That helps to explain my mother. She’s NT, very understanding and supportive of me, but lately she’s gotten a very stressful job (only female lawyer at a small town law firm, with staff who don’t seem to think women should be lawyers) and sometimes she comes home really cranky and fed up, and seems to expect more NT behavior out of me at those times. I think it’s probably that it does take some effort for her to remember that I won’t react in an NT fashion, and when she’s tired/overloaded she can’t keep track of that. It’s pretty frustrating for me, though.

“Another thing is that people who are visibly disabled (I know this is imprecise but I can’t get any more precise without seriously going off topic) often get certain allowance to act weird. Of course, there’s other bad stuff that invisibly disabled people are spared, but I suspect people are less offended by someone breaking social conventions if they look or act weird enough to be considered disabled (or if the context indicates they are disabled, for example if a staffy person is following them and bossing them around).”

I did notice this when I was regularly hanging out with my friend with CP (who uses a wheelchair). People tended to be nicer to her than they were to me, and would often spontaneously offer to help her with disability-related stuff, whereas I always have to ask for help with disability-related stuff (even when I’m giving off clear nonverbal signals of, say, overload, people misinterpret it because they expect me to be NT). I also got people assuming I was her helper, and handing me her change when she paid for things. I’d sometimes give them an odd look, because I was having trouble figuring out why they’d be handing me money that belonged to my friend. Ironically, she’s more competent to handle money than I am, because I tend to spend impulsively.

“I’ve experienced the thing with people who seem to give you spoons too. As well as people who deplete them at an incredible rate, such that I can lose all of my spoons in a certain area just by being in a room with one of them for very long.”

Me too. In my case, my parents and younger brother give me spoons. The people who take away spoons are usually taking them away for PTSD-related reasons, not autism-related reasons (they look or act like my abusers) although people who are highly controlling of me will set off my demand avoidance (the type of autism that best describes me is Newson Syndrome).

I’ve also experienced people who could somehow cue me in ways that gave me more spoons when I shouldn’t have been trying to use them– when I didn’t feel it at the time, but it resulted in a long-term “overdrawing” over time and eventually led to burnout. I’m not completely sure how that works either (though I’m not claiming that it’s anything psychic or anything, just that I don’t understand it; it could probably be easily explained by subtle kinds of cueing, and triggering me into authority-pleasing response patterns). I’m still trying to figure out how to recognize those kinds of people and avoid them, and tell the difference between good spoon-adding situations and people and bad ones.

Funnily enough, some people in my life actually seem to GIVE me spoons – when they visit, I have a slightly higher energy level than if I had spent the day alone, and I can do some small housecleaning things while they’re there and talking to me. It helps distract from the pain and fatigue, sometimes. Other people, I can’t see on bad days at all, and I have no way of explaining to them the difference in their energy that they can understand without being hurt.

I am also bipolar. Mania and physical exhaustion so bad you can’t move? Not a good mix…

In MY particular case (because they were the two most blatantly obvious “deficits” in relation to “normality”), I was/am designated as follows: 20/200 visually-impaired, and “Attention-deficit-hyperactivity-disorder”.

Basically, what this always meant — and still means in my case, is that I am severely nearsighted, and have WAY “too much” energy/stamina/focus/etc. in relation to other people. I am far more “normal”-seeming than you, probably (don’t take that as a slur), so I tend to really end up seeing things from a different perspective than either you, or the fully “normal” folk around me.

Here’s some observations from my point of view:

1. There’s a vast — and fundamental — difference between getting a level of personal functionality, maximizing your personal abilities, whatever, and being trained in “social skills” so that your nonconformity to majority standards doesn’t freak people out. Trust me, I know this — they inflicted TONS of that sort of bullshit on me…everything from if I held my fork the “wrong” way, to if I didn’t mouth the correct (meaningless) platitudes at the “correct” time.

Temple Grandin is NOT a particularly valuable role-model or “spokesperson” for the autie/Asperger’s populace. For one thing, she seems really obsessed with how cool she is for having gained the ability to “pass” in ‘normal’ circles. She seems to recognize that being a “little different” is acceptable, but she also places vast amounts of importance on conformity as being a positive attribute.

Add to that the fact that her whole gambit is essentially to be a “closeted” autistic who seems to specialize in “training” other autistic folk to “fit in”, and you have a poisonous mixture.

Keep up the good work…