Category Archives: Overload

Sep11

Back from AutCom

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I’m back from AutCom. It was both enjoyable and overloading. I plan to write a detailed account later.

The account may not be forthcoming for a bit, because it’s nasty-migraine-week (female hormone stuff) and I’m quite overloaded on top of that. Last night I managed to vomit and urinate just about everywhere but the toilet, and to go outside and get confused into immobility by the sheer number of blades of grass out there.

I’m still trying to write it but it might take awhile. Right now, even lying down and staring out the window seems unnecessarily overloading.

By the way, comments urging me overtly or covertly to view myself as in need of quacky biomed crap or as being in denial about some kind of preventable but ultimately lethal (and apparently pathetic) deterioration, are going to get deleted before they’d have been published. You know exactly who you are, and I do too, so don’t waste your time on me.

Aug1

Editing and Projection

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default blank facial expression

This is largely in response to comments on a recent post.

These pictures are, just so nobody has any doubt about it, pictures of an overloaded autistic kid. (Sometimes right in between meltdowns.) Any facial expressions or gestures going on here are not expressions of emotion, they are expressions of overload, shutdown, or some combination of the two. (Although this is really my default facial expression, I am pretty monotonous that way.)

What I find interesting about this is the context in which these pictures were used.

Just as I was beginning to enter a time period that I call adolescence and many professionals in my life called extreme regression, I was in a film for a grief counseling service. The acting was, in general, really bad. Really bad.

more default blank facial expression

It’s hard to be a good actor, at least playing an NT, if you have pretty much one main facial expression that you can’t easily change on cue, limited gestures, and look visibly separate from a group of kids you’re supposed to look like a part of, even when you’re told exactly where to put your body and what direction to point things in.

That last part now gives me a much better idea of why people were so convinced for awhile that I wasn’t paying any attention to anything social, my movements simply do not coordinate with or intermesh with the movements of the people around me, while all their movements are coordinated with each other.

And if your idea of “acting with feeling” is to combine echolalia with making your voice go up and down in a regular rhythm, and occasionally flapping your hands around while they’re at your sides. But even the non-autistic actors weren’t much good.

chewing on hand

Anyway, the assorted demands of a film set had me pretty much constantly on the edge of overload, and sometimes over that edge.

They did edit out the part where I started taking things out of my desk and sticking them in my mouth.

But there were plenty of shots of me staring at nothing, sticking fingers in my mouth, biting my hand, and even at one point flapping. (All of the expressions and gestures shown here are part of my standard set of positions, which apparently hasn’t changed much over time, but the hand-biting and stuff is generally something I do when I’m extremely overloaded.)

So, anyway, I’ve established that these are pictures of overload. They’re not pictures of acting. They’re not reactions to the subject matter in the film. They’re reactions to an environment that I still remember as intensely loud, bright, and cluttered.

chewing on one hand, flapping the other

So, when I finally pulled my tape of this out again as an adult, something immediately struck me.

They thought that all that chewing on my hands and staring at nothing and stuff was acting, or at least reacting to the idea that we were talking about people’s families getting killed. (Many of the kids were clients of the grief counseling center. They, by the way, give me an idea of what really deserves mourning in the world.)

They were interspersing it with the things people said. These things were supposed to convey sadness and reaction to a discussion about death.

chewing on finger with eyes almost closed

Acting, as far as I was concerned, was managing to be positioned in roughly the right spot and repeating roughly the right words, not much more than that. I’m now stunned that, despite the fact that they weren’t particularly good actors, the other kids were showing all these nuances of reaction and stuff all over their faces and in the noises they were making, constantly. They seemed to constantly have their bodies positioned in relation to each other.

So it makes sense that the filmmakers would have imagined that, rather than being overloaded, I was actually acting. (They also figured that my repeated meltdowns were a reaction to the seriousness of the subject matter, and kept trying to express their sympathy and explaining to me that lots of people feel that way. Which of course I perceived as just more sensory invasion.)

standard blank expression

All this interests me in light of the recent discussion that was going on in the comments to one of my posts. People were talking about the sort of mistaken impressions people get from their facial expressions.

It got me thinking about how in this case, it wasn’t just a mistaken impression, but it got used to convey a whole lot of things that weren’t going on in my head. I suppose that’s what most acting really is, but I think most acting is a lot more intentional.

People were talking in the comments, about their eyes or faces being interpreted as blank, which can be interpreted ‘favorably’ as ‘thoughtful’.

I’ve frequently run across that interpretation, and I’m pretty sure that’s what they were assuming here. Along with ‘sad’ and ‘serious’, two other things my face gets me considered often.

This is the only thing where I have evidence of misperception on film. I can rewind the thing and remember what was really going through my head (sensory chaos, mostly) while they were pointing the cameras at me, and then I can look at their obvious interpretations of this. It’s very strange.

This makes the power of editing very apparent, too. And the power of projection (and I don’t mean film projectors).

Jun25

Fear of disability is not what it seems.

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Two nights ago I had a long conversation with a friend.

She was in bed because she’s got a pressure sore forming on her butt. I was lying on a mat on the floor because I couldn’t hold my body upright and think at the same time.

We were talking about the stuff that normally gets called disability, or impairment, or whatever the current term is. The differences in our bodies, that are medicalized, and defined as horrible fates worse than death and so forth.

We were talking about our total lack of fear in the idea of acquiring any particular currently-pathologized condition.

She talked about how “chronic, intractable pain” is an everyday reality for her, and it’s only going to get worse with time. I talked about going twenty years without a diagnosis of chronic pain that resembles central pain in its nature and intensity. I talked about how people who’ve been in much less pain for much shorter periods of time have tried to tell me I don’t understand pain.

I started laughing, because that seems like an absurd idea to me. My friend said, sarcastically, “Oh, but you’re laughing. If you’re laughing, you can’t be in any pain.”

Then we got into migraines. I’ve had one for a few years straight now. My friend said, “It’s documented that people sometimes kill themselves over migraines, so that’s got to be considered one of the nastier forms of pain.”

My friend recently had a knee injury and was unable to get out of her wheelchair at all (normally she can stand for brief periods) without extensive assistance. She talked about how that isn’t a particularly awful thing in and of itself. She also once went through extreme spinal surgery and only got a day’s worth of pain drugs afterwards.

I freeze in place on a regular basis, sometimes to the point where even my eyes are not under my control, right down to pupils staying at a fixed, large size and my eyes not moving at all. I know very well what it’s like to have zero voluntary movement, and total awareness of surroundings, and I’m not afraid of it.

I also know what it’s like to not comprehend anything going on around me, to be unable to form what most people consider thought (although I think their definition is far, far too narrow to encompass all thought), to “lose” extended amounts of time because things were not encoding into memory, to understand things only on a perceptual level with no abstraction or what non-autistic people would call “comprehension” or “cogitation”, to understand things only in the moment and not have a continuous memory going on, to understand bits and pieces of things on bits and pieces of different levels, and so forth. I know what it’s like not to even be able to put together the intent to “understand” things in a relatively typical way, because the knowledge of that intent simply isn’t there, all that “makes sense” is sensation.

I even know what it’s like to have seizures every few seconds. And from the effects of various supposedly “anti”-psychotic drugs, I know what it’s like to hallucinate and lose touch with reality. I know what it’s like to vomit several times a day, or continuously for several hours in a day. I know pain so intense that I can’t move, and can’t think of anything other than pain.

These are things I know. I know them short-term, I know them long-term. I know them as states that I am able to partially exit for certain periods of time, and I know them as states that I am mandated by my body to stay in until they’re over, if ever. I know the extreme fluctuations in all of these areas that I go through daily, and the gradual moving from one area to another that takes place over time. These things are or have been significant parts of my life. My friend and I talked about all these things from my life, and all these things from her life. Between the two of us, we have internal-body experiences that cover a pretty wide range physically and cognitively. Neither of us are afraid of physical or cognitive disability, of pain, of confusion, of immobility, or of illness. We’re not particularly afraid of even the things considered the most devastating.

There are things we both fear, though. And they have nothing to do with the internal experience of any of these things.

I fear being put in an institution, of any kind, whether a large institution, a group home, a nursing home, or a psychiatric ward. I fear boredom because people might assume I’m not there and park me next to a blank wall for years. I fear people not bothering to prevent or treat things like infections and pressure sores. I fear people who claim to love me deciding to kill me to spare me the unendurable suffering they imagine I am experiencing. I fear bad staff. I fear being assumed dead or unconscious when I freeze (this has happened). I fear not being given a workable communication system when one is available. I fear being treated as a non-person.

The trouble a lot of people seem to have, is they can’t distance these legitimate fears, from fears of the state of being itself. They act like the above are a natural consequence of being configured in a certain way, and that the best way to avoid that is to prevent at all costs that configuration, instead of preventing at all costs those things from being able to happen to people.

My friend and I are not afraid to acquire various conditions that are currently pathologized. We’re aware we’re likely to acquire at least some of them within our lifetimes, even if only in old age. We’re afraid of discrimination, including deadly forms of discrimination. The solution here is not to fix our fear or “acknowledge our feelings”, but to fix the problems that cause legitimate fear.

The trouble I have in talking about these things, is that for people who do not adequately separate out how a person is from how they are being treated, this sort of thing often results in responses like “Oh how horrible, I or my child or someone else is in all this danger, this is a horrible horrible fear, how can we fix me or my child or whoever until they won’t be in all this danger?” Wrong answer. Work to fix the danger, or you will have solved nothing at all except temporarily your own emotional state.

The trouble is, people make decisions, including policy decisions, based on these nebulous fears of being disabled, rather than the real and concrete situation that disabled people are treated like crap. People actually believe that their feelings on this are neutral in nature, and of course, since they are feelings, impossible for anyone to validly question. But these feelings come from somewhere, and without looking at disability as a political thing rather than an issue of personal individual suffering and uselessness and whatnot divorced from any context, we will continue to have awful things happening to us all the time, and people will continue to fear becoming like us.

What started the conversation was a person we know offline who has acquired a new condition over the course of the time we have known her. She has always been extreme in both her ableism and her refusal to even contemplate thinking politically about disability, more extreme than most people. Her entire identity has been tied up in the work (paid and unpaid) that she can’t do anymore. And she’s currently mired in some of the worst kinds of self-hatred because she appears to have transferred her bigotry towards disabled people (which she never acknowledged as such, and would probably be insulted by that description, but it’s true) to herself, and is busy thinking of herself as the useless burden on her family that she thinks of disabled people as in general. And she does not even have the solace of understanding disability in a broader sense than her own feelings (that she believes come out of nowhere and are therefore not things she can change), because while she is capable of thinking politically in that way, she fears it and refuses, believing it would make her miserable. There’s nothing I or anyone else can do about this, but I hope one day she’ll realize that the kind of thinking she fears would actually both be closer to reality and make her less miserable and fearful over the long run.

Jun24

Efficiency and frugality

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In response to one of my earlier posts on interpretations of my eye gaze, Allison Cummins wrote:

As an NT, I use facial expression (as Amanda noted) and body posture when interpreting gaze.

In Western culture, we tend to prefer the vigourous, dynamic agent. Firm handshake, upright posture and all that.

In Nigeria (I lived there four years), where all that tension and vigour would be a waste of scarce calories and generate unwanted heat in a hot climate, people are much more relaxed. While most Canadian NTs would expect someone to stand up, look you in the eye and shake your hand firmly, a Nigerian is likely to remain seated with her head propped up on her arm, more or less looking toward you, as she proffers one limp hand to be shaken.

Many Canadians would interpret this not as frugality, but as laziness and inattention.

Amanda has a frugal-type body posture. She uses support (floor; elbows on knees) and has a facial presentation that could be unkindly described as “slack.” For me, this overall picture suggests someone who isn’t particularly present in her own body or for the other people with her, whether because she’s daydreaming or incapable of thought. Eye gaze is interpreted in this overall context.

Of course, knowing better, I can make a point of disregarding certain signals and focussing on other ones. But people have to know better to do that… otherwise they will defer to their unconscious readings.

This idea of frugal body postures reminded me of one of my own observations about the way I do things, formed when I was just starting to realize I had an outward appearance and that people were judging me based on it. I noticed that very little of me moves at any given time, in relation to the background. In fact, only the bare minimum amount of me moves voluntarily at any given time.

I say voluntarily because much of the time I have the standard autistic mannerisms as well as tics, both of which can look like a lot of movement. (As a very rude professional said the other day, in gesturing at me to make uninformed pronouncements about stuff I needed without acknowledging my presence, “See all that movement?”) But that’s background. In the background, there is either movement or stillness, but it’s still background, something my body is doing, probably for a good reason, but not something I’m voluntarily doing to achieve a tangible end.

When I say I use the minimum movement possible, I mean against that background. Whether I’m rocking or not, I still use the fewest body parts possible in order to type with my hands. I have noticed that non-autistic people (at least, in America) are in a constant state of what to me would be gross overuse of my body: Even when they are doing something with their hands alone, their faces and all possible body parts are involved in generating assorted signals or something. They seldom use the “resting” postures that my body assumes when that particular body part is not doing anything (the postures that apparently get interpreted as “blankness” or even signs of neurological injury).

But this exact kind of efficiency and frugality that I use, is one of those things that would fall under the heading of an autistic-style life skill. Many of my behavior programs, of course, were designed to try to get me to stop looking like this. That requires monitoring so many body parts that it’s really impossible, and even when I do achieve some semblance of it, the effect isn’t to make me look NT, it’s to make me look really weird with pasted-on expressions and such that are fairly incongruous and would probably scare the crap out of a lot of people who read standard body language.

me attempting to look NTish and only succeeding in a scary-looking facial expression

This is an example of me doing my best to do NT-style posing for a picture.

This obviously doesn’t work too well, and I know that once I get one thing (like the facial expression) then the rest of my body goes back to doing whatever it was doing. I can’t wrestle the whole body into submission at the same time, and even my face isn’t doing a natural smile at all. Even if I could look like that all the time (which I can’t), what’s the point? It’s wasteful, inefficient, and doesn’t even make me pass particularly well (the goal in the training that got me to do things like that was passing, it was never achieved). Compare it to the hand-flapping pictures on my other website, and ask yourself which one looks happier, and more natural for me. Hint: It’s not this attempt at a smily thing.

This efficiency, though, is exactly what is needed in order to control a body that must first be found, like any other sensory input, and then controlled, one piece at a time. Trying to train someone out of it is training someone out of… efficiency. That’s not a good thing to train someone out of, but it seems to be the focus of a lot of “social skills” sorts of things. A special ed teacher (for whom I have no respect) once told me that her goal was to make it so that when her class went out in public, they “didn’t look like a bunch of retarded kids being taken out in public”. So she as much as admitted she wasn’t teaching anything functional, only cosmetic. (And trust me, they all looked autistic, even when she was done with them.)

It’s not just movement, of course, that demands this sort of efficiency. It is also thinking, and perceiving the world. Wastefulness in these areas leads to overload, and overload leads to pain and shutdown. It is harder to describe the skills it takes to deal with thought and perception, because they are not as concrete and overtly visible as movement. But they are very similar things: Don’t waste what you’ve got.

All of these skills are pretty much the antithesis of how autistic people are taught to deal with the world.

For instance, many programs for autistic people rely on basically memorizing large amounts of symbolic information about the world. That is horribly inefficient. It requires perceiving what is in front of you, converting it into symbolic information, calling up the correct symbolic information on the basis of whatever it is that you’re doing, cross-referencing that with a whole bunch of other symbolic information, and then converting all those symbols into action or words. By the time you’ve done all that, the response may create as many problems as a non-response would, and you haven’t even had the chance to check in on intention. And you’ve used up a whole lot of mental energy on generating all those symbols (whether said symbols are words or something else).

Similar things happen when communicating with an autistic person. If you want me to do something, the most efficient thing to do is bring me the objects used in doing that thing. However, most people don’t do that. They announce things like “Would you like to do this?” which requires deciphering what they’re saying, remembering what they’re talking about, and responding in yet more words, and then in actions, which requires starting various body parts moving on my own with no appreciable cues to physical movement. Or they wave things back and forth in front of my face so fast that I can’t possibly see whatever it is they’re trying to show me, and the slower I am to respond, the faster they jiggle the object around. Then they’re surprised when I shut down and can’t do anything, or melt down and scream.

The combination of pressure to respond and total incomprehensibility is never good, and using various long and winding routes to get the information in is not good either. There’s a very particular side to side motion that people do, where the bottom part of something stays still and the top part is moved rapidly and rhythmically from side to side. It makes the object utterly incomprehensible to me yet conveys a desire that I respond to the object, and makes the object impossible to ignore. And people wonder when I start banging my head. Hand me breakfast and I’ll eat it, start talking about breakfast and waving oatmeal boxes around in the air and you’ll drive me up a wall trying to keep up with everything and generate the desired responses.

And yet things like that are considered among the “best” of what there is to teach autistic people. What autistic people actually need to learn, is ways of doing things that do not take up so much space cognitively. This, of course, is yet another thing with no fancy names, money to spend, promises of normalcy (in fact the person will almost undoubtedly look less standard), resemblance to anything medical, or appearance-saving shortcuts that are really the long way around. So it’s, yet again, unlikely to catch on in the “we’re doing something doing something doing something doing something” mentality that pervades the autism world. Much better, apparently, to bend autistic people in strange unsustainable directions or force us to take the long way to do things half as well as the short way, if at all.

May20

Condensed old-post response to twisting of experiences

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Typing hurts so this is a condensed version of a long post. Apologies in advance for lack of nuance. The long version was written before my last several posts (written last week) and resemblance to later happenings (which in some places is strong) is coincidental.

This is about me but surely applies to many others so should be read as broad-contained-within-narrow. So should many of my posts which some people mistakenly read as person-specific or autism-specific.

People call up an image with words. They use it to sell their cause of prevention, cure, institution, etc. The image is in many heads a fuzzy stereotype, in other heads such stereotype imposed on real people yet untrue even on the people.

People throw words in my face one after another as justification.

The words evoke real inside life for me not life of hypothetical or outside person.

They say ‘banging head’ I know the feel the constancy the effects on vision motor skills and thinking and other-side-of-head splitting headaches and blacking out. I know counting of thousands of banging per hour.

They say ‘institution’ I see hear feel smell real concrete lived experiences inside.

They say ‘alone’ I remember total isolation. Also remember presumed lack of social interest while interested. And remember how long I believed, and gave up on the belief, that there must be other people like me in certain ways, in the world, before I started one by one finding them.

They say ‘in a corner’ I remember exact one corner, specific corner, spent ages barely moving all the details of this.

They say ‘no understanding’ I remember the waterfall sound of speech still often happen, and pattern rather than typical abstraction. I also remember still often people speaking as if I not exist not understand people even telling each other “she doesn’t understand”. I remember nonsense sounds that years later understood the words, that were thought I would never understand or remember. I remember understanding things others never even thought to understand and thus never tested.

They say ‘no communication’ I remember endless attempts to communicate ignored, robotic non-communication praised. I remember interpreter after interpreter barred from helping because “she could not possibly be communicating that complexly with only her body, we see no real communication”. I remember impossible to communicate many things frustration, I remember before I knew what communication was, I remember only knowing bits. I remember now using alternative communication, I remember gradual loss of speech.

They say ‘will never’ I think of all people said I will never do just ten years ago that I have done. I think of prerequsites for ‘independence’ that I never met yet but here I am in my own apartment.

They say ‘unaware of danger’ I remember balancing on fences, climbing trees in unusual ways, walking into traffic, licking or trying to eat inedible objects, sometimes unaware sometimes unable to do otherwise even if aware. I remember interest in straight lines and circles and shining lights so intense it overrides any notion of ‘wheels’ and ‘road lines’ and ‘headlights’.

They say ‘no initiative’ I think all the time I spent barely moved yet needed assistance waiting yet never got what I was waiting for because not moving meant to them empty-headed or stubborn. I think of also having different initiative than pleased captors.

They say ‘no sense of time’ I think of stare at object no sense of different between hour or day. I think random sleep. I think of moment passing without reflection. I think of barely even now grasping difference of past/present/future and my conception of the world being outside time.

They say ‘no body awareness’ I think of having other people touch to tell me where I am and how to move. I think of feel pain but not know where. I think of body as external sensation just as room is, cannot always differentiate pain or itching from a desk.

They say ‘bite self’ I taste it and see the bite marks on hands and arms.

They say ‘incontinence’ I not only know the feel but also the feel under neglectful circumstances and going everywhere instead of one place and sitting in it for hours if stuck.

They say ‘violence’ I recall caged-animal fear and lashing out and treated with more violence than I ever had the power to inflict.

They say ‘mind of a child’ and I see test results putting developmental so-called ages on what I can and cannot do, but never being those ages at the time.

They say ‘screaming’ I remember doing so until I lost my voice at home, in public, in institutions, or in other places.

They say ‘no emotion’ I remember emotions without usual expressions or not in the usual situations, being chastised for ‘inappropriate’ emotion.

They say ‘no personality’ I remember records stating I probably had severe/complex developmental disability prevented formation of cohesive personality.

They say ‘cannot dress self’ I think of prompting both physical and verbal, ‘cannot feed self’ and I think of help moving arm and when they move my arm wrong by accident and what malnourishment does to the body and mind with pain and irrationality and food-obsession. I think of being walked step by step through every activity of daily life starting not with “pick something up” but “here is how to move one body part, now here is how to move the part next to it, and the next one,” all the way through the task, collapsing in exhaustion several times throughout and having to start over, doing it wrong anyway, never getting it all done. I remember stopwatches and clipboards in futile attempts to teach me some of these things.

They say ‘no communicate pain’ I recall many urgent medical problems never mentioned even with adequate communication system. I recall also being told I was not in pain because no facial expression even in excruciating pain. I remember taught not to scream with broken joint. I recall 20 years of severe pain never diagnosed. I recall emergency workers (ignorant of auties) saying I must be on PCP because of total imperviousness to pain when fighting them.

They say ‘low functioning’ I see the records and hear the conversations that use this and many equivakent terms on me, not ancient history but a few years back. I see the bottoming on test results of ‘functioning level’. The expectation in people’s manner of my being not really here or thinking. The arguments about salvageability like I am a shipwreck.

They say ‘brain scan is proof’ I remember the proof that I had a ‘broken’ brain the brain scan used as ‘proof’ of so many things I was supposedly incapable of. I remember hearing people say “her brain beyond repair no sense helping her she is gone no longer a person didn’t you see her chart look at this look at this get her out of here worthless impossible to help nobody home” outside room I was strapped in.

When people use these stereotyped repetiton of words and phrases (non-auties do it too in both senses of the word stereotype!), or the photographs or drawings meant to evoke same, it is, bam-bam-bam, one in front of the other. Each one conjures up not fuzzy half-formed abstractions or images of other people, but real vivid immediate multisensory multidimensional concrete experiences from my life (not even the life of a person around me).

After that bombardment, people use it to justify things I find horrible, as if my mere existence is unthinkably awful. If I call them on it, well then there are the “But we don’t mean you” statements, the inability to conceive that these conjured-up constructs are more concrete and immediate for me than for them. If I try to explain these bombarded images and smells and sounds and feels and everything, my motives and emotional state and character become questioned and analyzed and demolished. (No I am not constant-angry, asking for pity, lying, or hating.)

But evoking these strings of experiences at me one after one after one and then barring my access to them and then using this to argue against everything I believe in is a lousy tactic. I do not need it explained patiently to me that my life and the lives of my loved ones exist, while simultaneously twisting meaning and value out of all of us and ending with “We don’t mean you” when so clearly they do.

May19

Eyeballs eyeballs eyeballs

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It’s been a long time since someone’s really been insistent with the eye contact while I’m squirming and trying to get away. I noticed today exactly how much I react to that.

So I’m sitting there in a doctor’s office, and he’s leaning towards me and sticking his face up to mine.

And I’m sitting there trying to think in a way that, were it in words, would go something like this:

Okay… he’s got to…. EYEBALLS EYEBALLS EYEBALLS he’s got to be unaware… EYEBALLS!!!! …he’s… uh… eyeballs… uh… EYEBALLS!!!!!!!!! people like him think this is EYEBALLS EYEBALLS EYEBALLS EYEBALLS EYEBALLS …some people think… EYEBALLS!! …some people think this is friendly… EYEBALLS!!!! EYEBALLS!!!! EYEBALLS!!!! he really doesn’t mean anything EYEBALLS EYEBALLS EYEBALLS he doesn’t mean anything EYEBALLS EYEBALLS he eyeballs doesn’t eyeballs mean eyeballs anything eyeballs bad EYEBALLS EYEBALLS he doesn’t understand why I’m turning EYEBALLS EYEBALLS EYEBALLS why I’m not coming up EYEBALLS why I’m not coming up with words EYEBALLS EYEBALLS EYEBALLS oh crap hand going banging head EYEBALLS EYEBALLS oh crap not right thing to do EYEBALLS EYEBALLS EYEBALLS EYEBALLS EYEBALLS stop hand now EYEBALLS EYEBALLS EYEBALLS is he saying something? EYEBALLS EYEBALLS am I trying to type something? EYEBALLS EYEBALLS EYEBALLS EYEBALLS EYEBALLS oh crap better remember EYEBALLS EYEBALLS remember EYEBALLS what I’m trying EYEBALLS what’s he saying? [shading eyes as if staring at sun] EYEBALLS EYEBALLS EYEBALLS am I saying something? EYEBALLS EYEBALLS EYEBALLS EYEBALLS EYEBALLS EYEBALLS what’s going on?  EYEBALLS THREAT BAD EYEBALLS THREAT BAD EYEBALLS THREAT BAD EYEBALLS THREAT BAD EYEBALLS THREAT BAD… segmentation fault

Etc. Until I finally reached some point of shutdown. And where every EYEBALLS is not just the picture of eyeballs but of something very threatening about to eat me or something. I unfortunately in all that couldn’t figure out how to tell him that it was his eyeballs that were unnerving me, and I’m not sure I did a very good job of convincing him that I’m not that freaked out all the time. It wasn’t just eyeballs either, it was leaning at me with eyeballs. I tried briefly to remember that people like him consider eyeballs to be friendliness, but it got drowned out in the swamp of eyeballs, and all thinking got drowned out in the end in a sea of fight/flight.

Note to anyone who interacts with me: Eyeballs do not help, unless by “help” you mean “extinguish everything but eyeballs and fear”.

May16

Exactly who is unresponsive here?

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I just watch the horrible public service announcement by Autism Speaks. (I wonder how that girl likes having her mother announce to the entire world that she’s thought of killing her, if you’re wondering why I called it “horrible”.)

One thing that struck me was that the children in the video were described as unresponsive, over and over again. And yet the children were responding to their parents and to their environments in general, and they were doing so in incredibly clear ways.

However, by the way the parents were acting, it might as well not have been happening. They went right on doing whatever it was they had been doing, as if the children were not communicating anything. The body language of the parents did not change in the slightest in response to their children, it stayed constant, and very very socially smooth.

Then, in order to get their children to “respond” to them (as if the children had not been responding already), they’d do things like try to force eye contact. As if eye contact is “connection” and “response”. There was also some grabbing and moving them around, as if they were objects, but without any responsiveness to the reactions of the children. I even saw children being driven into overload and then parents sitting there looking “sad” that their children did all these “behaviors”.

Where is this fabled unresponsiveness?

I see a lot of unresponsive non-autistic people in that video, I see people being, in fact, unresponsive in ways that would strike me as outright cruelty if I thought they knew better. (I don’t think most of them know better.)

But where is this unresponsiveness supposedly existing in the autistic people in the video?

Is it because their faces are not pointed the “correct” direction? (Do you have to be looking at someone to know they are there?)

Is it because they are not talking? (Do you have to talk to respond to people?)

Is it because they are flapping their hands and stuff? (Do you have to move a certain way to respond to people?)

I don’t understand it at all. I look at those children and I see overwhelming, repetitive responsiveness in the face of being totally ignored and shut out.

I’m remembering a time recently when I was trying to find something out from someone, and no matter how many times I tried to find it out, she gave me the same useless piece of information. (Which amounted to, “Just do what you’re told,” which was not what or why I was asking.) When I started banging my head, she started yelling, “Listen to me! Listen to me!”

And the whole time I was thinking, “I am listening to you, why the hell do you think I’m overloaded, lady? Now stop screaming at me or I won’t be able to quit hearing you long enough to stop this.” But she was utterly convinced that I was not listening, and tried numerous ways of getting in my face to ensure that I was listening, all of which ensured I had no possibility of either communicating or understanding.

Then someone walked through and asked how I was doing. I hissed — like a cat, and one of my more unmistakable sounds — and the person I’d been talking to went into patronizing-cheery mode and said “Oh, she’s doing greeeat.” Like I wasn’t even there, and hadn’t just said something, and hadn’t been banging my head moments before.

The sheer amount of people who look at me and view me as “unresponsive” when I’m very responsive, is impressive. And the things they do when they view me as unresponsive, seem a lot more like unresponsiveness than anything I do to them.

It’s like they only see a tiny, tiny number of the possible human responses as “response”. When those responses are present, even if totally fake and out of context and plastered-on to someone who’s really not all that responsive to someone, they view it as “responsiveness”. When those responses are not present, even if every other possible signal of response is happening, they view that as “unresponsiveness”. And they call us oblivious?

May6

Overload thresholds really are pretty relative to the person.

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I’ve been meaning to write this post for a long time. I don’t know why I never ended up doing so, but I remembered today, so I am writing it today. I guess it falls under, useful things to know if you’re an autie and dealing with other auties. It’s stuff I’ve been figuring out myself. This may be stating the obvious for all I know.

Approaching dangerous levels of overload looks different in different people. Something important I’ve noticed, is that the signals for it are entirely dependent on the person, and on what their normal abilities are, and what their thresholds for certain kinds of shutdown are.

I’m remembering in particular a conversation I had with a friend once. She said… something like (I could be getting this wrong, I’m picking what I think was the particular trait that changed), “I’m starting to get to the point where words, spoken or written, are just running together and making no sense.”

I replied, “Yeah. That’s how things are a lot of the time for me. But in you that would mean trouble.” And we kind of laughed about it.

I remember, once, reading someone talking about an utterly horrifying experience he had. He described his mental state at the time in terms that are usually reserved for people who have no mental state. And then he told me what he meant by it, and it was something I experienced on a regular basis.

I still don’t agree with the words he used to describe it, but I’m starting to understand why it is that he would find it a lot more alarming, and a lot more of an “imminent danger” signal, than I would. It’s not part of his normal, it’s part of mine.

Likewise, I was at one point experiencing a great deal of pain with typing to the point where I strapped a bent stick to my arm and typed with the stick. The reactions of a woman who knew me, and a man who worked in the facilitated communication field, were very different. The woman who knew me was commenting on the frustration I was probably experiencing because of the speed issue, and the man was congratulating me on how well I typed compared to people who use more FC than I do. (Although I’ve seen FC users type way faster than I was typing that day.)

Meanwhile, I’ve seen people talk about dangerous (to them) levels of overload and shutdown, when losing skills I’ve never had in the first place.

This isn’t meant to be one of those vacuous statements about looking at how fortunate you are in comparison to someone else. It’s more the opposite. I can see a potential for auties to say, “Well I never had that, so losing it isn’t a big deal, I live without it all the time.” And I keep thinking “No, this is one of those things that really is relative to how someone is doing normally. For some people, losing the ability to talk signals a big crash, for other people it is commonplace. The fact that it’s commonplace for some of us does not negate the fact that it signals a big crash for others.”

May6

On “contradictions” and so-called prodigies and so-called savants and prejudice and being a freak on display.

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This is… more personal, and more emotional (at least to me, I have no clue if it comes across in the writing) than a lot of my posts. Just so you’re warned.

Julian of Amorpha replied to my last entry, talking about how people also try to discredit the writing of children, too, saying “A child could not have done this.”Which reminded me of a very annoying fact of my life, that I’d never fully connected together with this before. As a child, I could do things that children weren’t supposed to be able to do, too. Or some adults.

Not that I knew it, it’s even noted in my records somewhere along the line that I showed utter lack of awareness that I could do things other kids couldn’t. I was more aware, if anything, of all the things other children could do that I could not seem to do. But other people were very aware of it. And I didn’t much enjoy the ways they showed that awareness. (Being officially labeled an “idiot savant” is the least of it.)

I have a friend who was the women’s chess champion in her state at the age of fifteen. She refuses to play chess even at the age of fifty. I understand why.

I know this may sound weird for a blogger, but I hate being on display. Or rather, I hate certain things that being on display tends to entail. I don’t mind the actual fact of exposing my ideas for other people to see. I don’t mind the fact of communicating. I do mind… having to explain over and over again that yes, people like me can do the things we do. That it’s not particularly unusual among people with my brain configuration, etc.

Being a non-speaking autistic adult writer has a lot of utter nastiness in common with being a child prodigy. It’s sometimes worse in person, because on the Internet all you have is my word for the fact that I can’t do such-and-such and look like such-and-such. In person, people see a massive contrast between how I look and how I write, so massive that sometimes they block one or the other out to just not have to think about it. Or, to consider me amazing, without even knowing me, and not because I’ve done something well, but because I’ve done something well for a retard. It’s sort of like doing something well for a child. I almost prefer being attacked, to being praised and having no clue if I’m being praised for doing something well or praised for simply not being what someone expected me to be.

I know, of course, that there are ways I could avoid all this. I could avoid showing certain abilities in public. Sometimes I do. There are things I can do, and never do do, at least not in front of anyone, because I don’t want to deal with the fallout of the contrast between people’s expectations and what I am. No, they’re not things that would make me “more independent” or anything like that. They’re just weird little talents that I’d rather not deal with people’s reactions to. I’ve said before that I’d do them, if I could just not be me while I was doing them, and therefore not have to let anyone know that the rest of me is in total opposition to the sort of person they’d expect to do those things.

But I can’t always avoid it. I went to a sports event for people with developmental disabilities, and I did as crappily at most things as I expected, and then I picked up a badminton racket. And I’d never played badminton before in my life, but I kept beating the non-disabled staff (and they rapidly stopped trying to go easy on me), it was like all the links from perception to action came together in badminton. And it was a lot of fun. But then I was thinking “Oh great, I hope nobody makes a big deal out of this, I want to just have fun.” And it is fun. I enjoy the feeling of totally merging with sensation and movement like that. But I don’t want the “Wow you’re amazing for a disabled person” crap, nor do I really want a lot of recognition for it, I want to enjoy myself, or do my job, or whatever it is I’m doing at that point.

I also know that the way I’ve chosen to lead my life often leaves me with little choice but to sometimes bump up against those contradictions, and bump up against them hard. If I do advocacy in person, which I do, I’m going to bump into it right there. I sometimes use the contradictions in people’s heads to whatever advantage I can, in fact, in getting a point across. It’s necessary given the message I’m trying to send, and the medium I have to send it through. But there’s a downside, and the downside is not something I often talk about.

I’ve given speeches. Decent speeches, as far as I can tell. And then been so wound up afterwards that I’ve spun around in circles, meowed at the top of my lungs, flailed, banged my head, paced randomly, body-slammed walls, lost all connection to what the world meant except patterns of light and shadow (that my body then chased all over the place), screamed, and peed on myself (not necessarily in that order or all at once). With full awareness that many people were watching and would use my “weirdness” later on to amplify the supposed amazingness of the speeches.

In those situations, it seems like performing, even though it isn’t. Because people’s reactions are to the imagined contradictions, and people’s reactions are at times strong and overwhelming. I wish I had a transporter to disappear after speaking engagements sometimes. Not because of stage fright, which I don’t really have much of, but because of the “Holy crap it’s a walking talking typing autistic person” response. I’m sure even autistics who don’t show up in quite as glaring contrast to people’s assumptions, know exactly what I mean when I talk about that response, because at times it’s inevitable in being openly autistic and doing public speaking.

Well they offer you money, but money don’t mean much to you
And they feed you with flattery, to get you to show them the things that you do
…
And you’d like to say, “Leave me alone, would you all get away!”
And you wish you were safely at home
And you wish that somebody would stand up and say
“He’s a boy, a boy who can’t talk, just a boy, a boy who can’t talk”

— Tony Carey, “Pink World”, also a good explanation why there are certain things I won’t display publicly anymore (flattery, if anyone wonders, tastes like saccharine-coated poison to me)

I wouldn’t mind so much, I think, if this were a world in which there were not the ableist assumptions that lead to the backhanded compliment of “Wow you’re so amazing… for an autistic.” If everyone knew that there is no contradiction at all in being autistic, and writing good speeches, and, uh, doing all those other things I do. If everyone knew, even, that lives like mine existed, lives in which abilities that were there or seemed to be there before are not here anymore, or that abilities fluctuated seemingly at random, and in which I’m okay with that. A lot of things.

And yes, I’m very aware that in this particular day and age, if I put myself on display, I’m asking for it. But I wish there were some other way, and sometimes I wish that society would change just a little bit faster. What I like most is being in the company of people who are not surprised or overly emotionally awestruck by the apparent contradictions — contradictions that exist entirely in people’s heads — in what I can and can’t do, past and present. There’s a button that says “I am not a puzzle, I am a person.” I wish there was “My abilities are not paradoxes, the only contradiction you see is based in your own assumptions, not in me.” Or something.

My choice to reveal my areas of difficulty online is a conscious one. I am aware that in the present day, this has all the consequences I describe above and many more. I know people who choose not to discuss their areas of difficulty, so they will not have to encounter this kind of thing. Online, they can pass, because anyone with a certain level of writing skill is assumed to have a whole lot of other skills, even if they don’t. I have discussed this with some of them, who will talk in private about things like this, but never in public.

And that’s why I do it, I guess. Because I hope that at some point, some kid like me won’t have to grow up with what I grew up with, or face this world in adulthood that shouts “retard” at them one minute and hails them as a “genius” the next, and flip-flops back and forth faster than a ping-pong match. I hope that at some point, my particular kind of skill pattern won’t be considered weird. And people like me won’t have to deal with a choice between unpleasant hiding and unpleasant kinds of exposure and attention. Where we won’t have to be walking freak shows.

I am hoping that if I am an example of someone like this that people can get used to, then it will be easier for others later on. But every time I see my name used as an example of “this ability combined with that deficit,” I’m ambivalent, it’s uncomfortable. And yet I use others’ names in the same way, others who have voluntarily become examples. This is where I separate emotions from political acts: I know that however bad this feels to me, I’ve still chosen to do it, and these are the consequences.

As much as I dislike aspects of doing this, I would dislike it even more if someone tried to paint me as a fragile being who needed to be shielded from all public discussion. I would find it incredibly manipulative of myself, if I talked about how bad this made me feel, in order to avoid the consequences of what I’ve done. I can’t stand it when other people do things like that, make public political statements and then claim to be too fragile to have to deal with the consequences. So please don’t take what I’m saying as that, it isn’t.

I may react with horribly unpleasant levels of emotion to a topic, but I do not ever want to use that reaction to influence people’s responses in a manipulative way. In fact one time someone insisted that my emotional reaction meant that they had to avoid saying things that upset me, and that I was conveying to them that they should not talk about those things. I argued with that person. I told them that if I didn’t want them to talk about those things, I would tell them, I would not just display a strong emotional reaction as a hint. I told them that I may react strongly but in no way did I want that to make them feel like they’re obligated not to disagree with me.

I don’t like it when others do that kind of thing (“Here’s my opinion, and you shouldn’t contradict it or I’ll get very distraught/ill/etc, but you still have to listen to my opinion, and if you do contradict it I’ll not only be distraught/ill/etc but I’ll go to other people and tell them what a monster you are while claiming to be an infallibly nice person myself, my niceness being the reason that I’m so fragile and you’re so mean, etc”) and I don’t want to do it to anyone. My reactions exist, and I don’t always hide them (although I do believe in the “there’s a time and a place” thing), but they are my reactions, not signals to you to shut up. I know that there are real consequences for saying the things I say, and not always enjoying them doesn’t mean not accepting them in the “unpleasant but inevitable” category.

But I do want to get across that there’s a definite cost in this kind of situation. And not a trivial one.

I hope that this has made sense. This has been one of those posts where there are all kinds of depths and details to what I am thinking, but my writing only shows a pale cursory reflection/summary of those. There is so much more to this subject to cover, but it’s too emotional for me to jump into very far right now. I once, a long time ago, wrote a post on something related to this, and deleted it, never posted it. But, as I said in reply to someone earlier, I’m sometimes more honest than I want to be. And I do think there is a use in mentioning these things, even if only half-formed bits of my thoughts manage to get out. But I do, seriously, hope it makes sense, and hope that the parts of it that go beyond my personal situation are recognizable.

I have a few good friends, some human and some non-human, who don’t regard anything I do as a contradiction or cause for syrupy praise or astonishment. I love them for it. For them, I don’t have to perform, I don’t have to hide, and I don’t have to put up with a choice between the two or the appearance of one or the other. And I’m guessing the same is true in reverse.

Apr29

Lessons on Inclusion from a Segregated School, Version 2 (from memory, not an exact reproduction of the first one)

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I keep hearing that some disabled people are just too hard to include in regular society. That we have behavior that can’t be tolerated, that nobody will ever put up with the way we look, that there’s nothing we could possibly do, and a lot of other things like that. And I think back to one of the segregated schools I attended.

This one, unlike the others, was not on the grounds of an institution, although it might as well have been. The school did run several group homes, and many students lived in the group homes and were driven to school from there. Many of the other students were on strict behavior programs at home, went to school, and only left the house for segregated day programs. As far as I can tell, the main difference between the life lived by most students there, and an institution, was the distances involved between one part of the institution and another, which were traveled by car instead of on foot. We were still separated from the rest of society the vast majority of the time.

The people at this school were everyone the district didn’t want in its regular schools, as far as I could tell, although there weren’t a lot of purely physically disabled kids there. I don’t know where they all went, since most of them weren’t at regular schools either, but I suspect it had something to do with their insistence on not being lumped in with the “retards”, that over time there was probably a new rule made or something that purely physically disabled (or passing as purely physically disabled) kids had their own schools so they wouldn’t have to be in with the rest of us.

The rest of us included people who as far as I can tell, were everyone else the school system didn’t want in their mainstream classrooms. There were kids there from the psych system. There were kids who were extreme bullies, and who probably bullied normal kids, since bullying disabled kids rarely gets you recognized as doing anything wrong enough to be sent to school with them. There were kids who often got in trouble with the law. There were kids who sexually assaulted other kids. There were kids who were autistic. There were kids who were diagnosed with mental retardation. There were a couple kids with cerebral palsy, and diagnoses of other things too, since without those other diagnoses they’d probably have gone to some school for physically disabled kids. There were kids with dyslexia and other learning disabilities. There was one kid with narcolepsy. There were kids with Tourette’s or OCD.

It was basically anyone who wasn’t wanted anywhere else. And this school — which was a horrible school, by the way, with almost no good points to it and a lot of illegal things going on, lest I later paint what sounds like a good picture of it — supposedly specialized in the really difficult cases.

I notice something peculiar about this: We were supposedly too difficult for mainstream kids to put up with, but we were somehow not supposed to be too difficult to put up with each other. This is one of the strangest things about segregation to me. Somehow mainstream kids don’t have to put up with us, but we, who supposedly have less people skills, are supposed to figure out how to put up with each other.

The thing is, we did. We had no real choice. We did not always come up with particularly constructive ways to put up with each other, but we did have to come up with ways, nonetheless, because there was no escaping. And I don’t think that non-disabled kids always put up with each other in constructive ways, either, but they do put up with each other. This is not saying we all liked each other, or were all friends, because we weren’t. But we at least tolerated each other, which was more than mainstream kids were ever asked to do for us.

Anyone who thinks this was some kind of utopia for disabled kids, where differences don’t matter, wasn’t there. I was sexually assaulted several times by other students, and then blamed by the teachers for not picking up on the cues that it was about to happen. One time the teachers even found it hilarious and wouldn’t stop laughing about it. Many of the kids teased the kids they called the “retards” or the “special kids”. And while there were a couple teachers who really tried to make a crappy environment work for us, many of the teachers were bigger bullies than all the kids put together, and came up with creative, and probably illegal, punishments for minor infractions. Low expectations were normal there.

But at the same time, something became very clear to me: Unless disabled kids, including kids labeled “socially disabled,” are much, much more innately capable of putting up with each other than non-disabled kids are, then non-disabled kids could have put up with every last one of us, too. If they’d had to. If they hadn’t been encouraged towards a sense of entitlement that they don’t deserve, an entitlement to a life and an education totally free of the ones they consider undesirable.

Because if we were so “distracting” to be in a classroom with, why would we, who were said to be so much more distractable than usual in the first place, have been put in classrooms with each other? If we were so socially incapable, then why would we be expected to do what the “socially skilled” normal kids could not, and find ways of dealing with each other’s presence?

This, of course, extends well beyond kids, and well beyond school (I view school as flawed anyway, for everyone, so I’m not saying much positive about any schools here, just to be clear).

When I got out, I was surprised to see people walking down the street who did not suddenly scream or tic or rock. I was out of place. Many times, other weird people, many of whom had been in the system, would walk up to me, recognizing the look I guess, and start talking, and I’d have a sense of normalcy for awhile. But a lot of the time it was culture shock. Groups of non-disabled teenagers frequently ran up to me and tried to “trick” the “retard”, which is apparently evidence of their very high degree of social skill, or something. I was relieved whenever I saw someone who, by their walk or way of reacting to things or actions, was clearly not a standard-issue person.

But most people either saw me as a walking target or a person to avoid or patronize. The walking target part wasn’t new, but people didn’t really get a chance to avoid each other for being in special ed. We’d have had to have avoided ourselves, for starters, and there was nowhere to go where you could avoid meeting other disabled people. Since the only non-disabled people there were teachers, and a lot of the teachers there weren’t very nice, you wouldn’t even necessarily want to be around solely non-disabled people. Patronizing there came mainly from teachers, not students, although some students of course picked up patronizing from the teachers.

But what I keep coming back to, was we were never allowed a sense of entitlement to not being around each other. That sense of entitlement allows some non-disabled people to view our presence in their world as an optional obstruction to the way things normally are, instead of a part of the way things normally are that they’d better get used to. We had to make concessions for each other all the time, we even had to make concessions to non-disabled people by attending these horrific schools, but non-disabled people were never forced to make any concessions for us, so they view that lack of concessions as something they’re entitled to.

So do some disabled people, I have noticed. Physically disabled people don’t seem to want us in their own segregated schools, and I’ve seen many speak with more horror at being “lumped in with the retarded kids” than at being forcibly segregated in the first place. And many disabled adults, of all kinds, only want some kinds of disabled people, if any, around them.

I’ve talked to autistic adults who manage in the non-autistic work world every day, most of whom were never forcibly segregated, who claim they couldn’t bear being around autistic people who make loud, involuntary noises so all such people just shouldn’t be allowed around them. Now I’ve got as much auditory sensitivity as anyone, but I’m also a loud, involuntary noise-maker at times. Moreover, I was in a school full of autistic people, some of whom had too many noise sensitivities to stand a standard-issue workplace, and somehow we all survived having people there (who were sometimes us, of course, since noise sensitivities and making loud noises are not mutually exclusive) who were out in the courtyard screaming every few minutes, or who squealed and ticced loudly. Not that this prevents me from trying to stop screaming, since I’m aware of noise sensitivities, but I’m under no illusion that people like me are welcome a lot of places until we do figure that one out, and we’re usually the first ones to get thrown out instead of anyone thinking that both sets of a people have a right to be in any particular place and there needs to be compromise.

Likewise, I’ve seen horrible fights break out between people who have particular receptive language problems and people who have particular expressive language problems, both expecting the other to totally capitulate to their needs or else. I kept thinking, this is like listening to a bunch of signing Deaf people take offense to the idea of using interpreters around blind people while blind people insisted on signing Deaf people speaking, while a bunch of deafblind people (like, in this analogy, me, since I don’t always write in ways people can understand and can’t always understand some people’s styles of writing) sat around wondering why people couldn’t just quit taking offense at everyone else’s areas of difficulty and start looking for solutions.

Meanwhile, people with assorted receptive language problems were telling people with assorted expressive language problems to “try harder.” People with assorted expressive language problems were becoming offended and insulted at even an honest description of what reading their writing was like for people who had serious trouble reading it, and insisting that other people must make the effort no matter the cost. People with receptive language problems were in turn becoming offended and insulted at equally honest descriptions of what trying to write in standard English was like for those who had trouble doing it, and insisting that other people must make the effort no matter the cost. The idea of interpreters was rejected by nearly everyone as simply impossible, mainly apparently so they could go back to fighting. I can imagine a lot of problems happening at my school, but not that one.

We didn’t have the option of running off in a huff to some other school. Pretty much, that was the last stop for people schools didn’t want. Any further from that and we’d be in the kind of institutions that have a school somewhere on the grounds, rather than the ‘distributed institution’ that most of us lived in (nominally ‘in the community’, but, only nominally). And the kids weren’t the ones who made those decisions, anyway. Therefore, we had to learn to at bare minimum put up with each other, one way or another. An attitude that I find way too lacking out here, because most people have the “out” of saying “No [insert kind of person here] allowed.”

It seems to me, sometimes, that there were things more “inclusive” about the segregated environments I was in, than the supposedly-integrated ones I encounter in the outside world. There’s this sense, out here, that non-disabled people, and maybe a few of the elite among disabled people, own the world and the rest of us are intruders in it, who must be on our best manners at all times to keep from getting tossed out. Meanwhile, non-disabled people can often get away with, well actually murder is one thing they do often get away with towards us, but even lesser things too like severe bullying… and somehow we’re still the invasive and intrusive ones, because it’s their world, not ours. (This is why I refuse to refer to integration as inclusion.)

So I’ll close with a quote from Chris deBurgh’s “The Getaway”:

Das ist auch unsere Welt
This is our world too
Oui c’est notre monde aussi