Who does she think she’s fooling? Not me. I used to share her dirty little secret, so I know her. She acts like she’s better than most or all other autistic people because her autistic obsessions are compassionate (like helping the poor) or about social stuff. She’s bought into that retarded theory that you have to be and/or act non-autistic, or else you’re inferior. What she really wants is to be seen as a competent and compassionate human being, and she thinks that the only way she can accomplish that is by acting or being or seeming non-autistic. I don’t even know if she knows that autistics as a group are just as compassionate and competent as non-autistics. Yes, sometimes in different ways, or at different times, or whatever. And sometimes we’re not even different in that way at all.
Her name is Nadia. Then there’s the other pathetic poser, Carroll. The only one he’s fooling is himself. He fools himself into thinking he’s fooling everyone else into thinking that he’s normal, and therefore supposedly compassionate and competent. He pretends to be normal. He works very hard for that welfare check he gets for being autistic. He works hard trying to be or pretend to be normal. He tells sex jokes he doesn’t feel in his heart are really funny at all, and pretends to laugh. He doesn’t get the jokes, but pretends he does. He overcompensates for his mistakes by deciding to do something he considers neurotypical… apologizing profusely, though he isn’t sorry and doesn’t feel the pain he caused. He isn’t himself. When is he going to wake up and realize life is short and that he’d better either find a way to REALLY empathize with the neurotypicals, or find someone who isn’t neurotypical?
Life is so, so short. My autistic sister died when she was sixteen. She was murdered by bullies who beat her up. She stumbled home and collapsed, and Dad found her dead when he got home from work. Dad blamed the murder on my sister, not on the bullies. He blamed her for being an easy target and not fitting in or even trying to fit in. He did her memory no justice whatsoever. My mom was similar, though different, and even worse. She wrote a book about it and its horrors, but in the book blamed my sister for her own death. My sister’s name was Risa. She was so looking forward to getting out of high school when she was supposed to graduate, and getting away from those assholes. And then, at eighteen, getting away from those two assholes at home… our parents.
She should have dropped out of high school. It would have saved her life.
Nadia and Carroll are heading down a similar path as my sister. While they, unlike Risa, try to conform, I don’t see them living long. They both do drugs. Nadia does it to fit in though she pretends it’s to help her cope (which is the answer you give for why you do drugs if you want to fit in with certain people). Carroll does it to cope with the stress, and sometimes does it to fit in too, though he doesn’t enjoy it at all.
My sister Risa was special, and in a good way. She always stood up for herself. She wore what she wanted, outlandish but admittedly creative outfits. She was like Lady Gaga, showing off her mind that was able to create all these creative outfits, rather than her body with actually nice-looking outfits on her. So even though she didn’t look nice, nobody could deny her creativity. Risa also said what she wanted, and it wasn’t just nonsense. She actually believed what she said, though she played devil’s advocate a lot. It was her way of trying to see all sides.
She never drank or did drugs, but she did something just as risky… going against the grain and being different. Then she was beaten up by bullies and left for dead.
I know a lot of unhappy autistics. It’s no coincidence; it’s discrimination. Alma became a forensic pathologist. She wanted to be a doctor, but she was told she would be no good with live people because she was autistic, and that she’d better work with dead people only, if she wanted to be a doctor at all. It turns out everyone was the loser here. Her compassion, which would have been well-spent on live people, was wasted on the dead… who deserve compassion, yes, but when the person you’re helping is dead there’s nobody there to feel it and appreciate it and give her the reward of gratitude. Someone less compassionate could have solved these mysteries of who killed the dead for the dead. She was compassionate. And she was autistic. And that’s totally normal.
Then there’s Alana, who wanted to join the military, but they found out she was autistic. Autistic people, believe it or not, as of about five years ago, have been excluded from the US military. She ended up joining a militia instead and getting in trouble with them and getting arrested. She had no outlet for that urge to show them who’s in charge, for control in her life after being bullied so long in high school and the control being in the hands of the bullies.
And of course Hershel. Hershel wanted to be a Holocaust historian and tour guide at Auschwitz. He was only happy when talking about Auschwitz… not because he thought what had happened was a light or good or happy or funny thing, but because he had finally found people with whom he identified. He had been picked on all his life for being Jewish and autistic. But other Jews and other groups who had been targeted by the Nazis saw him as having a game-of-life approach to the Holocaust, and he wasn’t allowed to become a tour guide even at a Holocaust museum due to his seeming lack of reverence. Hershel once more felt depressed.
All of THIS is a Holocaust. And it’s getting worse. Parents are actually killing their kids because they’re autistic. No other reason. They just don’t understand that raising any kind of child is going to be stressful for them since they’re just people who can’t handle anything. If it weren’t autism, they would have used another excuse to kill their kids. The authorities don’t understand that (among the many things about this issue that the authorities don’t understand) so they give them light sentences and then turn them loose to hurt more autistics. It’s a slap in the face to all autistics. It really is. It tells us that they don’t think that our lives matter at all.
Which is why I started the autistic homeless shelter. Now parents are dropping their troublesome kids off here every day, discarding them like garbage. They sometimes sneer right in our faces as they bring their kids into our office. They sometimes say, “Just you wait and see, you pathetic naïve idealistic autistic nutcases. You’ll see what it’s like to deal with people like… you.” And then they leave. Once one of them had to be escorted out in handcuffs by the police because she had a knife to her four-year-old son’s throat and was telling us that she was going to kill her son in front of us to teach us some sort of a lesson. Luckily when my colleague, Martin, pepper-sprayed her, she dropped the knife and ran. Predictably. That kind of person is usually the kind of person who is both selfish and incapable of handling stress. She didn’t get far before being arrested, but she got no sentence whatsoever… just court-ordered counseling. Pathetic.
Autistic adults and some lone children also come to our center. And lots of non-autistics, pretending to be autistic, or thinking they really are, come to us too. We argue over those ones… which ones to keep because they might actually be autistic, and which ones to send away. Martin argues that anyone who identifies as autistic is autistic. I’m not sure where I stand; it’s so confusing.
Our shelter is called, simply, The Autistic Shelter. There’s a section for grown men, a section for young boys, and a section for women and girls. They all eat together in two cafeterias… one for people who want to be noisy, and one for people who like quiet. There are also two dormitories for each of the three groups (men, boys and females): a “noisy” dormitory and a “quiet” dormitory. The noisy dorm is for people who like to talk all night. The quiet one is for people who want to read or sleep in a quiet room. People who snore or sleepwalk or sleep-talk but want quiet are normally put in the individual rooms that are also available, for the people who don’t fit into either the noisy dorm or the quiet dorm. But there are only ten individual rooms available, and they are reserved for the complex cases.
There’s a noisy common room and a quiet common room too. In the noisy room people talk, listen to music, watch TV and talk on the phone. In the quiet room people read, search for jobs or apartments on the computers, write, talk in low voices if at all, etc.
There are optional groups that people living at the shelter can attend: self-esteem and stress and anxiety and depression management groups, mental health issue support groups, abuse support groups, and groups for real education about autism and the encouragement of autistic pride. There’s even a summer camp.
There’s a psychologist on our staff to counsel residents individually when they request it or when they say yes if we ask if they need it.
Sounds like a wonderful place, right? Well, it is. But then why all the hatred? I have a nasty feeling that I’ll never understand the hatred in my lifetime.
Suffice it to say that keeping this place open is an uphill battle.
This shelter was the fourth project of the International Incident Instigation Initiative, the third having been the camp in the mountains of British Columbia and the second and first being projects to save people from electroconvulsive therapy at a facility in Montreal and to save people from a guy who wanted to shoot up that same facility.
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