I have Asperger’s Syndrome, social anxiety disorder, OCD and depression.
I’m 30 years old, female and am happily married to a wonderful autistic man.
I like drawing pixel art. I started drawing in Aug 2011 and have been addicted to it since then, so if you see a pixel picture in this blog, then it was probably drawn by me.
Other things that I love are pokemon and animals.
If you leave me a message, please let me know if you don't want the answer to be published publicly.
I have a really hard time talking to other autistic people about struggles with autism because they often take any laments about being unable to do something as ‘internalized ableism’. The fuck is that? Acknowledging the difficullties that come with autism is being self-hating? Is your life really that easy?
Related to this (although maybe you’re talking about the same thing), I don’t understand why everyone seems to think that hating autism = hating the autistic person. It is possible to hate the symptoms of autism, and all of the difficulties that it causes you in your life, but to not hate yourself. There’s more to a person than just their autism, even if it does influence a lot of their life. People do have personalities as well as having autism.
I don’t think autism should be considered as a developmental disability. Yet most people think that autistic people are delayed throughout their lives. I wouldn’t say that people with autism are considered developmentally disabled. The reason I think this is because people with autism are in fact…
It isn’t called a developmental disability because autistic people are non-intelligent. It’s called a developmental disability because autism affects your ability to reach normal developmental milestones at the correct times.
My husband is autistic and he was definitely developmentally delayed. He was a very late speaker (took him until his teens), had a lot of problems with toilet training and bladder control (again, took him until his teens) etc. Speaking and toilet training are developmental milestones that most people reach at a very young age. My husband is however extremely intelligent.
I have asperger syndrome, and although I was actually quite advanced at hitting certain developmental milestones (like talking, toilet training etc), I was delayed in hitting social and emotional developmental milestones. In fact, I don’t think I was just delayed, I think I stopped developing in some areas completely. As an example, I never really developed beyond parallel play and I think I still possess the emotional abilities of a young child. I also feel like a child inside, even though I’m in an adult body. I feel like I never even became a teenager, emotionally or socially, and do not relate at all to anything people refer to when they talk about the life of a teenager. I do however have the intellectual maturity of an adult.
As far as I was aware, people do think of autism as being something like down syndrome and cerebral palsy. People are certainly trying to cure autism in the same way that they ‘cure’ down syndrome (eugenics).
I’m sure that there are people with down syndrome etc who do want to be cured, just as there are people with autism who do want to be cured.
Maybe. I always thought monotone meant not changing in pitch and I think I do that sometimes, at least. But I might not know very well what it means. The thing I’m talking about is more like…almost a “cut and paste” quality to my inflections, though even that might not be exactly the best way of describing it.
I’m not entirely sure if I’m using the right word when I say monotone. I just know that I’ve heard a lot of autistic people that have a very similar kind of quality to their voice as you, so I assumed that must be what’s meant by monotone. If I’d just seen your video without knowing about you, I think I would have thought you’re probably autistic after watching it.
That said, glad you liked the video. I need to make more like it, that was intended to be a series about relating politely to cats (and it would probably apply to some other animals as well, though I know cats better than I know any other type because I live with 4 of them.)
If you do make more, I really would like to see them.
Answer:
Some autistic people feel emotions. However, there are also some autistic people who don’t feel emotions. My autistic dad and I feel emotions. My autistic brother and my autistic husband don’t feel emotions (they have told me this themselves).
It is not a bullshit stereotype. What is a bullshit stereotype is assuming that all people who can’t feel emotions are sociopaths, rapists, and basically evil, horrible people. My brother and my husband don’t feel emotions and they have no empathy at all. However, they are not sociopaths, and they are not evil people. They are wonderful people who have been nicer to me and more caring towards me than the emotional empaths in my life have been. If I have a problem and want someone to talk to about it, I’d go to my husband or my brother for help, most definitely.
#autismY’know, it’s not just school nurses overstepping who misdiagnose ASD. I was diagnosed after a real evaluation, and by actual psych professionals. First Asperger Syndrome, then later switched to PDD-NOS, because I didn’t really have Asperger’s, since I…
Nope, I don’t think autism is gets diagnosed by school nurses. I’ve been through the system. It’s referring to a study referred to in the posted link, which asked parents “Has your child ever been diagnosed with autism?” and “Does your child have autism now?” which has the obvious failure of parents confusing ‘the nurse said we should get my kid evaluated for autism’ (Which does happen) with ‘the nurse said my kid has autism’.
And if you look at some statistics from the California school districts, the overall rate of learning disabilities diagnoses has fallen in the last eight years, while within those diagnosed with learning disabilities, autism takes up a higher percentage. Which leads to either the conclusion that all the other disabilities are decreasing dramatically, while autism is growing, or that autism diagnoses are ‘swallowing’ others, i.e. a kid who would have been diagnosed with nonverbal learning disorder in 2004 would be diagnosed with autism today. The confirmation bias of ‘autism is fairly common, so it’s quick to be leapt to’ is much more plausible than multiple sudden unexplained changes in frequency.
Or, another option - perhaps autism is more understood now than it was 8, 10, 15, 20, etc. years ago and we currently have a slightly more accurate criteria in which to diagnose? Because that’s the option I’m going with. Doing away with diagnoses and changing the criteria isn’t going to do anything but leave a reasonable percentage of people who need services out in the cold. As if we don’t already get the shaft now.
As I pointed out, it won’t leave people “out in the cold”. They won’t have “autism”, but there are a lot of learning disabilities that they will fit in. Umbrella conditions aren’t great for providing services, which I think we can agree is the point of diagnosis. When you can have two people, with the same diagnosis, who need vastly different services, you don’t have a precise diagnosis. Whether precision is a good thing or not is a matter of philosophy. I think it is (an ideal, but unlikely system that I’d like to see would be to eliminate ‘disorders’ as a set of symptoms and focus on diagnosing and accommodating or treating precise challenges people face), but a lot of people see benefit, particularly in terms of awareness, to having an umbrella diagnosis.
I’ve always secretly wished they’d come up with lots of different subtypes for autism. The fact that people can say “if you’ve met one person with autism, you’ve met one person with autism, everyone with autism is different” surely means that the diagnosis is far too broad. With other diagnoses, things seem to be so much clearer. Like with social anxiety disorder or ocd, people can have different symptoms and expressions of the disorder, but underneath it all, everyone with it generally experiences the same kind of problems, sensations and patterns of thought.
With autism, you get people with empathy, people with no empathy at all, people who struggle with talking and people who talk too much, people who can understand sarcasm and people who don’t have a clue, people who feel too much anxiety everyday and people who never feel anxiety. Both my husband and I have autism, yet we both have different issues, different things we need help with, and have different ways of coping with things. Just as an example, I need to have very meticulous plans to follow each day or I get mega stressed out. Making, remembering and carrying plans out really helps to make me feel in control and calm. My husband gets mega stressed out when having to follow a plan because he has issues with making plans, remembering sequences of instructions and following sequences of instructions.
Although we both fit the diagnoses of autism, I am very sure that my husband and I’s autism are of different types, have different brain/chemical/genetic causes, and require different methods of help.
Conventional wisdom has taught me that if I have to ask that question, the answer is “Probably, yes” but I have something I just need to put out there.
To catch some of you up: My youngest son is six, he has moderate to high functioning autism and speech delay. He’s a little ray of human sunshine…
Since he’s just six at the moment, I do think that him being able to put on his own shoes is probably far more important than what he looks like. Do kids at that age know or care what dorky is unless their parents point it out to them?
If his shoe laces come undone in school, or if he needs to take them off for a gym class or something, wouldn’t he seem more dorky if he needs to ask for help to do them up again, rather than if he can just velcro his own shoes, thus not drawing attention to himself?
Surely there are lots of cute shoes you could get with velcro on them? I’m sure I’ve seen velcro shoes with characters on them, or ones that even light up when you walk, which would surely shout cool to any other six year old seeing them?
(Source: creativeconflagration)
I watched it today. Honestly, it made me more than a little mad.
I am not autistic. I have been lucky to know several autistic people though. And going on what I know about autism, the film’s portrayal of it seems so… stereotyped.
In fairness, I liked a lot of things about the movie. I like…
The film is meant to have been based on the lives of two real people, Jerry and Mary Newport. Jerry really is a savant in real life. However, I do have to agree that it is extremely annoying that nearly every autistic person you see in a film is a savant.
When I saw the film, I was really disappointed. It was the first time I’d seen a female aspie portrayed in a film and I thought I’d finally get to see someone like me. Instead, I saw someone that I didn’t understand, didn’t relate to at all and just found to be very annoying.
I definitely preferred Mozart and the Whale to The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time. That really was stereotypical, as well as just so badly written that I had to give up on it a quarter of the way through the book. Everything in it was “and this… and that… and then this and then that and and and and and…”. It was probably the worst book I have ever tried to read and I seriously cannot understand why it’s so popular, or even liked.
Anyone can use the word allistic, although I personally dislike the word. I’ve only ever seen it used by autistic people as a way to insult non-autistic people. Therefore, I see it mostly as just a derogative term for non-autistic people.
(Source: saidredmolly)
uuuh this has been bothering me for a while wow um i cant believe im getting this of my chest the thing is just like transexuals feel they were born the wrong gender i feel like i was born the wrong mental state as a non autistic person
i have taken many online tests and i always score…
I don’t think you necessarily need an operation to get at least a taste of what an autistic person’s life might be like. I suppose if you want to live an autistic type of life that mimics mine, you could:
- get rid of all your friends and never make any more friends
- Take something that causes you to feel extreme amounts of anxiety on a daily basis. I dunno, maybe mega amounts of caffeine. (Although I really DON’T think you should do this, as it would probably ruin your health/kill you).
- not leave your house more than once a week
- not talk to anyone irl ever again unless you’re closely related to them
- play music at an unbearably loud level, at the same time as having the tv on at an unbearably loud level
- burn 20 different types of incense of different scents all at the same time and sit with them in a poorly ventilated room until you feel sick
- have lots of strobe lights, flashing lights, moving pictures etc all playing at once so that again you start to feel disoriented and sick
Are you really sure that’s the kind of life that you want to experience, day in and day out for the rest of your life?
I think you’re probably just not very happy with your life for whatever reason, and have a romanticised view of autism which makes you think that an autistic life would make you feel better and happier. Or maybe you feel lonely and you’re just looking for a group where you can belong. Maybe you need to work out why you’re not happy just being you, why you feel a need to have a label, and why you feel a need to belong to a group.
(Source: jeff-byrequestonly)
Because I want to still want to talk to them and I just don’t. People just lose their appeal easily for me. They’re not as interesting as fact books and shit. And I feel terrible about it. She did nothing wrong. Why are my feelings fading already? I hate this shit.
Shit. Just when I start dating someone I start second-guessing everything.
I hate relationships.
I suuuuuck :/
Maybe you just haven’t found the right person yet? One of the things that made me know my husband was ‘the one’ was the fact that I stayed interested in him for so long, and I still find him interesting to this day. Everyone else I’d met in my life got seriously uninteresting extremely quickly.
(Source: writingrhythmandretail)
