#object communication

Orange is the color of Autism Acceptance Month. Because it’s the opposite of blue, and blue is the color that everyone is told to wear for Autism Awareness Month. Which kind of sucks because my favorite colors, and nearly all of my clothes, are brown and blue. And I used to really hate orange. Sometimes I hate the term Autism Acceptance, too — I like the idea behind it, but I don’t like the way the term has become a meaningless buzzword in some people’s mouths. Whether it’s parent groups who throw the word ‘autism acceptance’ around to sound current but don’t actually accept the slightest thing about their autistic children, or whether it’s autistic people who’ve fallen in love with the words and forgotten the meaning. Either way, I like it as a concept but not as a buzzword.

Anyway, I hated orange.

I had a meeting to go to.  It was an important meeting.  Things would be decided there that could set my life on a completely different course.  My anxiety was through the roof, and therefore so was my catatonia.  I could not type unassisted and I could only move in certain very specific ways without a good deal of assistance.  Luckily, I had two friends with me, two good friends, to provide that assistance.  But this isn’t about that.

This is about the pattern blocks.  I used to carry old wooden blue pattern blocks in my pocket.  They’re the diamond-shaped ones.  I’d hold them, click them together, they were perfect.  I’d had them since childhood, and they were absolutely wonderful.

Throughout the meeting, I kept handing my friends the pattern blocks.  It wasn’t just handing them over casually.  There was a sense of urgency to it.  They picked up on the urgency, but they couldn’t make head or tail of what I was trying to say to them.  

At which point they said possibly the most important thing you can say to a person who is nonverbal, has hard-to-understand speech, or otherwise having trouble getting across what they mean.

They said “I’m sorry, I know that whatever you are trying to say is important, but I can’t figure out what you mean, for the life of me.”

Even if I could have typed perfectly and quickly without laborious effort and having my arm held up at the time, I would not have been able to give them an answer.  Because the thing I was trying to communicate, is not an easy thing to put into words.

Sometimes it takes me years to put something into words.  Please note that the incident in question happened in December of 2005.  It is now September of 2014.  That means it’s been almost ten years, and this is the first chance that I’ve been able to communicate what I meant by something back then.

Please remember that, when you tell me that if I wanted to, I could make words out of my thoughts.  Please remember that, when you tell me to hurry up and communicate something.  Please remember that, when you tell me that I’m lying when I say I can’t condense my long posts into short posts without a good deal of effort, and often not even then.  Please remember that, in other words, any time you’re tempted to doubt that I have a severe communication impairment.  Being eloquent in words in some contexts does not remove severe communication impairments in other contexts, it only masks them.  And it only masks them for people who are inclined to believe that communication is a single skill that you’re either good at or bad at, rather than the convergence of dozens of skills that any given person can be good at or bad at individually, and whose skills can change day to day, hour to hour, year to year.

So here is what I meant:

I am here.  I am alive.  I am giving this to you because it is a part of me.  I want you to have a part of me with you because I exist and I am alive.  And you exist and you are alive.  And if you hold onto a piece of me, maybe we can make it through this.  I have held it certain ways, clicked it on certain surfaces, to show you its physical properties and how they interact with my own physical, emotional, and cognitive properties.  

I know that you are unlikely to be able to take all of that in.  I know that you are both ACs, but you’re not like me in certain ways, and my communication through objects is not intuitive to you the way it would be to certain people.  Hell, if I handed this to you in another context it could mean a totally different thing, and you wouldn’t know, and I get that.  But for now, I need a powerful acknowledgement of my existence.  I need to burn so bright during this meeting that they won’t be able to ignore me.  I am scared.  I am scared and I am asking for your help.  I am asking to be distributed among more than one person, so that together I can be more than I am as one person.  And I am asking you to see your connection to me, to see me, to see me at my core, where the fire burns, where our fires can burn together.  

I am asking you to see who I am, reflected in the way I handle this pattern block, and the way I hand it to you.  I am asking you to see me.  I am asking you to shield me when I need to be shielded.  I am asking you to help me find words when the words are not there for me.  I am asking you to help me when I need help.  I am scared, I am asking for your protection should anything go wrong.  I am asking for you to stand in front of me should anyone start attacking me verbally or otherwise.  I am asking you to tell them what I am thinking, when I am unable to do so myself. I am asking you to elaborate on the very short answers I can give by typing slowly with support while my body is trying to freeze up.

There are people who would have gotten every word of that, just from the way I handled the pattern blocks.  The people I was with that night, could not.  They could tell I meant something important.  But they couldn’t tell what I meant.  And fortunately, they didn’t pretend to know what I meant.  People who pretend to know what I meant make communication impossible.  My friends were honest with me, and while they didn’t know what I meant, they helped me communicate and advocate for myself perfectly.

But now I can say what I meant.  So that’s what I meant.  And that’s how much information can be carried in a single set of seemingly simple motions with a pattern block, or a rock, or a stick.  It’s good to get to know what meaning an object has to the person, because that can factor in.  But it doesn’t always.  Sometimes an object has a specific meaning, sometimes that exact same object is a stand-in for something broader.  Everything depends on context.  And if you can’t understand, that’s fine.  Not everyone can understand this stuff any more than everyone can understand speech or language.  People more likely to understand are people who for any reason at all have been forced to use highly nonstandard ways to communicate at some point in their lives.  The longer they’ve had to, the more likely they’ll get it.

So there.  That’s what I meant nearly ten years ago.  Please don’t tell me how easy I find communication.  I may be good at it once I get there, but getting there is a long, tortuous journey sometimes.

I just did a poem that involved some of it.  Two people placing rocks in certain locations.  Each rock contains embedded within it all sorts of information about the rock and other things about the world as well.  Each person places the rock where it goes best with the other rocks.  The rocks form a pattern that is bigger than the sum of its parts, and contains elements of the rocks and the people who made it.  Some people will be able to see that, other people will just see rocks, other people will see something in between.

http://youneedacat.tumblr.com/post/96421049215/for-my-friend

[This is a reply to a private message.  As such, some information is being left out to preserve anonymity.  The subject is the difference between the way I relate to, say, my dad-shirts, and the way many people become ‘owned’ by objects in a negative sense, where the amount of possessions they have controls their life and makes them unhappy, regardless of whether it’s a few or a lot.  I’d suspect it’s the nature of the attachment, not the number of possessions, that causes that problem.  Anyway, on to the post.]

The physical world is my mind, in some ways.  I don’t hold complex thoughts in my head very well.  They start slipping out of my head, or slipping out of sight, or messing up my ability to think and perceive other things that are more important.  So I have always said, let the world be the world.  The world can hold all the complexity it needs.  I don’t need to hold it all in my head for it.  It’s still going to be there whether I’m thinking about it or not.

But the difficulty holding all these thoughts and feelings in my head on a conscious level, means that I often use objects to represent those different things.  Especially useful are objects that are saturated with meaning.  If I only had the words to describe all the things I can perceive in it, I could go on all day about my mother’s alpaca-wool poncho she recently sent me.  It contains many memories from before the age of four years old, it involves my mother, it involves love, it involves a lot of important things.  It’s as much a mom-poncho as the shirts they sent are dad-shirts.

And yes — this way of relating to objects is very different from being owned by objects.  It also may help that I see objects as having their own life.  So I don’t try to shackle their life to me.  I don’t try to make them into extensions of me, or to tie myself to them in ways that create discomfort for me and something akin to discomfort for the object in question.  My way of relating to objects is similar to my way of relating to people — and there, too, I find the wrong sort of attachment to be extremely destructive to both parties involved.

I do try to keep my possessions to a minimum for a large number of reasons.  But the possessions I do own, and do keep around, often have specific meanings to me.  And they hold those meanings outside of my head, so that I don’t have to hold the meanings inside my head.

I wanted to elaborate on this because of an ask I got that was actually a private message so I can’t reply to it as an ask.  I think this is an interesting topic, and I would love to go into it further, but I don’t really have the words.  I was hoping I could paint you a beautiful picture of how I relate to objects and what it does and doesn’t mean to me.  Instead, I’ve managed to describe a couple things and that’s all.  Maybe I’ll be able to come back to it later.  

Also, to relate to an object in this way, it doesn’t have to be ‘mine’.  It can be an object that only belongs to itself, or that belongs to someone else, but I can still relate to it as a friend, sort of.  My friend Anne has a house that I have a strong relationship with even though I have never set foot in it.  The house has a specific personality and it has shown interest in me — or at least that is how I would describe such things, not knowing any better way to do it.  

(I’m not unaware of what ‘inanimate’ means.  People tend to think I just need it explained, verrry slowwwwly.  But that’s not the issue, the issue is a major difference in worldview.  This is not about ‘retaining childhood anthropomorphic characteristics’ nor is it about ‘primitive belief systems like animism’ — both of those are very condescending at best, and definitely inaccurate.  I don’t see objects as being human-like, I just see them as having a life that is very uniquely their own, nothing else has a shape quite like it, and decidedly not human.)

And I think that it’s very possible to form relationships with objects without becoming owned by objects in a negative way.  I understand why some people would want to avoid relationships with objects altogether, too.  I just happen to relate to objects on so many levels — mental, emotional, and spiritual — that they’re a very important part of my life.  But they never own me.  And aside from legally, I try not to own them.  It’s important to me that they be what they are meant to be, not what I want them to be.

Another thing objects have been huge for me with is communication.  If I have arranged objects around me in a certain way, then it means something, usually, and something that some people are able to pick up on and others are not.  Some autistic people also arrange ideas around themselves in the same manner.  But for me it's mostly objects.  If I want to add in an idea, I find a book about that idea and add it to the object collection.  I used to call it my 'connection collection' and was amazed when the very first person ever followed it and found me at the center -- the message of the objects was "Here I am.  Over here.  Right over here.  Please see me?"  I've talked to other autistic people who did the same things, with varying degrees of success.

Many autistic people relate to objects in a way that is similar to the way I do, for what it’s worth.  And many autistic people go “WTF?” when I try to explain it to them.  So it’s one of those things, as so many things in autistic people, that can go both ways.  But I definitely get the sense that this pattern of relating to objects is far more common in autistic people than nonautistic people.  It’s been described in the literature since the very beginning, for one thing, although they often get it wrong.  (They see our “attachment to objects” as “attachment” to something cold and hard and unloving, when actually our “attachment to objects” tends to be full of the same warmth and love that people experience in friendships.  As usual, they find a way to make the presence of something sound like the absence of something, because it’s easier to pathologize us that way.)

Anyway, for me an object contains so much detailed information that nothing quite is the same as an object.  An object can be felt, smelled, looked at, tasted, and tapped on to listen to. In a purely sensory way, objects are complex.  If you start looking at the patterns between what you see in a sensory or pre-sensory way, you start getting more and more complexity.  But you don't need to hold the complexity in your head, because it's all there in the object.  So each object has its own life, its own personality, its own meaning, and that can be very important to some people.