Tag Archives: independent living

Fiat Lux!

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“Let there be light!” (Or, in literal translation, the order, “Make light!”)

So, yes, this post is about sensory stuff. Specifically, visual sensory stuff, and living with people who aren’t as sensitive to light as I am.

Everyone needs light. We’re a diurnal species, meaning that we’re active in the daylight. There are very good reasons for that, involving the anatomical makeup of our eyes – namely, we (as a species) aren’t very good at seeing in the dark, and vision is our species’ primary sense.

More than that, we need a certain amount of sunlight to stay healthy. It helps our bodies produce Vitamin D, which helps with the absorption of calcium, and assists in preventing depression (or helping to mitigate it), to name just two benefits of sunlight.

Continue on for the sensory stuff….

Services = IQ ≤ 70

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*sighs*

My Mom is still working on making connections with Eastern Health, trying to get services for me so that I can live independently. I’m working (somewhat – I seriously need help with motivation, depression has me in its grasp) on getting Income Support and Employment Insurance. I’ve filled out the forms and stuff, now it’s mostly waiting.

But for Mom… she keeps running into the same old problem. “If she has an IQ of higher than 70, we can’t help her.”

Click for further venting and expressions of dissatisfaction

“Autism Speaks, I Want to Say”

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Another flash blog. This one prompted by the Autism Speaks video “I Want to Say”, which was supposed to be about autistics using AAC… but no communications from autistics were actually shown. Which renders the supposed purpose of the video useless. Read more about it here, at the flash blog.

I’m verbal. I don’t need AAC to communicate. But I am by far more comfortable communicating in email and text and via the computer than I am face-to-face (or, gods forfend, on the phone). I am autistic.

I want to say: Autism Speaks, I don’t like you. Things like that video are fear-mongering and hate-promoting. Things like that video portray us as less than human. We are not.

Continue reading →

Recommendation: Musing’s Survey #1

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Okay, Musing of an Aspie‘s “Take a Test Tuesday” has now changed over to “Take a Survey Tuesday”, at least for a month. I highly recommend them; the questions are asked by ASDers for other ASDers. The first one, now up, is about relationships – friendships, family, romantic.

So, what are you doing still over here? Pop over to her post and either fill out the survey on Survey Monkey, or answer in the comments!

😉 tagAught

Hyper-Tense? Medical Stuff

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So, mentioned in the last post that I was going to the doctor this morning. I had an appointment to talk to her about my cholesterol (for which I had a blood test last week, finally), and I also wanted her to act as my referrer to Avalon Employment Inc., which helps people with developmental and intellectual disabilities find and handle work. (And considering some of my work requirements, I could use the help!) Not to mention, I also wanted to talk to her about what happened Wednesday and yesterday.

Please note that if you’re triggered by medical issues, you may not want to read the following. Read on

Coping Mechanisms

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Warning: Speculation post! No definite cognitive science here, I’m afraid!

Ah, coping mechanisms. Where would we be without them? Well, as a species, probably dead. Coping mechanisms are our ways of dealing with stressors in the environment.

So… I can’t remember whether I mentioned it on here or not, or maybe in a comment on another blog, but over the past several years (as in about 3-5 – essentially when I began accepting and understanding what it meant to be on the spectrum), I’ve become more (consciously?) aware of various sensory issues, emotional overloads, and needs. I’ve been noticing that I avoid eye contact a lot more than I (or my mom, in fact) thought I did, for example. Continue on….

Cleaning Aids

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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….

ASD Behaviours and Traits

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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

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