neurowonderful

Disabled Beauty Portrait for Myth

Timelapse:

They’re here! Because you demanded it, and because I love you – more neurodivergent/Autistic Valentine’s Day cards! Please feel free to use and share these as you will. Just do remember to give me credit, please <3

[Image description: A series of six Valentine’s Day cards featuring bright watercolor backgrounds with complimentary coloured bars containing white text. The cards read:

Your stims are stupendous; your happy makes me happy

I would talk on the phone for you; please don’t make me

You’re on my red list; let’s get out of here

I want to know everything about you; do you mind if I take notes?

I want to spend time in parallel existence with you; let’s be alone together

Your echolalia is enchanting; let’s back and forth

End image description.]

Created using these papers. 

There are no upsides to denying or minimizing someone’s pain, except that it frees the person doing the minimizing from having to deal with it. Even if the child is “only doing it for attention”, worst case scenario they give their child attention. What’s so terrible about that? Because the alternative is that they are teaching their child not to value and trust their own experience, and that is immensely damaging. It can mean the child might not recognize when they’re being emotionally abused. It can lead to mental health issues, burnout, and many other problems.

Somewhere I read that a symptom of autism/ ASD is a tendency to feel victimized. Feel. And I couldn’t get that out of my head because there is a difference between saying that and saying “a tendency to be” victimized. Saying “feel” carries the implication that the victimization is in one’s head. 

There’s probably a reason people with ASD feel victimized:

1. Autistic children are more likely to be bullied. 

2. Autistic children are more likely to be abused.

3. Autistic children are more likely to experience sexual abuse and the abuse is less likely to be recognized because symptoms of being abused are often misinterpreted as “normal” autistic behavior. 

4. Autistics are more likely to be sexually assaulted because they are often taught compliance from a young age in therapies like ABA.

[Edit with more links on this topic]: Info On Autism & Sexual Assault Personal Essay On Why Autistics Are Vulnerable ABA Teaches Compliance Not Consent

5. Autistics are more likely to be unemployed.

6. Employers discriminate against autism, autistics are more likely to be bullied by their coworkers, and many autistics lose their jobs because of it.

7. Schools find loopholes to discriminate against autistic children. 

8. Autistiscs have a higher risk of experiencing police brutality. 

9. Autistics are being murdered by their own caregivers, and the murderer is often given a lighter sentence because the victim was viewed as a burden.

10. Autistics suffer because they are not given effective medical care.

You are a young child, and in this universe, the large majority of people communicate by writing words on paper. Unfortunately for you, your natural method of communication is by speaking.

When you speak, no one seems to understand what you are saying. They seem confused, embarrassed, and even angry when sounds come out of your mouth. Your mother publically laments your inability to communicate like the majority. The older you get, the more obvious your difference in communication becomes.

People begin to shush you, place their fingers over your mouth, or even duct-tape your mouth shut when you speak. When you enter kindergarten you spend entire school days being taught how not to laugh, exclaim in delight, speak your teacher’s name to get their attention or blurt out answers to questions vocally.

Your parents and therapists spend hours and hours pushing a pen into your hand and forcing your hand to the paper, withholding praise and affection until you do. But while writing comes so easily and quickly to everyone else, you find it nearly impossible on your best days, and an insurmountable challenge on your worst.

Along with a different natural method of communication, you have a motor disorder that affects your ability to hold a pen and write. While other children your age are scrawling out long lines of chatty dialogue, blowing through page after page of paper, it takes you six months just to eke out the letters of your name.

But you try, and you work at it— as if you have any other option. You learn to stay quiet, to not laugh or sob aloud, to put pen to paper instead of expressing yourself with your vocal cords. You find a system that works for you and your motor disorder, and although it takes longer, you find that you can communicate by carrying around index cards and using one card per word.

This means that you are constantly carrying around a backpack weighed down with packs and packs of index cards, which tires you out. Sometimes you drop your cards or lose a few, and often people will get impatient watching you lay out your lines of words to make sentences and walk away before you can answer their question. For no reason that you can understand, people can get offended if they can tell that you’re re-using your cards. There are still some days where forming letters is too difficult, or the wrong words come out.

But by the time you’re a teenager you’ve done it— you can, in your parents’ words, “speak properly”, and your parents are thrilled. Never mind that, out of ease, you often reuse the same cards over and over, even if those words don’t exactly apply. Never mind that you’ll answer “no” because it’s easier to write than “yes,” or that you’ll avoid answering at all because pulling out your index cards is such a pain.

Never mind that other people’s pens move so fast across their notebooks and their words are printed so small and close together that you struggle to understand half of what anyone says to you. You can print at all, and that’s enough.

You don’t know that there are other ways. You don’t know that some people like you speak by typing onto a tablet until one day you see the technology, featured on a sappy news story about a young non-writing child, a child like you once were.

The realization stuns you. No more fumbling with index cards, watching in despair as they catch in the wind and scatter while people look on in pity or (worst of all) laugh! No more forcing your hand to squeeze each and every hard-won letter out of a pen! With that technology, you could have entire conversations, order your own meal, ace a job interview!

carmen papalia:

From the series on replacing his cane, this is one where he replaced his cane with a megaphone and would stand at intersections repeating “I can’t see” until somebody would stop and help him cross the street

Another cane replacement, this time replacing it with a high school marching band who would change the music depending on if there was something in the way or not.

A museum intervention where he got people at the MET to go through the museum with their eyes closed and experiencing touching things he’d gotten permission to touch (the floor in this image) and just exploring a visual art museum blind.

The Blind Field Shuffle, in which he has dozens of people form a conga line behind him with their eyes closed and leads them on a blind tour of the city - literally the blind leading the blind.

Wish I could find a better photo, but this is a museum gallery he curated where the works are almost at floor height, making them accessible to children, little people, and people in wheelchairs, but requiring abled people to bend down or sit on the floor in order to see them properly.

1. constructive criticism is a criticism that clearly points out something you feel can be improved upon in a piece while, preferably, offering suggestions for how to improve said thing.

2. constructive criticism is not always appropriate or wanted. here’s when constructive criticism is appropriate:

a creator requests criticism

you are with a creator in a setting specifically designed for giving critiques like a workshop or lesson (this is really just an extension of the point above)

a creator is causing harm to others, like creating racist art, exploiting people, or endorsing dangerous behavior, and needs to be called out

you are discussing a piece of art released for wider public consumption (ie not a piece someone made for fun or for their friends) somewhere independent of the creator (ex: sharing a movie review on a blog and not in the creator’s inbox)

3. creators are people and not content machines working ‘round the clock. they do not always want to discuss their work nor is their work their sole designing factor. it’s weird and presumptuous to assume they are open to criticism from strangers at any given time.