This is going to be a list of articles or websites by autistic people who use augmentative communication a significant amount of the time. There’s a few things I am not trying to do by writing this page:

• I am not trying to do the “Wow, look at the amazing autistic specimen that writes!” zoo exhibit crud.
• I am not trying to say that autistic people who largely use writing to communicate in the offline world, are somehow more autistic, or more correct about autism, or better than, or worse than, other autistic people.
• I am not trying to agree with every single thing written by an autistic person who uses augmentative communication.

What I am trying to do is deal with a situation where people are willing to accept that I use aug comm successfully, but believe that I am unique, or rare, or the only one, or something else like that. I’m none of the above.

Some of the people on this list use aug comm exclusively. Some use it only some of the time. Some use it rapidly, some slowly, some different speeds at different times. Some can read out loud what they type, some cannot. Some started out able to speak and lost that ability either gradually or rapidly, some have never spoken, some cannot use speech in a communicative way, and some have always spoken but have never been comfortable with it for many uses. Some use physical or emotional support to point and some do not, many started with it and continued without. Some look at the keyboard, and some, regardless of number of fingers they use, do not. All of these things can be mixed and matched. So there’s a lot of diversity here.
Links in bold are the person’s website, which may contain many articles.

People and their websites and articles
Misc. People

• Poetry from the May 1998 Syracuse FC Conference
• Defining Autistic Lives
• Autistics Speak

Richard Attfield

• Letter
• My Half of the Tide
• Who Dug Me Up From the Land of the Dead?

Roy Bedward

• Roy Bedward (Breaking the Barriers)

Larry Bissonnette

• My Classic Life As An Artist
• Beyond Questions and Answers
• Right To Communicate
• Being Laptopped into World of Personal Expression

Jamie Burke

• Celebrating 25 Years of I.D.E.A.
• The School of My Dreams
• Inside the Edge: A Journey to Using Speech through Typing

Elana Connor

• Why Retards Are Sad In This World

Robert Cutler

• In Memoriam: Gunnar Dybwad

Kim Duff

• What Is Autism?

Tyler Fihe

• Relentless Activism
  
• Tyler’s Survey

Peyton Goddard

• It’s Your Move
• Peyton Goddard (Breaking the Barriers)

Lincoln Grigsby

• Poetry
  

Eve Hanf-Enos

• Taming the Untameable

John Jameson

• Four Poems

Sharisa Kochmeister

• Poetry
  
• Reflections on a Year of Turmoil and Growth
• FC and Me
• Excerpts from Shattering Walls
• To Have a Voice is to Have a Choice
• What Frontline Didn’t Tell You

Schlomo Lowinger

• Schlomo Lowinger (Breaking the Barriers)

Eugene Marcus

• How FC Users and Their Professional Supporters Can Define and Defend Success in Facilitated Communication
  
• Outrigging the Partnership: Reflections on Collaborative Songwriting
• The Jenn and Gene Comedy Hour
• Advice to Peer Supporters
• On Almost Becoming a Person
• Compulsion, and Yes, Freedom Too
• My Life Among the Chatterers
• My New Years Wishes
• Helping Facilitated Communication Speakers Make Friends

Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay

• When Silence Speaks: The Way My Mother Taught Me

Sarah Nettleton

• FC Was the Key

David Newton

• Me and Lanny

Tom Page

• Tom Page (Breaking the Barriers)
  

Nick Pentzell

• How Things Have Changed

Jeff Powell

• Letter of Introduction

Sandra Radisch

• Sandra Radisch (Breaking the Barriers)

Chammi Rajapatirana

• On Being Mute
• Thoughts on Facilitated Communication

Heather Rossignol

• Knowing and Longing

Sue Rubin

• Living and Thoroughly Enjoying Life in Spite of Autism
• Whose Life Is It Anyway?
• A Brief Account of my Life with FC
• Independent Typing
• Castigating Assumptions about Mental Retardation and Low Functioning Autism
• A Recipe For Success
• In the Footsteps of Cesar Chavez
• Killing Autism is a Constant Battle
• On Doing One’s Homework

Nick Russi

• The Hindrance People

D.J. Savarese

• D.J. Savarese (Breaking the Barriers)

Jeff Seeger

• I Dreamed of Being Normal

Jenn Seybert

• The Jenn and Gene Comedy Hour
  

Joel Smith

• This Way Of Life
• NTs Are Weird (blog)
• You Have It So Good
• Autistic Pride Day: Do We Celebrate It Right?

Sarah Stup

• Are Your Eyes Listening?

Ian Wetherbee

• The View from Huntington College
• The View from Huntington College II

Organization Websites

• The Lonesome Doves
• Breaking the Barriers
• Watch Our Words

Books

• Understand: Fifty Memowriter Poems (David Eastham, 1985)
• Wenn ich mit euch reden könnte … Ein autistischer Junge beschreibt sein Leben. (Dietmar Zöller, 1989)
• Ich gebe nicht auf: Aufzeichnungen und Briefe eines autistischen jungen Mannes, der versucht, sich die Welt zu oeffnen. (Dietmar Zöller, 1992)
• “ich will kein inmich mehr sein” – botschaften aus einem autistischen kerke. (Birger Sellin, 1993)
• A Child of Eternity (Adriana Rocha, 1995)
• I Don’t Want To Be Inside Me Anymore: Messages from an Autistic Mind (Birger Sellin, 1995)
• Ich Deserteur einer artigen Autistenrasse. Neue Botschaften an das Volk der Oberwelt. (Birger Sellin, 1997)
• Through the Eyes of Aliens: A Book About Autistic People (Jasmine O’Neill, 1998)
• Lucy’s Story: Autism and Other Adventures (Lucy Blackman, 1999)
• I Had No Means To Shout! (Charles Hale, 1999)
• Ich Igelkind. Botschaften aus einer autistischen Welt. (Katja Rohde, 1999)
• And Love Was All He Said: Growing Up Autistic (Michael J. O’Reilly, 2000)
• The Light Within (Lincoln Grigsby, 2001)
• Buntschatten und Fledermäuse. Leben in einer anderen Welt. (Axel Brauns, 2002)
• The Vial (Chammi Rajapatirana, 2002)
• Embracing the Sky (Craig Romkema, 2002)
• Autismus und Körpersprache. Störungen der Signalverarbeitung zwischen Kopf und Körper. (Dietmar Zöller, 2001)
• Caught Between Two Worlds: My Autistic Dilemma (Thomas Page, 2003)
• “now you know me think more” (Ppinder Hundal, 2003)
• Silent Words: Forever Friends (David Eastham, 1990)
• Beyond the Silence: My Life, the World and Autism (Tito Mukhopadhyay, 2000)
• Wasted Talent: Musings of an Autistic (Krishna Narayanan, 2003)
• The Gold of the Sunbeams And Other Stories (Tito Mukhopadhyay, 2006)
• Do-Si-Do With Autism (Sarah Stup, 2006)
• The Road Trip: Life With Autism (J. Kevin Vasey, 2005)

Anthologies (may have both aug comm users and others as contributors):

• Autism and the Myth of the Person Alone (Douglas Biklen, 2005)
• Sharing Our Wisdom: A Collection of Presentations by People within the Autism Spectrum (Gail Gillingham and Sandra McClennan, 2004)

Comments from when this was a page, not a post:

1. Ballastexistenz » Blog Archive » Autistic Aug Comm Users says:

   June 26, 2006 at 10:57 am

   […] This is the permanent page on this blog I’m using for this at the moment. […]
2. Ann says:

   June 26, 2006 at 4:29 pm

   THANK YOU THANK YOU !!!! I will be definitely linking to this page from my website. With all these resources hopefully I wont be constantly bugging you with all my questions !! smile.

3. Linda says:

   June 26, 2006 at 9:06 pm

   I was entranced by your story while driving home from the library. I work for a young lady (15) who essentially does not communicate verbally, but uses a communication device (she hates that name – she calls it her talker) using a reflective dot to activate her choices. She is wheelchair bound, quadreplegic, yet totally aware of the world around her and VERY definite about her likes and dislikes. Her Dad is her primary caregiver, and I did not know what LOVE was until I met the two of them. Everyone is different, and Vive Le differance! I also care for my 90 year old mother who is legally blind, and post-stroke – she can verbalize her needs and wants totally with no reservations. I am so impressed with your intelligence.

4. Autism Blog Web Design Blog: » If Someone’s Not Broke, Don’t Fix Them says:

   June 27, 2006 at 8:41 am

   […] Amanda is one of those autistics that certain people don’t believe exist or can communicate – she is an autistic person who is typically referred to as ‘low functioning’ just like my own daughter. This is because she doesn’t speak. When you hear Amanda, you will hear her fingers on her keyboard. Here is a list of other autistic people who are non-verbal and considered ‘low functionning’. […]

5. Michael says:

   August 30, 2006 at 5:43 pm

   I was very excited to come across your page. My son is seven (eight this month) and we learned he was able to spell and was extremely intelligent when he was 3 1/2. He is not able to speak but has been using a letter board and a Dynavox since then. We have many transcripts from his neuroligic music therapy sessions expressing frustration, anger, sadness and a wicked sense of sarcasm. Without the FC we wouldn’t know what a great child we have and how gifted all of us are for him.

6. Samuel says:

   April 13, 2007 at 11:45 pm

   Hello, I just stumbled upon this great AAC resource for Mac OSX called Verbalize and thought you might like to check it out. http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/productivity_tools/verbalize.html

   I just posted a low cost text to speech idea using Verbalize, you might be interested in checking out, on my new blog. alltogether.wordpress.com

   From, Sam

7. Craig Chadwick says:

   June 22, 2007 at 3:26 pm

   I posted earlier under old email craigwchad@frys.com. Anyway I’m so angry I could spit. The county found some funding to purchase my son augmentative comm device. Just notified that the State is now saying the communication device is not a “health or safety” issue and they are not going to fund it. Anybody dealt with that? How you shame bureaucrats like this or educate them into doing the right thing?

8. Craig Chadwick says:

   June 22, 2007 at 3:37 pm

   ps I’m now mrplutodog@peoplepc.com That old account kept bouncing in and outgoing email.

9. ballastexistenz says:

   June 22, 2007 at 3:38 pm

   In places with regulations like that, your speech pathologist/doctor/etc have to justify it specifically in terms of its use in medical communication situations, and show that other communication methods will not work.

10. andreashettle says:

    June 22, 2007 at 6:02 pm

    Craig, I don’t blame you for being so angry. Access to some means of communication is a fundamental human right, without which the person will find it immensely difficult to advocate for themselves in obtaining all their OTHER fundamental human rights. That alone should be enough to justify funding, especially if it can be shown that a given augmented approach clearly works better than other approaches at least in certain contexts. It sounds like there needs to be some policy changes to make it easier to obtain communication-related funding for people who need it.

    I know your most immediate concern is getting your son’s needs met NOW. But I can’t help ALSO thinking of the larger picture. Is there a way you can get together with other parents and with adults who use augmented communication to work together in advocating for policy reform? Not limited to autistic children and adults — ALL users of augmented communication.

11. Craig Chadwick says:

    June 28, 2007 at 8:05 pm

    When you say “in terms of its use in medical communication situations”, I hope you don’t just mean in terms of visits to the doctor’s office. Even narrowing it to the “medical communication” thing which leaves out a lot of health/safety issues, I would think it ought to be broader than that, especially in terms of prevention and maintaining good health when you can’t reliably communicate other ways.

The interesting thing here is that if you actually go back through what has been said to dismiss the viewpoints of autistic people, you’ll see these things being used simultanenously. You’ll see that a person will use back-handed compliments about a person’s ‘intelligence’ and ‘verbal skills’ to distance that person in people’s minds from the stereotype of autistic people, may even question openly whether the person is autistic, and then at the very same time will say that the person engages in black and white thinking, lacks empathy, and clearly has no compassion. This of course happened to Michelle Dawson recently, but it’s been going on for a very long time, as has my desire to document it in a list in this format.

Another very interesting thing about these list is the way that the apparent meaning behind the rhetoric changes depending on which side is being used. If a person is argued to be too autistic to understand what is going on, the implication is that autistic people cannot understand what is going on at all, and therefore always need non-autistic people to make the decisions about us. If a person is argued to be not autistic enough to understand what is going on, the implication is that only someone more autistic would be qualified to speak on the matter (in which case, the non-autistic person has even fewer qualifications themselves).

These implications actually oppose each other, but they serve their purpose. Their purpose is not to illuminate anything useful about the people they are being used on. Their purpose is instead to be a fancy way of shutting autistic people up. Since many people, particularly people unfamiliar with autistic people, are swayed by arguments like this, it becomes a handy way to defend anything that autistic people oppose in large numbers. Simply declare us, one way or the other, unfit to comment, and go on saying whatever you were saying to begin with. The whole point seems to be to push us out of the way.

Of course, non-autistic people are not the only ones to use this kind of rhetoric. There are plenty of autistic people who do so as well, but that takes on a slightly different form, and I think I’ve written a fair bit about that already.

The Autistic Authors Booklist now contains:

• Sarah Stup
1. Do-Si-Do with Autism (2006) [added to booklist 2006-06-25]

It looks fairly definite. They’re doing a show on All Things Considered tomorrow (Monday, June 26), and you can find the times and stations on this website.

Interviewed should be Michael John Carley, Jim Sinclair, me, and possibly others.

The blurb on the site says “Life can be difficult for autistic children. But imagine being diagnosed as autistic when you’re an adult. Many autistic adults say they aren’t hoping for a cure — just acceptance.” I want to clarify for anyone who comes here from there, in case it isn’t made clear on the show, that neither Jim Sinclair nor I were diagnosed in adulthood, but that they might be talking about Michael John Carley or other people who were interviewed.

God forbid we human beings should ever have to get up close and personal with our unwieldy, messy, smelly humanness. In every way possible, this culture’s rules and values distance us from the realities of our own bodies in all their glorious imperfection. Just flick on the TV any time of the day or night and you’ll be bombarded with messages about the necessity of looking perfect and smelling better. It’s presented not as an option, but an obligation. Of course we want to hasten death; of course we want to make it easier for Cripples to die. Out damn spot. Out.

I don’t think it’s just coincidence that this urgent, zealous drive to give us more ways to opt out of life comes at a time when more and more of us are visible, living in community, being “in the face”, so to speak, of able-bodied assumptions about normal. And not just the us that can almost pass as AB, but those of us whose bodies are wildly uncontrollable, we of the drooling, spazzing, claw-handed variety of Cripple. And instead of trying to fade into the nooks and crannies as good Cripples of the past were taught to do, we blast down the main streets in full view, we sit slobbering at the table of your favorite restaurant, we insist on sharing your classroom, your workplace, your theater, your everything. The comfort of keeping us out of sight and out of mind behind institutional walls is being taken away. And because there is no way for good people to admit just how bloody uncomfortable they are with us, they distance themselves from their fears by devising new ways to erase us from the human landscape, all the while deluding themselves that it is for our benefit.

(Emphasis in the quote is mine.) That’s a quote by Cheryl Marie Wade in On Edge, that describes a frightfully real phenomenon. When it is not an option to lock us up and separate us from society (and it still often is, but it is for less of us), people, with the same prejudices that lock us up to begin with, try to justify our quick-as-possible death.

Moreover, people are terrified of the things I described in my last post. Terrified in particular of having bodies or minds that don’t stay tidily in control, in a society that is right now far more of a control-freak society than it was when Wade wrote that article.

When Wade (who also wrote the great poem A Woman With Juice) wrote that article, I was still in the out-of-sight out-of-mind category that she describes. Now, I’m not. But I think a lot of people would be more comfortable if I, and everyone else like me, were. I don’t think all of them think of themselves as hating us. I think we make people highly uncomfortable merely by existing in their presence. We bring up too many questions, remind people of too much, and break too many rules devised for a society being run without us. And, as she mentioned, since nobody is willing to admit their discomfort, they do a lot of very nasty things while distancing themselves from the nasty things they are doing.

That’s of course not the only reason. Wade goes into many other reasons in the article. But I’ve noticed that merely being plonked into a society that is not designed for me, that in fact is actively hostile to people like me, is not the same as living in an inclusive society. It’s not the same as living in a society where people have shed their prejudices about us, or where we have enough power and respect to avoid some of the more awful fates (including re-institutionalization) that are accepted for us by others. It’s just a change of address. And it’s just the beginning.

I have to wonder how much of these attitudes are behind the widespread acceptance of the murders of Tracy Latimer, Charles-Antoine Blaise, Katie McCarron, and so many others, and this latest attempted murder of a little girl with cerebral palsy.

Someone pointed out in my post about Katie McCarron that it’s not just beautiful, young people who shouldn’t be murdered. It’s also those of us who aren’t cute anymore, those of us who have ‘severe behaviors’, drool, need help going to the bathroom, or whatever else is different about us. I think people are more comfortable with the murder of a disabled person than a non-disabled person, but also more comfortable with the murder of one of the disabled people with an ‘undesirable’ body than those who are closer to standard-issue. A lot of effort has gone into distancing Katie McCarron from a stereotype that she has never come close to fitting. But those of us who do fit it more than she does (of which I’m definitely one), are real people too. The misplaced discomfort and disgust we are greeted with should not rule our life and death.

Another mother has apparently tried to kill her disabled child, near to where Katie McCarron was murdered. Stephen Drake of Not Dead Yet has written a press release called Disability Advocates Call For Restraint and Responsibility in Murder Coverage, urging people reporting on these things not to constantly harp on the idea that parents don’t have enough support, that disabled people are just inherently hard to raise without wanting to kill us, and that the sort of parents who end up killing us are really just wonderful parents who love us.

In response to the Autism Society of Illinois’s claim that saying all this garbage is looking at the bigger picture and the context, the press release says (emphasis in the quote is mine):

No, we cannot ignore the broader context if we have a new attempted murder on our hands. Services and supports have been what they’ve been for quite awhile in Tazewell County and other parts of Illinois. Services didn’t suddenly get worse between the alleged murder of Katie McCarron and this newest incident.

We’d suggest that what has changed is a barrage of irresponsible media coverage and equally irresponsible advocacy. Researcher Dick Sobsey has documented an increase in the murders of children by their parents in Canada in relation to well-publicized and sympathetic coverage of the murders of children with disabilities. Articles about the alleged murder of a person with a disability should not contain more about the disability than about the victim as a person. More space should be devoted to grieving family members than sympathetic friends of the accused killer.

The Autism Society of Illinois and the ANSWERS group should rethink their strategy as well. Mike McCarron, Katie McCarron’s grandfather, has written that he feels abandoned and betrayed by “advocates.” To him and his family, the parade of “horror stories” about autism are offensive and painful. These groups need to ask just for whom they are supposed to be advocating. Is it the grieving McCarron family? They don’t feel supported. Is it children like Katie? Then why do they blame the victim? Or is it Karen McCarron, the alleged killer?

I agree completely with this. I have never ignored context, but I simply don’t think that the context of murders like this is a murderer-serving combination of the worst myths about raising a disabled child and the worst myths about so-called mental illness. I’ve read some of that research of Dick Sobsey’s, but when I bring it up, people are unduly incredulous. But really. When you make things like this sound even remotely okay, understandable, or excusable, what you get, is more people doing it. If you don’t want more people to do things like this, you take your campaigns for better services and whatever else you’re looking for, and you go off and do them somewhere else, in a way where they cannot even be mistaken for standing on the backs of murdered disabled people.

By the way, it’s been confirmed in court records that the little girl in question was given an overdose of pills, to “make her go to sleep and never wake up”. In that article, you can begin to see the “What loving parents, can’t imagine why they’d do it, but it’s really really hard to have one of Those People as a child” angle starting already. Please don’t do anything to perpetuate the hate speech.

A recent blog entry and its responses have shown one of those strange perceptual ambiguities in other people that autistic people frequently run up against. It seems that there are two ways in which many aspects of autistic people’s appearance can be taken. I’ve often wondered if this is why people flip so rapidly back and forth between calling me “Hey retard” and calling me a “genius,” that both stereotypes involve roughly the same physical appearance, interpreted two different ways.

My last blog entry on eyeballs focused on my reaction to other people’s eyeballs. This blog entry on eyeballs focuses on other people’s reaction to my eyeballs.

I’d commented that Erik Nanstiel called the look in my eyes a blank stare. Other people commented that I appeared pensive, lost in thought, or thoughtful. I don’t actually think that either one of these says anything about my mental state at the time that people are saying them, but these are not new concepts to me. Like everything else, there are two fairly extreme reactions my eyes get.

When I was first born, people said I had owl eyes, that looked “deep” and made them wonder what was behind them. (I have very large eyes, I’m not sure if that’s part of it or not.) When I was a bit older, before I understood language, but when I was certainly recording sensations that I would later understand as language, I often heard people describe my eyes as “thoughtful”. When I was old enough to understand, people often made the same sorts of comments about my eyes: Thoughtful, deep, spiritual (what on earth “spiritual” eyes look like are anyone’s guess, mind you), and other adjectives that seemed to mean there was some kind of depth of thought (or that I was “thinking” rather that perceiving anything) that was visible by looking at my eyes.

The same eyes, at the same times, have been described in a completely opposite light. People have said that they look blank, like there’s nobody home. Someone once tried to make eye contact with me, because she thought she could read people’s mental states by looking them in the eye, and broke off because she said the total emptiness in my eyes was too scary. She was shaking. People have told each other in my presence that all they had to do was look at my eyes to know that there really wasn’t anybody “in there”. In fact people have used the look in my eyes to wonder whether I was even alive or not. And, of course, the Nanstiels of the world have already registered their comments with words like lonely and vacant.

Now, these are the same eyeballs we’re talking about here. These are not two separate sets of eyeballs, nor, as apparent from the reactions to the same sets of photographs, two separate times that people are looking at these eyeballs. I’ll break down some of the ways in which my eyes (and most of these are things that are true of many autistic people) actually differ from other people’s eyes in appearance.

In actual physical structure, my eyes are much larger (particularly in the sideways direction) than most people’s eyes, and at times I’ve also had eyelashes that enhance that particular appearance. This probably calls people’s attention to them to begin with.

My pupils are often more dilated than they’d be expected to be under any particular lighting conditions. When the rest of my body freezes, sometimes my pupils also freeze in size at very large and don’t respond to light. (These things have variously been interpreted as brain damage, seizures, intoxication, unconsciousness, and death, when people have commented on them. I’m sure there are assorted ways in which they unconsciously influence people’s perception of me as well.)

My eyes have never tracked objects in a typical way. I’m not sure how they do track them, but this has been medically noted since infancy and reconfirmed several times. I suspect that people who look at eyeballs pick up on this in some fashion, even if subtly.

Sometimes my eyes do not move at all regardless of stimulus. Sometimes they just don’t seem to move in any particular response to the stimuli that are being presented. Sometimes they move rapidly and involuntarily all over the place.

My eyes don’t always look symmetrical: Either the lid on one closes more than the other, or they point different directions. (I don’t notice or feel this.)

I don’t generally look right at people’s eyes if I can help it.

I usually use my eyes to look at things with, not to deliberately communicate information.

What I perceive visually doesn’t seem to be what other people perceive. Unless I deliberately look at things (and even sometimes when I try), I don’t see “Here is a bunch of named, distinct objects.” I see a whole lot of patterns, shapes, colors, and so forth. While I have no idea exactly what the difference in appearance is, I suspect that people who do automatically perceive objects in a typical way will move their eyes over them in a different way than I do.

Similarly, I don’t think I always point my eyes at things to look at them. At least, I seem to be able to shift my visual focus without shifting my gaze at all, over a fairly wide range. I’m sure this also leads to differences in where and whether I move my eyes.

When I’m using some other sense, my eyes are of course in standby mode, or picking up information without telling me about it yet.

I don’t always have a lot of facial expression, at least not the typical expressions that people look for. I have often suspected that people’s impression of eyes having an expression of their own, is partly a result of the face around the eyes. My face has one main expression, that it’s in the majority of the time, and it changes into other expressions for much briefer periods of time, and possibly more subtly, than non-autistic people’s faces usually do. (It also, like my eyes, does a bunch of involuntary movement at times that has nothing to do with my mood or intentions.)

I suspect that the combination of all of the above (most of which are common in autistic people, not specific to me, and some of which are probably also common in blind people) causes a general impression of difference from the norm, and people’s assumptions determine how that difference is interpreted.

The thing is, I’m not particularly lost in thought in any of those pictures, any more than I’m particularly vacant. In some of the pictures, I’m even very definitely watching the camera, but when I look at the pictures, my eyes aren’t pointed at it (in some other pictures, my eyes are pointed straight at the camera and I’m not looking at it). It’s certainly usually better for me to be thought of as “thoughtful-looking” than “not there at all,” but I don’t think either one has anything to do with what I’m actually doing or thinking. I am pretty sure I look the same way when I’m very intently carrying on a conversation with someone, focused on wholly external events, watching the person who thinks I’m thinking about something else, or other things like that.

This does seem to be one more area where there’s an appearance of an autistic person that is different from a typical appearance, and a lot more is read into it than there actually is. As far as I know, the above eyeball facts are what are actually likely to be going on at any given time. Whether I appear deep or vacant, thoughtful or incapable of thought, based on that, has very little to do with whatever’s going on in my head (seems to have more to do with whatever’s going on in everyone else’s).