An alternative to traditional Christmas pudding

Ingredients:

• Agar-agar-based vegetarian/vegan jelly crystals (raspberry-flavoured works especially well) (better texture and faster setting than gelatine-based crystals)
• Ginger — crystallized/glace/stem-in-syrup (this is a flexible recipe, and if you go for stem ginger, you can stir the syrup into the liquid for dissolving the jelly crystals)
• Glace cherries
• Dried mixed fruit (currants, raisins, candied peel, what-have-you — you might want to soak them overnight in fruit juice to soften them up a bit, but then again, they’ll be in a fairly liquid environment once they’re mixed into the pudding)
• Tinned pineapple chunks in fruit juice (optional but tasty, and you can add the juice to the jelly-dissolving liquid as well)
• Crystallized angelica if you can get it, but for whatever reason it’s become extremely rare over the past couple of decades

Procedure (to be carried out on Christmas Eve):

1. Put the Festival Of Nine Lessons And Carols from King’s College, Cambridge on the radio.
2. In a bowl large enough to hold all the ingredients, place the ginger, cherries, mixed fruit (drained if soaked), pineapple chunks and angelica (if using), and stir until well mixed.
3. Place the jelly crystals (and the drained-off juice/syrup, if they’re a factor) in a jug and make up the jelly to double or triple strength with hot water.
4. Allow the liquid jelly mixture to cool just enough to not break the bowl from thermal shock, then pour it over the mixed fruity ingredients and stir until well combined — you will have to work very quickly here, because I’m really not joking about how fast agar-agar-based jelly sets!
5. Once everything’s mixed, put the bowl in the fridge and leave to cool and set overnight.
6. Fish it out after the main bit of Christmas dinner and eat with Cornish clotted cream.
7. If there’s any jelly pud left over, it’ll keep covered in the fridge for a couple of weeks (if!).

***

Ok, that’s the recipe out of the way, now for the backstory!

This recipe is a long-standing family tradition — as in, 55+ years and counting. My late paternal grandmother found the recipe in (I believe) the Radio Times when my dad was quite young, and he’s been making it at Christmas ever since. He started making it with the vegetarian jelly crystals (usually strawberry or raspberry flavour, but any flavour should work) when he met my mum (near-lifelong vegetarian), and that aspect of the tradition has been present ever since. I wasn’t really able to appreciate this recipe in years gone by (Autistic taste-related sensitivities are weird and occasionally a pain in the bum), but now I’m firmly of the opinion that it’s not really Christmas without Dad’s jelly pud ^^

This recipe should be a good alternative option for folks who are vegetarian, vegan or who simply don’t like the traditional heavy cake-y Christmas pudding.

Eat hearty, folks! 😀

Recent art-wrangling

One of my New Year’s Resolutions this year was to start a Redbubble shop for a bit of passive income; apart from the slight wrinkle that my art/personal laptop died of 16,000+ bad sectors on the hard disk, things are going fairly well on that front! I have all of the pieces for my intended selection-at-launch done and ready to scan (apart from the A2-sized one, which is going to require some very careful photography instead). I’ve set a photo of ’em as the featured image on this post, but in case that doesn’t come up, here it is again:

Image description:

Starting from furthest back:

The tetraptych of #bacteriophages (icosahedral head, long ‘tail’, six legs) on the wall over the printer (each image will be sold separately) — Lower middle: #bacteriophage in shades of red, surrounded by the words ‘Autistic Pride’, also in red; Right: bacteriophage in the black-grey-white-purple colours of the asexual pride flag; Left: bacteriophage in the dark green-light green-white-grey-black colours of the aromantic pride flag; Upper middle: bacteriophage in five shades of green (which turned out more yellow-toned than I initially intended) against a lemniscate in black — this represents the #autigender pride flag (‘Autigender’ designates a gender identity so strongly influenced by one’s being Autistic that it cannot sensibly be considered apart from it)

A painting on an A2-sized canvas, placed on a blue desk easel, depicting a purple bacteriophage-rocket hybrid blasting off from a blue-green planet in the lower-right corner. (Fun thing, I based the landmasses in the painting on the island of Tanegashima in Japan, which is the real-life basis of Mossdeep City and the Mossdeep Space Center in Pokémon Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald/Omega Ruby/Alpha Sapphire)

Two paintings, the left-hand one on an A4 canvas and the right-hand one on a square canvas, showing variations on the theme of ‘layered four-pointed star motif in many colours’. The right-hand painting is in a fairly basic rainbow colour scheme progressing outward from the centre, while the left-hand painting has a more complex colour scheme and ‘channels’ of random splotches of colour to each side of the layered stars. (These channels came from my unwillingness to waste paint when I’d mixed slightly more than I needed to cover a particular area — my dad pointed out that they make a nice order-vs-chaos contrast with the layered stars.)

In the foreground, on top of the laptop: a roughly rectangular piece of cardboard painted with a chaotic variety of colour splotches. Similar in principle to the ‘channels’ mentioned in the previous paragraph, I used this as my ‘avoidance of waste’ picture when I was working on some custom Funko Pop figures, and I thought it would look nice on a hardcover journal or T-shirt or something 😀

/end of image description.

This represents my intended range of pictures — mainly bacteriophages in various #pride flag colours (since there seems to be a bit of a gap in the market), with occasional surrealist bacteriophages and colourful abstract geometry as inspiration strikes.

I did the two layered-star pieces during the 2020 lockdown — or at least, I intended to, but I ended up having to squeeze them into the interstices of an unexpectedly increased workload from the publisher that was my main/only client at the time…

Further updates once I get a working art laptop again! 😀

On forcing people into stories

A few weeks ago, I was talking with one of my LinkedIn connections about having the language to articulate and comprehend one’s own LGBTQIA+ identity when I remembered a scene from Witches Abroad by the late, great Sir Terry Pratchett (#GNUTerryPratchett).

In this scene, Granny Weatherwax, Magrat Garlick and Nanny Ogg (witches from Lancre) are travelling through a forest that the villain of the book has been using as a testing ground/practice field for her MO of forcing people to have fairytale lives and happy endings, whether they want them or not, under the honest belief that she’s doing what’s best for them and being the ‘good fairy godmother’ by doing so. The Lancre witches run across a version of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ which is played for tearjerking horror in that the ‘Big Bad Wolf’ is an ordinary wolf that’s been compelled by magic to think human thoughts and perform human actions (walking on two legs, operating door latches and so on) with a wolf mind and wolf body. This compulsion causes the wolf such colossal pain, being torn between wolfhood and humanhood but unable to be either, that it ultimately begs for a mercy kill: “”Preeees,” it growled. Annn enndinggg? Noaaow?”” (Granny Weatherwax insists on the wolf being given a proper burial afterwards, so as to disrupt the story further.)

What got me thinking was the applicability of the idea that, regardless of your intentions, forcing people into stories or roles that they don’t fit only causes them harm.

Whether it’s forcing autistic people (via ABA and the like) to perform neurotypical actions and think NT thoughts with an autistic body and mind to fit an ‘autism is a disease to be cured’ story, compelling LGBTQIA+ folks (e.g. via conversion “therapy”) to follow cisgender and/or heterosexual thoughts and behaviours with a non-cis/het body and mind to fit a cis/het/allo/amato-normative narrative, or any other variation on the theme of squashing people into boxes that are all wrong for who they are — it doesn’t matter whether the harm is your overt intention or you genuinely believe that what you are doing is what’s best for the person you’re targeting. Forcing a person into a role they don’t fit for the sake of a story that is not theirs, but rather is imposed upon them from outside, is colossally harmful and counterproductive.

Ironically not so rage-y: genesis of a special interest

After all of my rage-posting in April, I thought it’d be a nice palate cleanser to explore how Autistic special interests can form. Sometimes it’s quick — for example, when my mum put toddler-me in front of a Doctor Who video involving Daleks, or when a friend let me have a go on his copy of Pokémon Blue way back in 1999 (these are my two most enduring interests — I literally cannot imagine life without them). Sometimes it’s a bit slower or more indirect — like my interest in Undertale, which crept up on me slowly as I saw more and more of my tumblr friends raving about it before I decided to explore it for myself (and led to my interest in Deltarune being of the ‘instant’ variety). Sometimes it’s a really circuitous route, as shall be detailed below:

Prerequisites: strong interest in Pokémon and Undertale, a vague awareness of the Final Fantasy series being a thing that exists and involves oversized swords and someone called Sephiroth who has white hair

• Listening to random bits of video game music while working, stumble across a heavy metal cover of Megalovania, click the link on a basis of “What the heck, why not?”
• Holy crap, this guy‘s good!
• Hey, he has a Pokémon playlist and an Undertale playlist? Nice!
• Listen to just those two playlists over and over while checking the channel at least once a day for new uploads relating to either series
• [time passes]
• Hey, he’s posted a metal remix of Sky Tower? That track’s awesome, but too mellow to be metal-ised… *listens anyway* HOLY CRAP THIS IS BEAUTIFUL I HAVE TO CHECK OUT THIS GUY’S OTHER STUFF

• DING DING DING! New special interest/audio stim unlocked: GaMetal

• *listening to the back archives by year, looking at titles of upcoming tracks* Hm… Dancing Mad, huh? Wonder what that’s about? Dang, this guy’s a great vocalist as well… Wonder what the original sounds like? *listens to it* *mind blown*
• *gets curious, finds a Final Fantasy themed wiki and goes on a massive wiki walk between there and TVTropes regarding Final Fantasy VI* Cool… kinda depressing, tho (no spoilers here!)
• While looking at Pokémon Sword/Shield stuff on TVTropes: [about Galarian Zapdos] “[I]ts Shiny palette, while reminiscent of the original Zapdos, makes it bear more than a passing resemblance to a Chocobo, especially with the running.” *thinks ‘What the heck’s a Chocobo?’, looks it up, gets sucked into another wiki walk*
• *continuing to listen to the GaMetal back archives* What’s up next… One-Winged Angel? Isn’t that a trope on TVTropes? This must be where they got the name from… Hm, cool… [vocals start] O.O *mind heavily blown*
• Must find original track… [finds it] [has something akin to a revelation]
• [starts a frenzied FF wiki/TVTropes deep dive with an internal commentary that cannot be adequately encapsulated in words — ND peeps reading this will probably understand the feeling; sort of an intense burning energy in the dark space behind the eyes, one’s brain afire with INTEREST]

SPECIAL INTEREST UNLOCKED!: FINAL FANTASY VII

This is more or less how it went down, as best I can remember; the final step happened in the second half of 2021, shortly before I found out about the Nintendo Switch port of FF7. I held off on downloading it, though, because I was not at that point familiar with the Active Time Battle/conditional turn-based combat system used by the game — I decided to play through Pokémon Legends: Arceus first, since that game has a somewhat similar battle system and was in a reassuringly familiar series.

I downloaded the Switch port in late March of this year, when by lucky hap I found it to be 50% off on the eShop. I started playing on Friday 1st April and defeated Sephiroth on Sunday 24th April — fun fun! I remember instinctively grinning like a loon once I realised that Bizzarro-Sephiroth was going down, because I knew EXACTLY what sort of awesomeness was coming next! ‘Twas a great feeling, taking down an iconic videogame boss using my two fave characters from the game (Vincent and Cait Sith) 😀

It’s funny how short PSX-era games feel these days, isn’t it? Three-and-a-half weeks for FF7, and it generally takes me a fortnight to go through the N. Sane Trilogy, compared to at least six to eight weeks for the more recent Pokémon games… Maybe it’s down to advances in digital storage allowing individual games to have more content? Some difference between games made for handhelds vs consoles? *shrug* I don’t think it matters too much, so long as they’re fun ^^

Oh, and in case you’re wondering where the ‘irony’ in the title comes in… run the lyrics to One-Winged Angel through a Latin-English translation ;D

Autistic perspectives — some relevant links

I’m rounding out Autism Acceptance month with a few links to sites that showcase Autistic perspectives. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but I hope it serves as a good starting point.

Here goes!

• https://medium.com/@professionalautie/a-list-of-traits-that-people-dont-realise-are-actuallyautistic-6dd7795e570a — Well worth a read, especially to get an idea of just how varied autism is
• https://autiebiographical.tumblr.com/ — a blog posting short comics about various aspects of autism and the NT ableism we deal with on the regular
• https://autistic-apple-sauce.tumblr.com/ — another blog with comics about various Autistic trials and tribulations. Infrequently updated, but worth following all the same
• http://adhd-alien.com/ — more comics — about ADHD this time, but likely to have resonance for Autistic folks as well
• Nonverbal Tree — a tumblr blog that uses the headcanon of Groot (from the Marvel Cinematic Universe) being Autistic to explain various aspects of autism from the Autistic perspective. The blogrunner had to archive the blog itself due to receiving abuse — hence the Wayback Machine link — but the linked page (Autism Educational Posts) is a masterlist of important information. Quick warning — some of the posts go into unflinching detail about the kinds of abuse Autistic people can receive, both from bullies etc and from abusive “therapies” like Applied Behaviour Analysis, so tread carefully if this is a tricky subject for you. The posts themselves are well-tagged with trigger warnings
• https://archiveofourown.org/series/275382 — connected to the above point, the blogrunner’s GotG fanfiction — extremely good writing, and an excellent example of how to write Autistic characters!
• https://www.thearticulateautistic.com/ — An extremely accurately-titled blog that goes into great detail about various aspects of Autistic life and what neurotypicals can do that genuinely helps us
• https://autisticscienceperson.com/ — another excellently informative resource, focusing slightly more on the scientific aspects of autism
• The #actuallyautistic tag on social media — don’t post in this tag if you’re not Autistic yourself; simply read respectfully and with an open mind
• https://seaproofreading.wordpress.com/tag/autistic-rage/ — shameless self-promotion!

Autistic Rage, part 7 — “suffering” and “inspiration”

Just a short rage to round out this series, because it’s been more emotionally intense to work on than I expected…

First of all, the idea that Autistic people “suffer” from being Autistic. NO WE F***ING DON’T!!! What causes us ‘suffering’ is being in the neurological minority in a world built by and for neurotypicals who may or may not give an airborne wossname about helping us with accommodations to support us in navigating life, the universe and everything. I’m not denying that some aspects of autism can be very definitely not-fun — sensory overload, meltdowns and so on — but taking the time and effort to work with us on ways to ameliorate the sharp edges benefits everyone!

Talking about autism as something we “suffer from” also ties hard into the ableist, eugenicist, dehumanising rhetoric of “disease-fear-tragedy” that still unfortunately abounds. Which is a total pile of noxious, decaying porcine manure — autism isn’t a disease, you can’t ‘catch’ it and it’s not something to be afraid of or see as tragic unless YOU can’t be bothered to put in the effort to step out of your neurotypical comfort zone and try to understand things from our perspective. (I mean, NTs tell us to step out of our hard-won comfort zones for their benefit often enough — what’s stopping them doing the same?)

Second — just as dehumanising and possibly even more infuriating — is inspiration p*rn. You can probably imagine the sort of thing — a nauseating saccharine clickbait article all about how terribly ~inspiring~ it is that little Timmy who has high support needs learned to tie his own shoelaces aged 10 after years of effort and frustration (I ask you, what’s wrong with slip-ons or velcro???). Or maybe it’s about how Tara achieved three C-grade GCSEs in her mid-twenties through massive ~determination~ even though no-one supported her or thought she’d ever be able to do that because she’s nonverbal. Maybe it’s even just about an Autistic person who is (le gasp! le shock-horreur!) comfortable going grocery shopping on their own.

There are soooooo many things wrong with this sort of thing!

1. These sorts of stories treat us doing completely mundane things as highly remarkable, noteworthy and exceptional. This is downright insulting; it assumes that we can’t ever do these things normally because of our different neurological wiring, so they should be ooh-ed and ahh-ed over when they do happen.
2. It’s incredibly patronising, infantilising and condescending. Think about it, NT readers — how would you feel if someone came up to you and told you it was so inspiring that you have a successful career despite your need to focus on social interactions all the time? Pretty miffed, right, maybe even angry at their presumption that they know your world better than you do? That’s how we feel about these “inspirational” stories about Autistic people successfully doing things that are treated as non-noteworthy basics for neurotypicals.
3. Related to the previous point: it’s part of the toxic side of “positive stereotypes“. No matter how hard you try to convince us that these “inspirational” stories are meant to genuinely praise us, all we see is someone who doesn’t truly know us (and might not ever care to do so) reducing us to one trait or a small handful of traits for the sake of making NTs feel good about themselves.
4. Underlying all of the above: inspiration p*rn is downright dehumanising. It treats us not as real, whole people who come at the world from a slightly different angle (with all the strengths and struggles that implies), but as things that neurotypicals should use to motivate themselves. You see how that’s infuriating and demeaning?

Grrrr… My Limit Break bar is getting worryingly close to full from typing all that, so I’ll sign off now — back on Thursday with some interesting links!

Part 1 here

Part 2 here

Part 3 here

Part 4 here

Part 5 here

Part 6 here

Autistic Rage, part 6 — empathy and social skills

Warning for discussion of ableist bullying by teachers

Hoo boy, this is a big one!

Social skills first — one of the key aspects of autism is difficulty with social skills. I’m not denying that, but it’s primarily difficulty with social skills as defined by neurotypicals that gets us looked down on — among ourselves, Autistic folks tend to do just fine!

The thing that looks really hypocritical to me is that NT folks don’t seem to understand or care about NT social skills either. Think about times in the supermarket, for example, where people block aisles or shelves with their trolleys while obliviously chatting with each other, or where they barge into queues rather than going to the back of the line. Or any ‘I don’t work here’ story involving colossal entitlement (e.g. many accounts on Not Always Right — like this (caution: linked story involves physical assault)). All participants are presumably NT, but are they showing the vaunted NT social skills? Nope!

Incidentally, ‘I don’t work here’/entitled-customer-type stories are a pretty solid counter-example to the concept of autism as ‘lacking theory of mind’ (shudder). This was proposed by Simon Baron-Cohen in a 1985 paper that suggested that the key feature of autism was a lack of ‘theory of mind’, i.e. the ability to attribute mental states (especially those differing from our own) to other people. This is not only a wildly inaccurate understanding of autism — we’re able to attribute varying mental states to others just fine, thanks, it can just take a while to figure out the whys and wherefores because we’re speaking a different neurological language — it’s also massively ecologically invalid. Think about the example above of the (presumably) NT entitled customer demanding customer service from someone who did not work at that store — Customer was attributing a ‘lazy employee’ mindset to Target based on her own assumptions, not bothering to stop and consider that what she thinks is not the same thing as what is real. I’m sure any neurotypical person reading this post would agree that that’s a plausible mindset for an unpleasant NT person to have. And if NT people can so strongly lack theory of mind, ‘lacking theory of mind’ is a wholly inadequate and ecologically invalid conception of autism. Not to mention ableist — the language of lack and deficit just enforces prejudice.

Speaking of Baron-Cohen and ecological invalidity, his 1997 ‘Reading the mind in the eyes’ test is no better. The test in question involves multiple photos of various people’s eyes, which are allegedly displaying different emotions. The idea behind the test is that NT people will be able to accurately assess the displayed emotion just fine, while Autistic people will not. This is ecologically invalid for a couple of reasons. One, NT people don’t just look at eyes to determine someone else’s emotions; they use other parts of the face and body as well, in addition to stuff like tone of voice and so on. Two, Autistic people are perfectly capable of figuring out what other people are feeling or thinking — we just don’t use eyes to do so. With us, it’s frequently a gut-instinct sort of thing (though how much of that is a trauma response as opposed to an autism-specific trait is potentially debatable).

Neurotypical misunderstanding/ignorance of their own social skills extends to how they treat Autistic people (all too often, BADLY). For example, two NT social rules are ‘treat other people kindly and with understanding if they mess up’ and ‘don’t upset or insult someone for your own amusement’. Try telling that to three of the teachers I had in secondary school:

1. The Geography teacher I had in Year 7 who looked at my little ‘globe of the world’ pencil sharpener and told me, “Put that away, that’s cheating!”, keeping on and doubling down until I was in floods of tears and the entire class was laughing at me, and ONLY THEN clarifying that she was “joking” (some f***ing joke…sadistic old witch)
2. The RE teacher in Year 11 who insulted me for not wanting to take part in a roleplay skit to illustrate some moral point or other, saying, “Well, if you want to sit there like a cabbage…” and seeming to feel validated in saying that when the rest of the class (you guessed it) laughed at me. Admittedly, this was comparatively mild in relation to some of the other flak I caught in school, but seriously! Don’t insult someone for not wanting to do something they’re not comfortable with!
3. The teacher who saw one of my main bullies from my GCSE Engineering group shouting at me for not saying hello back to him, forced me to write up a bullying incident report before I had a chance to get back onto an emotional even keel, decided she didn’t like the way I’d worded the report (apparently, I’d used the word ‘stupid’ too many times or something) and pulled me into her office to faux-empathetically lecture/berate me about how I’d never get anywhere in life because I lacked emotional intelligence. I’m still pissed off about this even a decade-and-a-half later. Not *quite* to the point of being vindictive enough to directly dox the ableist old hag, but I will say that she had one of the most bitterly ironic surnames I’ve ever come across…

All of the foregoing discussion of NT (lack of) social skills, especially in relation to Autistic people, really comes down to one thing: empathy. The idea is that NTs have it and Autistic folks don’t. That’s a load of bollocks if ever I heard it — for one thing, all the examples given above (both entitled customers and asshole teachers) show that NTs are perfectly capable of being grossly unempathetic. For another thing, Autistics are absolutely capable of empathy, often to a greater degree than NTs; we just process and display it differently (see these posts from The Articulate Autistic: (1) (2) (3) for more details). But of course, for NTs, ‘different’ social/emotional processing is ‘wrong’ and ‘bad’… Blech.

I suppose this comes down to the ‘double empathy problem‘ — the idea that NTs and Autistics have trouble empathising with each other’s thoughts, feelings, behaviour and so on because of the very different angles from which we approach life and the world. (image is from the Wikipedia article)

This idea certainly has merit; it feels right in a way that other conceptions (e.g. ‘theory of mind’) don’t, and it lacks the stigma-promoting negative connotations of the language of lack and deficit that still enjoy too great a prevalence in the NT discourse about autism.

I’m all out of writing spoons for now, so I’ll see you on Monday for my final rage!

Part 1 here

Part 2 here

Part 3 here

Part 4 here

Part 5 here

Autistic Rage, part 5 — spoons and processing

Warning for discussion of teacher-sanctioned bullying

Before I get into today’s rage, I want to define a term: spoon theory. You may have heard of this already (original post here) — put simply, it’s a metaphor whereby a collection of spoons is used to represent a person’s limited pool of energy for carrying out daily tasks, with each spoon representing one ‘unit’ of energy. The theory originated with regard to chronic illness, but is also highly applicable to neurodivergent people.

With this in mind, let’s get on with today’s topic: processing issues and work speed. This is quite a personal thing for me, since it was a recurring issue when I was in school; I tended to catch a lot of criticism and mockery for working more slowly than everyone else. I’m willing to bet that that’s a somewhat common experience of Autistic folks, even if it’s not universal.

A sine qua non of autism is that we process things differently from the neuromajority. This can mean we figure things out a lot quicker than people expect — for example, the time I walked into an A-Level Chemistry assessment and figured out the identity of the ‘mystery chemical’ just from looking at the test instructions, or when I received the module document for my third-year Sartre module for my Philosophy degree prior to the start of term and a full essay plan for the final assessment dropped into my head fully formed. However, it can also mean that we take longer to do things or work things out than neurotypicals would like or expect.

This sort of thing is frequently misinterpreted as laziness, stupidity or willful stubbornness and ignorance by NTs, and responded to with some degree of hostility. Such an interpretation is thoroughly wrong-headed. Processing speeds in Autistic people can be influenced by any number of factors. For example, the information we’re being given to work with might be presented or constructed in a way that works well for neurotypicals but which we need to spend a lot more time and energy figuring out. Alternatively, we could be burning through our daily quota of spoons doing things like masking, trying to filter out unpleasant sensory input in the immediate environment, or simply forcing ourselves to focus on the task in hand when other thoughts — about special interests, say, or emotions relating to some other situation — are clamouring for our attention. Any of these factors (there will more than likely be multiple in play at any one time) could affect an Autistic person’s ability to process information and execute tasks at a neurotypical-accepted speed.

I’ve mentioned that I had recurring problems with this issue in school; one incident from when I was in Year 4 or 5 (about 9-10 years old) particularly sticks out in my memory. I forget exactly what triggered the situation, but the teacher called out my slow working in front of the whole class and initiated a discussion (with, I must repeat, the whole class) about a phrase or word they could say to me to get me to work faster if they thought I was being too slow at something. She apparently thought it was ok to do this because she’d worked out something similar with another (presumably NT) student who tended to get a bit too chatty.

I repeat: when I was nine or ten, a teacher publicly called me on my tendency to work too slowly for her liking and gave the rest of the class carte blanche to bully me over it and gaslit me into agreeing to go along with it! (At least, I think it counts as gaslighting; I knew even then that my speed was an issue, but…)

This teacher was pretty unpleasant in other ways too, tending to yell at me for sometimes being clumsy and confused, or for reading the same book over and over — once even screaming at me in front of the class for having what she thought was a comic in my classwork drawer! (It wasn’t)

Ekkk… F*** you, Miss O.

Anyways! You see why hostility is a bad response to slow Autistic processing? Try taking the time to actually understand the full situation and how you can help, and for Arceus’ sake, avoid public humiliation!

Incidentally, the spoon theory and the ease of processing different situations are why ‘If you’re well enough to play video games, you’re well enough to go to school’ is fallacious — there’s a world of difference between quietly curling up in a safe place with a blanket, pile of cuddly toys and a video game save file that’s just getting to a really good bit, and being forced to spend a large chunk of every day wearing a stupidly uncomfortable uniform while stuck in a cramped building reeking of sweat and cheap deodorant, in the company of a noisy horde of hormone-addled sociopaths who seem to take a genuinely sadistic glee in making your life as miserable as possible (I suspect that my experience of secondary school is not especially unique among Autistic experiences).

This has been a Ramble(tm) — see you on Thursday!

Part 1 here

Part 2 here

Part 3 here

Part 4 here

Autistic Rage, part 4 — stimming and infodumping

Equal parts rage and sadness for this one, because stimming and infodumping are two natural Autistic things that seem to provoke the most unwarranted neurotypical hostility.

First up, stimming. A lot’s been said about this in many different ways by many different people, so I’ll start with a quick definition: repetitive movements or other sensory simulation (e.g. listening to the same piece of music over and over) used instinctively or deliberately by Autistic people to self-soothe, aid focus, express emotion and so on. It’s highly important for our physical, mental and emotional health that we able able to regulate and soothe ourselves in this way.

Why the ever-loving f*** do neurotypicals seem to hate stimming so much? Probably because it’s very obviously different from what the ‘majority’ does, and hence in their minds is ‘annoying’ and ‘not acceptable’ and ‘must be erased’ (blech)… Sorry to disappoint you, hostile ableists, but stimming is part of who we are — you’re not going to make us neurotypical by forcing us to mask it, so maybe try stepping out of your narrow little comfort zone, looking at things from a different angle and respecting our physical and mental health and our natural way of being in the world! You might just learn something!

For instance, the subtle nuances of stimming that can be a far stronger indication of an Autistic person’s emotional state than facial expressions. To take myself as an example, I frequently stim by hand-flapping in contexts of distress and happiness. The two types of flapping are very different, though. When I’m distressed or uncomfortable, I hold my arms in a rigid and slightly weird position by my sides, hands at hip level, and make slow, staccato hand-flaps and stiff partial rotations of my wrists. The overall visual effect is sort of like a live-action version of a video game with a dodgy frame rate. Vocally, I might whimper a lot at a low pitch and generally struggle to construct a sentence.

With happy hand-flapping, on the other hand, my movements are much faster, looser and freer, with my arms bent at the elbow and my hands at shoulder level or in front of my face or chest. I might also be jumping up and down or bouncing on my toes, and will almost certainly be making high-pitch squeeing noises 😀

I’m tempted to draw an analogy here between Autistic stimming as emotional expression and the subtle nuances of feline body language, especially regarding tail movement, ear position and so on. If you ignore what the cat is trying to tell you, mutual hostility and resentment is likely to result. However, if you take the time to understand the subtleties and respect what the cat is expressing, you’ll earn its undying trust and affection. Plus, petting a cat is one of the best multi-sensory stims ever! Soft kitty floof, happy kitty purring, the visual input of a cat existing adorably, maybe kneading with paws, pressure input of cat on lap or chest… KYAAAAAAAAAA! 😀

Infodumping — giving a lot of information about a particular subject in monologue form — also seems to attract a lot of NT hostility, which saddens and infuriates me in equal measure. I mean, sure, work with the Autistic person/people in your life to figure out good contexts in which to infodump, but for the love of Loki, don’t try to stamp it out altogether! Us Autistic people get a lot of disproportionate hatred for daring to have special interests and wanting to talk about them, so if an Autistic person feels safe enough to attempt to connect with you by infodumping to you about their interest in, say, Anomalocaris, you should cherish that; there is almost no stronger way of saying that they like and trust you, quite possibly with their lives.

Well??? Are you CHERISHING???
CHERISH HARDER!!!

*ahem*

While I might have been joking around a bit with the Undertale reference, I’m fully serious about that last point. Neurotypical hostility to Autistic traits and people can make displaying those traits a matter of life or death, so we’re not going to take the safety to infodump for granted — and you shouldn’t either.

You see why this topic is such a point of rage/sadness for me?

Incidentally, the harm involved in the suppression of natural autistic traits like stimming, infodumping and so on is why the ‘indistinguishable from peers’ concept can [procreate] off and die in a goddamn fire — if NT comfort relies on not ever seeing anyone or anything acting even a tiny bit different from NT notions of what is acceptable, then FUVK NT comfort! We’re here, we’re weird, we’re real, whole people and we’re not going away!

This has been a Rant(tm) — see you next week!

Part 1 here

Part 2 here

Part 3 here

Autistic Rage, part 3 — linearity and disclosure

This post is a bit of a continuation of the theme of part 2, but more in the realm of ‘simmering annoyance’ than “ESTUANS INTERIUS IRA VEHEMENTI” (trans: ‘Burning inside with violent anger’). Where functioning labels and “person-first” language (ick… If you have to insist on banging on about our personhood before mentioning our neurodivergence, do you really see us as people?) really evoke my wrath, the misconception of autism as a linear spectrum is closer to being mildly irritating by comparison — though it’s still a valid concern.

What do I mean by ‘linear spectrum’? This is the neurotypical misconception of autism being a straight line with the classic, stereotypical ‘locked in their own world’ kid on one end, a perfectly acceptable neurotypical person on the other end and a smooth gradient between the two.

Autism just does not work like that! This ties back to my discussion of the inadequacy and invalidity of functioning labels in the previous post — just as an Autistic person might or might not be able to Do The Thing at any given time depending on various factors, they can’t be placed at a particular point on a linear spectrum from ‘Autistic’ to ‘neurotypical’ on the basis of their profile of abilities. I’ve heard the term ‘spiky profile’ in this context, and it’s a good one! Where NT folks might have a smooth distribution of abilities (imagine you’re using a radar chart for this), an Autistic person’s ability chart is more likely to resemble a porcupine having a bad quill day. Their spread of abilities might well seem random, inconsistent or nonsensical to an NT observer, while simply being the way things are for the Autist. This ‘spiky profile’ precludes placement on a linear spectrum because some of the points in the profile would place the Autistic person at one stage of the line while other points would place them somewhere else entirely.

Plus, the idea of a linear autistic spectrum has the same problem as functioning labels, in that there’s an inherent hierarchical element and value judgement that prioritises neurotypical convenience and the appearance of neurotypicality.

Consequently, I prefer to view the autistic spectrum as being more of an n-dimensional colour wheel or a complex gemstone with n facets, where n equals the number of Autistic people in existence. Isn’t that a better mental image? 😀

These faults and troubling aspects of functioning labels, linear views of the spectrum and so on are part of why disclosure — especially forced disclosure — can be so very dangerous for Autistic people. ‘The Articulate Autistic‘ has multiple posts explaining why this is so (and far more coherently than I can — see for example here and here (tw for bullying and suicide mentions in the second link)). To put it concisely, there’s the very real danger of NT misunderstandings leading to hostility, abandonment or outright violence and abuse (or worse), refusal to believe us or do more than half-listen to us based on prior expectations, and the sheer exhaustion factor in trying to explain our brains to an already unreceptive audience.

For my part, all of these pitfalls and dangers are a big reason why I’m in favour of leaving the choice of whether or not to disclose in the hands of the Autistic person as far as possible, regardless of their age. Of course, there might be a need for the parents of newly diagnosed Autistic kids to inform their school so that the proper supports can be put in place to help that kid thrive, or for carers of high-support Autists to disclose for the same reason. Otherwise, though, I’d say it’s better to give the Autistic person control of their own personal information — parents, friends etc. going around telling all and sundry, “Oh, little so-and-so is Autistic!” without the individual’s permission might be well-intentioned but not thinking about how badly that can potentially backfire. The same applies to pressuring someone to disclose their autism to others, whether strangers or otherwise. You know what they say about roadbuilding in Hell*… Plus, it’s just downright disrespectful of the Autistic person’s right to control their own narrative and information!

As ever, I’m open to discussion on this — let me know what you think in the comments!

This has been more of a Ramble(tm) than a Rant(tm), but still! Back on Thursday with more of the same 😀

Part 1 here

Part 2 here

* ‘The road to Hell is paved with good intentions’