your dreams will be reduced down to breathing, and you will be grateful

Posted in featured, Society

The thing about not-being-a-person is:

They will say those people and the price of being a person is to nod and agree that yes, those people aren’t people at all.

They will have no idea who they are talking to.
You yourself will start to forget, too.
They will say a million small things that sow the seeds for violence done against you, and you will smile and let them.

You will do math, constantly.

How much do I want to be a person today? How much do I want this …

...[Read More]

on 03/5/12 | 2 Comments | Read More

Navigating Competing Worlds: The Elusive Ideal of Normalcy

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been very busy with my job and with getting acclimated to the routine of my graduate program. I’ve formed a great connection with the little guy I care for, and in my[Read More]

on 10/28/11 | 2 Comments | Read More

Quiet Hands

1. When I was a little girl, they held my hands down in tacky glue while I cried. 2. I’m a lot bigger than them now. Walking down a hall to a meeting, my hand flies out to feel the texture on the wa[Read More]

on 10/27/11 | 16 Comments | Read More

Grabbers

It’s a grabbers vs. flappers warzone. On the one side are the flappers. We wave and twist our hands in front of our faces or slap them against our chests. Our heads punctuate our moods and the music[Read More]

on 10/27/11 | 1 Comment | Read More

Mind conversation with myself

Mind conversation with myself. How to speak about the differences in perceiving the world before you learn that your view of the world is not the typical way? How would you know the difference between[Read More]

on 10/26/11 | No Comments | Read More

Occupy The DSM (Open Letter and Petition to the DSM-5 Task Force and the APA)

To the DSM-5 Task Force and the American Psychiatric Association: As you are aware, the DSM is a central component of the research, education, and practice of most licensed psychologists in the United[Read More]

on 10/25/11 | 1 Comment | Read More

Introversion and Schizoid Traits

Not so long ago, I was dropped a link by a reader to Wikipedia’s entry on schizoid personality disorder. I was shocked as I read it over. I read through the descriptions and lists on this page and f[Read More]

on 10/24/11 | 1 Comment | Read More

Autism, Culture, & Representation (course description & reading list)

With this supposed increase in autism has come an increase in texts about autism (across media, across genre), much of it volatile and emotionally charged. Our main objective in this class, then, is t[Read More]

on 10/21/11 | No Comments | Read More

Evidence Christ Was Autistic?

Here is the abstract from a recently published paper (Izuma 2011): People act more prosocially when they know they are watched by others, an everyday observation borne out by studies from behavior[Read More]

on 10/20/11 | No Comments | Read More

Diary of a Drooler

This is a story about disability. This is a story about the politics of drool. This is a lot of things, and maybe you should just read it. [Read More]

on 10/19/11 | 1 Comment | Read More

Why Shouldn’t It Be Easy For Everyone? Why Shouldn’t It Be Easy For Autistics?

Just a quick companion piece here for Zygmunt’s account of his grappling with the social justice system of extroverts — a group that if not provably neurologically distinct, certainly seems to hav[Read More]

on 10/17/11 | 1 Comment | Read More

Extroverts and the Concept of ‘Deserval’

We turn on the TV and encountering the concept is inevitable: “I deserve it.” says a waifish, urban thirty-something woman as she justifies buying that expensive dress or that decadent slice of ra[Read More]

on 10/17/11 | No Comments | Read More

Thinking In Binary: Recently at Reddit

This conversation (below) along with a parallel comment on another thread caused me to dig up a Douglas Rushkoff quote that keeps coming back to me: “The digital realm is biased toward choice, becau[Read More]

on 10/12/11 | 10 Comments | Read More

What Is Psychopathy’s Place In Neurodiversity?

Psychopaths loom large in the autistic anxiety closet. Our single-day traffic record at Shift Journal belongs to Scott Shea’s Spotting Psychopaths in the Workplace, which garnered nearly 1800 hits o[Read More]

on 10/11/11 | 5 Comments | Read More

Life After Mass Society?

I received this comment from a reader: Hey this is Adi. I have been reading a lot of your posts and like this blog a lot and I am posting for the first time. I have a question that has been bugging me[Read More]

on 10/10/11 | No Comments | Read More

Book Review: “Blazing My Trail: Living and Thriving with Autism” by Rachel B. Cohen-Rottenberg

“Blazing My Trail: Living and Thriving with Autism” by Rachel B. Cohen-Rottenberg is a “sequel” to “The Uncharted Path” which I reviewed here and followed up here. When we last left Rachel[Read More]

on 10/7/11 | No Comments | Read More

Thoreau’s Visit from a Canadian Woodcutter — Conversations (pt. 2)

He was so genuine and unsophisticated that no introduction would serve to introduce him, more than if you introduced a woodchuck to your neighbor. He had got to find him out as you did. He would not p[Read More]

on 10/6/11 | No Comments | Read More

Thoreau’s Visit from a Canadian Woodcutter — Description (pt. 1)

Rather than trying to spark a debate over postmortem diagnoses, the primary intent here is to showcase and encourage an appreciation for Thoreau’s fascination with and delight in his neighbor who wa[Read More]

on 10/6/11 | No Comments | Read More

Indistinguishability and Modeling- or, To a Friend or Three

I think that for too many of us, we are brought up to look for role models upon which to model our behavior. This modeling is something that I think is sometimes so very encouraged in some of us- Auti[Read More]

on 10/4/11 | No Comments | Read More

When it comes to development differences, environment dictates when it’s a disability

The other day, the governor of Texas, Rick Perry, commented that attention-deficit disorder should be a “paddleable offense.” He compares ADD/ADHD to having “ants in the pants,” and says that [Read More]

on 10/3/11 | 1 Comment | Read More

Introverts vs. Extroverts: Learning

The acquisition of knowledge has a very different meaning to introverts and extroverts. Extroverts: Learning is a means to an ends Introverts: Learning is an end unto itself. Extroverts learn somethi[Read More]

on 10/3/11 | 3 Comments | Read More

Autism War Fizzles Out

Five years ago, the Combating Autism Act was passed with great fanfare, authorizing a billion dollars in federal spending for autism research. The act’s proponents made clear, in language every bit[Read More]

on 09/30/11 | No Comments | Read More

Welcome, Crow’s Eye Readers

We’ve been getting a significant traffic bump from the recent comments thread and/or the blogroll (thanks, Jack) over at political blog The Crow’s Eye, and since it may not be readily apparent wha[Read More]

on 09/29/11 | No Comments | Read More

Advice For Children, Unsolicited

Do not trust knowingly decent people. It isn’t their native temperament. They want more than simple kindness, or good faith. They want security, the promise of reward, or to pretend that they can ha[Read More]

on 09/28/11 | 3 Comments | Read More

Asperger, Self-diagnosis and the Media

I am aware that the TV show Glee portrayed a self-diagnosed Aspie (someone with Asperger) as someone using this as an excuse for being a jerk. Not only could this not be farther away from the truth, t[Read More]

on 09/27/11 | 1 Comment | Read More

Extrovert Success and the Introvert

What kind of life in society is considered a success? In obituaries we see ‘was a great person/parent’ and all kinds of statements, but never do we see ‘This person was successful. In their ti[Read More]

on 09/26/11 | No Comments | Read More

A Question of Humanity?

Autism is often referred to in ways that dehumanize autistic people: That autism leaves a child seemingly soul-less; that the person once present in that body and mind is now missing or unreachable. T[Read More]

on 09/23/11 | 1 Comment | Read More

Unwarranted Conclusions and the Potential for Harm: My Reply to Simon Baron-Cohen

I want to thank Simon Baron-Cohen for taking the time to respond, in his September 10th post on the Autism Blogs Directory, to one of my early pieces on autism and empathy. I am very gratified that he[Read More]

on 09/21/11 | 9 Comments | Read More

A Safer World

Over the past decade, the United States and other countries have worked to stop terrorism, educating citizens to recognize and report potential dangers. Some terrorist attacks have indeed been preven[Read More]

on 09/20/11 | No Comments | Read More

Extroverted Critic: “You Need to Be More eMOtional”

“Sometimes you need to let go man and just go with your eMOtions. You think too much.” What Subtle person hasn’t spent years getting bombarded with this platitude? The critic is usually well-mea[Read More]

on 09/19/11 | No Comments | Read More

Sometimes it feels like Nice is a Dirty Word.

Being polite is this really tricky thing for me. On one hand, I know that I struggle with being polite, even when I mean to be. There’s lots of little things that even after ages of studying, I miss[Read More]

on 09/16/11 | 2 Comments | Read More

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