I think this is another important function of autistic blogging, aside from political motives and educating people. It’s important for autistic people to be able to reflect on these things, particularly as society engenders many of these problems that arise, and it can be very difficult (especially growing up, with little context or exposure to these issues) to sort out what is prejudice and what are the “real defects we need to feel ashamed of”.

That’s one reason I enjoy reading blogs by autistic people. I can see something of myself in various people, aspects of myself I’m not used to identifying in other people around me. I may have various issues, both external and emotional (which overlap quite a lot, as emotions tend to be reactions to external things and these emotions influence our actions), but one thing markedly positive about this year as opposed to previous years is that there’s far less beating myself up (both figuratively and literally) about things that I can’t do, or that I have more trouble doing than some others. It’s also good to know that you’re not alone in your experiences, which is especially reassuring when your experiences are so far out of range of the experiences just about everybody you know has experienced.

Yes, if you evince the ability even once, it means that all the rest of the time you were just putting on an act of not being able to do so.

Which seems to me like a ridiculous amount of trouble to go to just for ‘getting others to do things for you that you don’t want to do yourself.’ In fact, that idea is so ridiculous that I doubt anyone who holds it has ever thought much in depth about the amount of acting that would be involved in continually feigning overloads and shutdown, for instance, if you really had the ability to keep going.

But there’s the insidious “Big Lie” effect of other people constantly telling you what your “real” motives and capabilities are– you can come to believe that even the most absurd things about yourself must really somehow be true after all, because why would everyone keep saying and thinking it, if it weren’t?

I think it’s common for people to think that part or all of a disability isn’t quite real. To bring up a very small example, I can’t point my toes. There’s very solid medical evidence that I am, and will forever be physically incapable of this. Not a big deal. But I spent the ten years between my first elementary school gym class, and my last high school gym class convinced that I wasn’t trying hard enough, and was just being lazy.

This was because I got a lot of physical therapy in which it was made clear that I absolutely had to reach down and point my toes with my hands for five minutes every day, for unspecified reasons. I assumed it was to make them point the normal way. And being about as good at keeping a routine without adult supervision as the average kid, I would occasionaly forget. Which meant it was my fault for being lazy, and if I just worked harder, it would work. By the time I found out that the stretching was to keep my muscles from tightening up, and it only needed to be done every few days, I’d completed my public school gym requirements, rendering the ability to point my toes completely irrelevant.

I think part of it is that people have such weirdly absolute expecations of disability. It’s expected that someone in a wheelchair can’t stand or walk at all, someone with a white cane reading in braille can’t see your hand waving directly in front of their eyes, and someone who’s non-verbal can’t produce any intelligible speech, ever. And people who don’t fit neatly into the image are assumed to be faking. If someone has a temporary or limited ability to perform at a certain level (some unassisted walking, the ability to temporarily stave off shutdown, etc.) that becomes the standard of performance. No wonder it’s a common idea that trying hard enough will lead to normality.

…yeah. That sounds familiar, also.

And I don’t know if I should say this, because it was and still is regarded as a ‘dirty secret’ by us, but we also felt at times that we were superior to others because we had ‘voluntarily chosen to suffer,’ like all the saints who mortified themselves. And that it was a kind of revenge against the people who insisted we weren’t suffering when we really were, etc.

Before I read this, I put these feelings (and their echo in my subconscious today) down to the fact that I have fluctuating subjective symptoms (pain, fatigue, cognitive dysfunctione etc) and a condition shrouded in some mystery. But it was just the same; I was different, other people with my diagnostic label were really ill, but not me. I was in control “behind my back” as you put it, bringing this about somehow.

I even cited my ability to be articulate and coming across as smart in face-to-face spoken communication as the way in which I managed to manipulate doctors (with whom my experience has been generally very positive) into assuming an “organic” cause.

The worst thing is that recently I have enjoyed a significant improvement in my symptoms, particularly levels of pain and the amount of physical activity I am capable of. And I find myself congratulating myself; haven’t I done well? See, I’m being more positive, I must have hit on the right attitude. I was probably able to do this much all along, only before I didn’t want to – I thought I wanted to but I couldn’t have done, not really…