On the ‘net, you use words to say exactly what you mean. If anyone reads something into it that is not in the words you use, it’s their own fault. (Conversely, if someone doesn’t use the right words to spell out exactly what they mean, and several people who are very careful about their words interpret them in a way very different from what you meant, that’s the fault of the person who didn’t use the right words in the first place. I have never seen you do that, but I have seen a number of other people do it, some of them chronically, some of them only under certain conditions.)

Thanks for your extended translation of my attempted translation of Charlie and his head.

I’m sorry that that comment thread went belly up like it did. Your comment was entirely appropriate and not hurtful at all.

I’m sorry if I didn’t make it clear that you comment was fine. The person who took offense seems to me to be very sensitive.

I don’t think she reacted to you because you are autistic or otherwise disabled, though. I doubt she knew or cared who you were when she read your comment, but I could be wrong about that.

I guess since she says she rarely comments, she must be afraid of negative feedback and so when she got some she felt like, “SEE! this always happens to me.” Your feedback was negative in the sense that you didn’t agree, it wasn’t hostile or anything vaguely hostile.

I hope you don’t feel like you were too beat up over there. I think that communication is hard to manage sometimes with just words. Well, it’s next to impossible to manage no matter what method is used, and we are strangers, basically, or partial strangers so we can’t always tell the other’s motives or why they are feeling sensitive on a particular day.

I’ve seen my family member who uses a wheelchair go ballistic over having the wheelchair moved without permission. I can still remember the incidents, probably once where I moved it and once where one of my kids moved it. We moved the wheelchair like an inch to the side by picking up the big wheels off the floor and moving the chair sideways (not rolling it) like you would move any piece of furniture to the side. Without warning.

Like I said, the person in the wheelchair (who was quite little) went berzerk with anger (to the extent that that person does, which is pretty minor compared to me) and taught us that that was NOT OK! As far as I know, neither of us ever did it again. The kid who moved the wheelchair might have talked back and said, “what’s your problem?”, but I made sure that the kid who moved the wheelchair learned that it was wrong to do that. It wasn’t a problem after we learned not to do it.

When I thought about it, I realized how horrific it would be if someone just lifted me off the ground and moved me like a chess piece without asking. I mean you can do that to a baby… but you don’t do that to people who can move themselves at request.

And believe me, I’ve heard that kind of crap before that you were getting from that person. I’ve even heard that caregivers should be allowed to kill us whenever they want to if we get too “difficult” for them, and that this is not the same as killing someone else. I mean, that’s toward the extreme end, but I’ve heard it, and that’s the level of disturbing that some people think is polite conversation.

(Synchronicity raises its head once more.)

This “inspiration”, I think, comes from disabled people being presented as disabled, as if that were the only thing that mattered.

I recently shared, on a.s.a, a conversation I had with the 11yo autistic boy I do respite for twice a month. I shared it because it was funny, and very cute. If I were to choose to share it with someplace that collects anecdotes about children, I probably wouldn’t say that the child in question was autistic. Why? Because his autism isn’t an important part of the story. Not really.

People seem to think that a person’s diagnosis or disability is all there is that matters about them. I think that’s what leads to the attitudes you’re talking about here. NTs are victims of “overgeneralisation”, to use a term from my ABA therapist past. I fail to understand how it’s good when they do it and bad when autistic people do it.

One person who is in a wheelchair is not the same as the next. One autistic person is not the same as another. One “ADDer” is not the same as anyone else.

I think it’s much like the latent racism that lurks within most people. It’s probably not malicious racism, but “all oriental people look the same” is a very good example of that. Taking pride in having a friend of a different ethnicity is another example of it. It works out to the same thing as disability discrimination – it’s not generally malicious, but “everyone in a wheelchair looks the same”, and there’s pride to be found in befriending someone who has a disability. (Even if it’s not real friendship.)