Monthly Archives: January 2013

Meltdowns and Control

Okay, not a long post. Hopefully. I have tasks I need to do before I can go to sleep, and boy, do I need sleep. But at the moment I’m a living example of how control of meltdowns can sometimes be detrimental, and I think I need to relay this while I’m in this state. Read on….

Cleaning Aids

Meant to do a different post originally, but this is what came up, for reasons you’ll read.

Yesterday, Dad and I were going to sort through some of the stuff in my room to try to get the area in front of my closet clear. (Well, he said that he’d pick the stuff up and my responsibility was to sort it into “Keep” and “Trash”.) However, my nerves were still jangled from what happened Wednesday afternoon (more later) so I asked him if we could do it today instead. He agreed. And onward to the cleaning process….

Effexor and Its Effects

[Edited Feb. 16/13: See first comment for points made.]

Alliterative title, isn’t it? (Ironically, while I tend to… enjoy alliteration most times, for “Effexor” and “effects” I really don’t like it….)

Anyway, as you can guess, this post is going to be about medication. If you’re not interested, feel free to leave alone (although please note that if you’re an ASDer contemplating the need for SNRIs, or if you’re the parent of one, you really should read this)…. If you are: follow my SNRI adventures here.

Asperger’s Diagnosis, Official and Non-

So, here it is, the post where I talk about how I felt concerning my Aspie diagnosis.

Official diagnosis? Relief.

Now, at least some of this was because, well, I’d actually sought that diagnosis. I’d made a point of going to the people who helped a friend of mine get his diagnosis, looking for one. It gave me the ability to access information and resources (including the Disability Tax Credit and the Registered Disability Savings Plan: Gov’t of Canada initiatives to help Canadians with disabilities that result in “severe and prolonged impairment of physical or mental functions” – which, quite frankly, ASD does).

Unfortunately, I’m still looking for some of those necessary supports…. Read further on my chatty opinions and thoughts….

ASD Behaviours and Traits

Warning: Very long post!

Once again, I seem to be writing something other than I meant to because of a response I started writing to one of The Third Glance‘s posts. This one is on my own ASD behaviours as a child and teen – what I know of them, at least. I have vague memories of my childhood, somewhat better ones of my adolescence, but most of what I remember is generic things that repeated, and specific events that stood out in my memory for some reason or another (some good, some bad). I may easily miss some – I’m still learning what is “normal” for ASD and what might have been something else, but these are the ones that my mother and I remember (or I experienced). Not in any particular order, except that of how they occurred to me while writing. Read on for the details

Making Decisions and Prioritization

(Before I get into the details of the post, if you haven’t read it already – or if you read it before Jan. 09/13 – I would greatly appreciate you reading all the way through my First Post. Then feel free to come back. Thank you.)

Originally, this post was going to be about my diagnosis, and how it felt to finally have that official medical validation that said, “Yes, I have Asperger’s. Yes, I am on the autistic spectrum.”

But then I read The Third Glance’s article about how she survived jury duty, and in my response, I found myself explaining about why I wouldn’t make a good candidate for jury duty. I don’t have as much trouble processing audial/verbal input as she does, though I know I’d end up exhausted at the end of each day. No, my reason was both much more and much less complex, in some ways.

I can’t make decisions. Continue on to find out what I mean…

Civility / Politeness in the ASD Community

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

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

This Blog and Post Index

This blog is mostly devoted to my life as an adult diagnosed (as an adult – it was only March 2012 I received my official diagnosis) with Asperger’s Syndrome / Autism Spectrum “Disorder”, and what it’s like to live in an allistic / neurotypical (aka “normal”, aka “NT”) world. (Note: “Allistic” is from the same roots as “autistic”, only where “aute” means “self”, “alli” means “others”. So allistic = non-autistic, because there are other people out there who are neuro-atypical, but not autistic.)

See the link at the top of the page saying Posts Index? That’s to a list of my posts in chronological order (along with a note as to when they were last updated), so you don’t have to scroll down the page to find the last post you read. Check it out! The Links Page is fairly obvious, I believe. And click on Handy Tips to find the posts I believe have potentially useful information for all!

Disclaimer [dated Nov. 04/17]: I have just been elected to the autistic self-advocate seat on the board of the Autism Society of Newfoundland and Labrador. As such, I am including this disclaimer – unless otherwise explicitly stated, opinions expressed in these posts are my personal opinions, and not those of the ASNL Board.

[Added: April 20/15] I have recently changed my usename on this blog from “tagAught” to “tagÂûght” to reflect the use of symbols chosen by the Autistic Community (as opposed to for autistics – AKA the puzzle piece). Namely, a number of autistics now use the chemical symbol for gold (Au) with accents (Âû) to represent Autistics/Autism. See Unstrange Mind’s April 2015 post “G is for Giraffe” for details.[/end addition #2]

😉 tagÂûght
(Trudy Goold)