Tag Archives: let’s talk about

Let’s Talk About: Not A Compliment

First of all, I’m sorry I haven’t posted anything in the last year-plus. See Update & Devastating Last 6 Weeks on my Other Blog for some of the details.

Onto the topic of conversation: why “I would never have known you were autistic if you hadn’t told me” is most emphatically not a compliment.

So, some of you (any who have read the aforementioned post, definitely) will know that I broke my ankle in April. Yesterday was my last appointment at the Orthopedic Clinic (it’s well-healed). I was talking to doctor there and happened to mention that I was autistic, and the above paragraph mentions what she told me in response.

This is definitely not a compliment. This is, in fact, a summary of just how badly our culture/society regards autism/treats autistics.

Continue on….

Let’s Talk About: #Neurodivergent ≠ Saint

Bit of a rant here, just warning you….

Disclaimer

Additional Disclaimer: I am not naming names; this may have been prompted by one incident, but I have no desire to start a flame war.

So, a friend recently sent me a link to a post by someone else that was written in response to a comment they’d left on a previous post. A calm, rational comment, that did disagree with some (though definitely not all) of the author’s viewpoint, but explained why they disagreed. The subsequent post (the one I was directed to) did a not-very-good job of “paraphrasing” certain elements of the comment (i.e. they were not direct quotes, they were the author putting their own spin on what was said), and seemed to feel that my friend was NT because they disagreed with the author.

Continue for more details and my reactions.

Let’s Talk About: Emotions – Feeling Left Out

It looks like I’m going to be doing a series of rambles about emotion. This one, as per the title, is about feeling left out. I was thinking about other stuff yesterday, and a few memories came up that put me in mind of this particular emotion.

It’s a difficult feeling to quantify and to express, the sense of feeling left out of something. Particularly when you already have trouble with social cues and body language, and so can’t necessarily recognize that whatever you’re feeling left out of has nothing to do with you.

It’s also a very alienating and isolating emotion. Even thinking about talking about it makes me want to cry or melt down. Not exactly a pleasant topic, I’m afraid.

But it’s an important one. Particularly when the people around you don’t mean for you to get the impression that you’re being left out of things.

Read on for my rambles and thoughts on the matter.

Let’s Talk About: Emotions – #Grief

There’s a series on Twitter about how (we) autistics feel negative emotions right now, prompted by one of Neurodivergent Rebel’s Twitter #AskingAutistics polls. (Which I highly recommend, by the way.) And since there are things going on in my life right now that make this a fairly relevant topic for me, I decided to write a post on it. Or more specifically, write a current post on grief. I’ll probably write about others later, but this is the one relevant right now.

I’ve mentioned alexithymia – the inability to recognize/categorize one’s own emotions, and sometimes to have physical reactions to emotions instead of “feeling” them – before, both when speaking of imagination, and about psychosomatic issues. And there’s also the issue that autistics tend to emote in ways that are not recognized/understood by the neurotypical audience. All of this means that quite often, the neurotypical audience has no idea what we feel, or how deeply/intensely.

One thing I do know about grief, from previous experience, is that I process it very differently from most of my family. (I’m not sure about my dad – we haven’t really discussed that.) Of course, no one processes emotions in exactly identical fashion, whether from the neurotypical or the neurodiverse population… but my way is rather different from most others that I’ve heard of.

Read on for more about my processing and the questions to talk about

Let’s Talk About: Followup #AnxietyAttacks What Helps?

On Wednesday I posted about anxiety/panic attacks, and what happened to me on Monday. As one might guess, it’s been a topic of conversation among my family since then.

And what keeps coming up (understandably enough, especially considering that no one said anything or reacted to me on Monday) is the question: What can be done to help? What helps while the attack is happening, and what helps after it’s over?

Read on for details and Let’s Talk About questions

Let’s Talk About: #AnxietyAttacks

Disclaimer

So, I meant to get this up yesterday, but due to things around the topic, I spent yesterday trying to distract myself.

Anxiety (and depression) seem to go hand-in-hand with autism, and no one yet has been able to determine whether they are co-occuring conditions, or whether there’s something about the autistic brain wiring that lends itself to anxiety and depression, or perhaps they’re symptoms of trying to deal with a world not suited to us for years and years on end (which is what I suspect they are, personally, but I’m not a scientist). Could really be any one or any combo of those things.

Basic intro over with, let’s go on to what I want to talk about (and hear from others about) today: Anxiety attacks.

I’ve mentioned before on this blog that I tend to get anxiety attacks when medical issues are being discussed, and they present (for me) like hypoglycemic attacks: lightheadedness, cold sweats, dizziness, shakes, etc. I know one person who “whites out” when they have an anxiety/panic attack, and another who thought they were having a heart attack when they had their first (that they could remember) attack.

The reason this topic came up for me to write about was what happened to me this past Monday.

CW: Mention of dental procedures, not very detailed, but method of injecting freezing stated.

Read on for details and questions

Let’s Talk About: Modes of Thought: “Blind” Mind

Way back when, I wrote two posts on imagination and modes of thought. Well, my Dad tends to read the BBC, and when he sees an interesting article on there, he tends to share it with the family. Early this morning he found one that has a very definite link to what I was talking about in those two posts. It’s about the fact that there are some people who are unable to visualize anything; it’s called “aphantasia”.

This man had no idea his mind is ‘blind’ until last week

Read on for my thoughts

Let’s Talk About: Storybooks – Face-blindness vs. Bullies

And now that I’m back in St. John’s, I’m resuming the talk about storybooks! Specifically, this post is to look at the issue of face-blindness and bullying.

While I was in the CAPP meeting a week and a half ago, I brought this topic up over lunch, and got some great suggestions for how people who are face-blind can deal with “recognizing/identifying” bullies. I’m going to list them here. If anyone has other possibilities, ideas, suggestions, solutions, please let me know – I’d really like these Spectrum Storybooks to be as comprehensive as possible.

Continue reading

Let’s Talk About: Storybooks! Post #1

So, here’s the thing. When I was at Social Club this afternoon, our facilitator mentioned that she’d been looking in the ASNL Library for resources – storybooks – to help some parents explain certain things to their children. Unfortunately, she wasn’t too happy with what she found – some she liked the wording but not the illustrations, some she liked the illustrations but not the wording, and some were “yuck”.

Because we’re a pretty creative group, she came up with the idea that maybe we could go ahead and write (and illustrate) some of these missing resources. We all loved the idea. So, one of the first things we have to do is research – and I’m turning to you. Autistic adults – what (of the subjects listed below) would you have wanted to read to help you as a kid? Autistic teens, what about you? Parents, can you ask your kids? Do you have any suggestions for wording? Are there any other subjects you think would be helpful? And if we’re satisfied with what we produce… would you like us to publish them?

Read on for details!

Let’s Talk About: The Meanings of “Obsession”

So, at Social Club (at the Autism Society for NL; it’s basically a small group getting together for social activities – playing games, doing art, etc.) this past weekend, we had a new person there. And that person mentioned that xe was obsessed with one particular topic (I can no longer remember what it was, that wasn’t the important thing), “like with OCD” (obsessive-compulsive disorder).

On my post about Hyper-Focus vs. Lack of Focus, Unstrange Mind called me on using the term “special interest” for interests that we have and like to focus on – a term that I used to replace the term “obsession”, which tends to carry a negative connotation. She suggested using the term “passion”, which I thought was a very good idea, and have since cleaned up my vocabulary that way. 🙂

Anyway, getting back to the topic of the post, I was rather disturbed by the way that person was using the term “obsession” to define a particular area of interest, because at one point, my mother suggested I might be OCD, and I asked my psychologist about the matter. And what he said was something of an eye-opener.

Read on for more details….