easy. And now I’m living with them, while we’re all trying to deal with the fact that I have definite, measurable issues with independent living, as proved by the 9 years I spent on my own, and I haven’t been able to get an OT – see my next post, coming soon – and the local Autism Society is being no help at all.

So. My parents are in a very frustrating situation, and are still doing the very best they can to help me. If I make any comments about things that they’ve done, or not done, throughout my life… it is not their fault. They didn’t have the resources we have today, nor did they have the resources we are developing here and now, on my blog and others, with adult autistics being able to tell people what it was like for them growing up. Please take that into consideration before you make any comments on my parents’ behaviour that might be mentioned in here.

[end edit]

Thanks for reading. See you all later!

😉 tagAught