happened to stumble by here.
had a struggle this week where a visual perceptual challenge was taken as selfishness. I couldn’t get it.

If a blind person fails to consider what you assume they see, is this selfish, egocentric? I think not. But those of us with eyes that see and brains that fail to process, are constantly shouted at, told off, lectured, for not LOOKING, CARING, ASKING etc.

One can’t know what one can’t know. And then I’m told to do nothing without asking or being told first.

So am I do be a bold person living as close to independence as I can, or one who society disables in order to appease them? I am proud at least I declared, I am not a broken orange, I’m a damned fine apple.

But I did cry, then cried more, not because one person hurt my feelings, but because nobody educates these people and I’ve spent 20 years self advocating about things they can’t imagine just because I can hear and see even if processing fails on both levels.

And the irony is this other person felt it was good for me to cry because I was gaining insight… shit, 9 books, a hundred interviews, hundreds of lectures, 12 years as a consultant… when will people learn that an information processing problem is nothing to do with insight, nothing to do with empathy….

I’m tired of the projections and presumptions. But if I can’t make it ‘out there’ which of us can? So one dusts oneself off and goes back to the horse.

aiaiai.

Donna
the arty autie.

They also have non-autistic children. I’ve been very tempted to ask: if one of their children ever says, “Mom, Dad, I’m gay/lesbian”, would they just as proudly start calling themselves “a gay family” or “a lesbian family”??

BTW Amanda if you’re already worried about this becoming a fight then you should see Lenin’s Tomb (my favourite blog apart from your own) where the comments page gets *really* raucous very frequently.

It would be fun.

These days I much prefer Weber to Marx.

My family has generations of people labeled variously (or unlabeled but would be labeled today) autistic, bipolar, dyslexic, dyspraxic, Tourette’s, and mentally retarded. Generations, on both sides. Our non-autistic family members are not usually neurologically typical either.

We can only be considered as a system of people, not an impact of something on a normal family, because as much as some of us have tried to pretend otherwise (while others take pride in it), and as much as some of us have been ashamed of it, and as much as anyone has loved this fact or suffered for it, our family is not what is currently considered “normal”, although we’re all pretty normal to ourselves.

I cannot imagine simply dividing our family along the lines of autistic/non-autistic, and leaving it at that, we are all kinds of people impacting each other in all kinds of ways, some of which have to do with neurological atypicality and some of which do not, some of which have to do with being autistic and some of which do not.

It’s really impossible to say, “the impact of autism on the non-autistic family members” any more than I could tell you the “impact” of “bipolar” on non-“bipolar” family members. These labels are not bombs that were dropped into the middle of an oh-so-normal family, we’re talking generations of eccentrics and mad(wo)men and “slow” people and so forth here, a eugenicist’s nightmare (and personally I’m proud to be that nightmare).

But, the fact that we are interconnected in a complex way (which is part of what I was trying to get at in the post), does not mean the non-autistic family members are autistic, any more than I’m “bipolar” just because some relatives are so labeled. The overall strangeness covers our whole family, but that’s because, we’re, in this day and age and place and time and so forth, strange (not so strange in other places and times, maybe).

So perhaps I can’t know the so-called “impact” of an autistic person in an all-neurotypical (or all-thinking-they’re-neurotypical) family, but it’s because of my background, not because I’m autistic and somehow incapable of taking other perspectives.