World Autism Awareness Day 2018

[Plotinus]

I'm autistic too! I've been reading a lot of fiction with autistic characters lately, stuff that I really wish existed when I was a kid, but didn't. I don't know what kind of stories you like but there's a ton of recomendations here.

Of those, I particularly liked:

Inappropriate Behaviour

Iron Aria

Iwunen Interstellar Investigations

The scrape of tooth and bone

You have to follow the rules

What are your interests? What kinds of things do you really like to do and lose yourself in doing? I like trees and hyperbolic geometry and perfect squares and sierpinsky triangles.

Talking is really hard! I've been working on my speech some this year but my speech still isn't very reliable and writing is much easier and less stressful. The words stay put and they don't get lost when they're written down. I've had some successes in the past year with using AAC in public but I'm too shy to use it most of the time.

[Plotinus]

The line between autistic and add is pretty blurry, there's a lot of overlap. you could totally have both.

the eidetic memory thing is more common in hollywood than outside of it. Some of us do have really good memories but it's not an important trait. It's more of a harmful stereotype from movies like Rainman and tv shows like Sherlock. In Barriers and Supports to Autistic success, Sparrow talks some about how autistics are portrayed in the media.

If your therapist is still calling it Asperger's though, she might not be qualified to diagnose it. The distinction between aspergers and autism is basically whether you could speak at 3-4 or not. The reason aspergers was removed from the DSM was that there's no predictive value in whether a person can speak in early childhood or not, you don't know whether they'll be able to speak as an adult -- many who could speak regress at puberty, many learn to speak later on. It doesn't predict the kind of supports you'll need later in life or how successful you'll be. There are different kinds of autism but the kinds don't match the diagnostic labels very well and therapists recognised it and removed it from the DSM. It's still in the ICD-10, but that's not used in your country and I wouldn't be surprised if it were removed from the ICD-11. So you might want to talk to your therapist about how recent her knowledge about autism is and what kinds of sources she uses.

If you're autistic, you might not be the Sherlock Holmes type. Maybe you're the Luna Lovegood type or some other type.

I did used to have an almost eidetic memory but I don't anymore, I lost it in an illness last year.

[Plotinus]

@vijarada: Intensity, I think. It's good to have things you're passionate about but I think it's rare outside of autism/add to have things you can get completely absorbed in 16 hours a day 7 days a week. When I'm really gripped by a special interest I don't have the attention span to think about anything else. I got obsessed with a certain language about a decade ago and I went from 0 to reading harry potter in 2 months because from day 1 I was spending 16 hours a day practicing my cyrillic handwriting and copying out texts as I read them and listening to nothing but music in that language and thinking exclusively in that language. I think most people just don't have the attention span for something like that, even if you're passionate about something, even if you really care about i dunno Tori Amos, you have portions of your life that aren't Tori Amos being asked to take a break from Tori Amos wouldn't feel like taking a break from breathing.

Also sometimes the topic. Like a lot of people are really passionate about football or music [in general] or a fan of something in particular but it's rarer outside of the autism community to be passionate about sidewalk quality in your city, to be able to hear any street name in your city and know which side of the street has a higher quality sidewalk. But less stereotypically sometimes we do have interests that aren't in the "memorise tons of obscure facts about the thing" category like I'm really obssessed with trees but by sight I can identify only some common ones: yew, weeping willow, maple, oak, spruce, pine, maybe a few others, my tree obsession is a nonverbal thing but trees are just really captivating for me and I store a lot of metaphorical meaning in them and looking at trees reminds me of things that I have trouble remembering on my own but it's hard to talk about. I have a deep and personal connection with trees but it's not something I can really share with other people very easily. If I'm taking pictures outside, I'm mostly taking pictures of trees, but if I tried to show them to people I think people would lose interest after a picture or two. I'd be like the lady who wants to show you 20 pictures of her grandkids when she buys a train ticket.

When I was a teenager, I was trying to talk to an autistic guy and we both had a special interest in computers but mine was in computer programming and his was in computer parts and we just couldn't find any common ground at all. He asked me what kind of motherboard I had and I was embarrassed that I didn't know it off the top of my head and he spent like 10 minutes talking about different kinds of motherboards and I just couldn't pay attention to any of it. I was able to install RAM and stuff on my own but what kind of motherboard i have is information that I look up before going to a store and then write down and forget about it immediately. And similarly I couldn't hold his interest with talking about BASIC (I'm dating myself here lol); our interests were too narrow and neither of us had any interest in what the other person was saying.

Some of us have special interests that can be turned into careers and it can be a real source of strength; we're able to focus passionately on things that other people would get burned out.

One of my main interests right now is hyperbolic geometry and I'm trying to find a way to talk about it to people who are afraid of math, because I want to be able to talk about how cool it is in a way that other people don't find intimidating. "But what is it good for? What is the use of it?" someone asks of the purple...object... I'm creating and I could talk about how you can have two intersecting lines on its surface and a third line that is parallel to both of them or I could talk about how you could draw a triangle on it ... a regular one with straight edges and no tricks ... and the sum of the interior angles would be less than 180° or I could talk about how János Bolyai discovered hyperbolic geometry in the 19th century and his father warned him that this math obsession could be as much a vice as being obsessed with women and how it was considered to be completely useless and purely theoretical until a woman came around in the 70s and pointed out hyperbolic surfaces do too exist in nature, in coral and in textiles, that it's actually very easy to recreate this purely theoretically hyperbolic surface with a bit of string, that this "impossible to imagine shape" that her professor was rambling about was actually just a gusset such as everyone in the room has on their clothes. I could talk about differentiability and essential singularities in three dimensions by showing with a pen how the slope of a surface varies at each point depending on which angle you're approaching it from. But none of that answers the question asked. I don't know how to answer "what is this purple unidentifiable object good for". But it's important to me and I care a lot about it.


I guess that's one difference between our interests and the not-being-boring interests of other people -- neurotypical people find our interests boring or hard to understand or don't get why we care so much about the things that we care about and they write opinion pieces about how autism means that we can't tell what's important or not so that's why we care so much about unimportant things and don't care about important things.

[Plotinus]

@Plotinus: I really like to play darts and play games. I'm switching my games very often, usually I don't stick to one particular game for more than two weeks. Right now, I'm playing Drawception and it's very cool. I'm also extremely good at maths. My score right now is 9,92/10 and I'm nearing the end of high school and this hardly ever happens.

I used to play Drawception! That was fun, I should get back into it. That's cool that you're good at maths. What's your favourite kind of maths? When I was in school I liked algebra and calculus best and I didn't understand geometry or logarithms at all, and trig was hard for me too, but then later in life it finally made sense. I like combinatorics too, and mental maths. What kinds of maths careers are you looking at?

@Plotinus 2: I don't know about how therapists that don't know enough about autism can even become therapists, but it's of course a good thing to ask. Probably the parents of the child would need to do that (if you're a child ofc, don't ask your parents if you're in your forties).

A lot more is known about autism now than was known in the 80s and 90s or even ten years ago so a therapist who got her degree some time ago might not have kept up to date with the new findings. Also, most therapists usually specialise and learn a lot about a certain topic, so a therapist who is really good at marriage counselling might not know very much about eating disorders or a therapist who mainly deals with depression might not know much about autism. They might be really good at what they do and then pretty decent about a range of other topics and then might not realise how much has changed in an area they haven't had a lot of experience with. Her therapist might need to do some more reading and research to update her knowledge.

The same thing can help to doctors and general practitioners -- there's a lot of medical research being done and by the time a doctor gets old, maybe half of what he's learnt at school is outdated, proven wrong by new studies. For example when my grandmother was pregnant, her doctor advised her to start smoking to calm her nerves, even though back then some doctors did know better already, her doctor wasn't up to date. Doctors and therapists have to do a lot of continued education and research to keep up with all of the changes and new findings, but even a good doctor might not realise they need to do that in a particular area until they get a patient with a certain condition.

[Plotinus]

Probability is fun and economics will pay well too I think. Congrats on the tournament!

Do you know about Art of Problem Solving? They have some fun probability problems to work out, I went through them some years ago. If you have an android phone, there's a game called Probability Puzzles that has three different groups of puzzles, from pretty easy stuff like the birthday paradox to

Spoiler: medium problems like this one

"You're again confronted by a coin-filled jar. There are ten coins this time: one has two heads, the other nien are normal. All are equally likely to come up on either side when tossed. Someone picks a coin uniformly at random from the jar and tosses it three times. If it comes up heads on all three tosses, what's the probability you're dealing with the double-headed coin?"

and

Spoiler: hard problems like this one

"Five foxes and seven hounds run into a foxhole. When they're inside, they get all jumbled up, so that all orderings are equally likely. The foxes and hounds run out of the hole in a neat line. On average, how many foxes are immediately followed by a hound?"

(don't tell me the answers to those if you work them out, I'm meaning to solve them myself and just haven't got round to it. I just wanted to recommend the app because it's pretty fun)

[Plotinus]

The app is free in google play (no adds either) and it has over 80 different problems. they're pretty fun.

[Plotinus]

Autistic blogs I follow:

Updated in April:
Real Social Skills - about disability in general but by an autistic writer and often talking about autism specifically
Liminal Nest - autism and chronic illness
Child Myths - this one isn't actually about autism except tangentially, it's by a psychologist and speaking out against attachment therapy, which is a therapy i was subjected to as a child, as a fair number of autistic people are.
autisticook
inner aspie - a blog by an autistic mother who has two autistic children.

Updated in March:
Rose Lemberg - is an autistic author and their blog links to stories they write, often featuring autistic characters. I really love their birdverse stuff.
Thinking Person's Guide to Autism - a group blog with stories by autistic people and also by parents of autistic children.
Unstrange Mind - an autistic guy who lives in a van
Ballastexistenz - an autistic adult with multiple disabilities. sie hasn't been writing as much lately and I miss hir. I've been following hir blog since 2004.
Respectfully Connected

People who haven't written in a while but their blogs are still up:
Radical Neurodivergence speaking
Iwonen Interstellar Investigations - a serial fiction story with a whole planet of autistic people in an autistic society and magic and trans stuff and it's so great
Gareeth - everytime they post I think oh thank god they're still alive. Their last post is in January.
Yes, that too
Emma's hope book - this started out as a mommy blog, you can see the early entries from when she was a little kid and her mother didn't know what to do and it was all doom and gloom and then as her mother got to know more autistic people, the tone changes and it gets better and then finally when Emma was a teenager she learns to type and now she writes the blog all by herself.

We are like your child -a lot of times, parents of autistic children point at autistic adults and say that we're not like their child because we are capable of using the internet but their 3 year old is not capable of using the internet. This is a group project with essays about yes we are like your child we're just not three anymore.

Just Stimming

NeuroQueer - i want to like neuroqueer but so much of it is written in a way that I find very hard to understand -- using a lot of academic language or a lot of complex sentence structures. Very few of the entries are cognitively accessible to me, but I like the ones I can understand.

The Third Glance

Musings of an Aspie


Did you know that it's possible to have a special interest in autism?

[Plotinus]

you know about yourself though. you know more about what it's like to be you than anybody else does.

[Plotinus]

welcome back! I've seen you around in song contest mostly.

Adolescence is hard, it's a wonder any of us survived it to become adults. I hope things get better for you. you are right that a lot of people on online forums have gone through these kinds of things and can understand what you're going through.