Right now I’m stuck in a linux console until a bunch of upgrades take place. I can’t decipher these Wordpress dashboards when I’m in this text-based web browser. So I don’t dare try to moderate comments, because I think I’d probably get the wrong ones so we could all read about penis enlargement instead of the things we actually talk about here. My system’s fine, it’s just a pain in the butt to upgrade sometimes. Now I’ve got to go find the “publish” button in this wall of plaintext crud. Argh.
(Edited to add: If anyone can direct this woman and her daughter to resources to deal with the situation described in that post, it’d be really helpful. I’m passing it on because I don’t know about these things, at least not right now at 2:30 in the morning, but I’m guessing others do.)
I just pissed off Larry Arnold about “deleting” comments he made that I’d never actually seen. But I figured out the problem, they were in my spam filter. Problem solved. But I figured I should post this in case it happened to anyone else. (Edited to add: I just checked — I found a whole bunch more posts sitting around in my spam filter, and have de-spammed them as well. This is way clearly nothing personal, the thing is just acting up too much.)
Just to reiterate something I said recently before:
Be aware that my spam filters often mess up and throw things in the spam bin that are actually legitimate comments (this happens most often to Andrea Shettle for some reason, to the point where I search all spam for her name before deleting it). So you might want to keep a copy of your comment just in case.
I just searched on that person’s name in my spam filter, and found the comments.
Please note: If I’d deleted the comments, I wouldn’t have been able to find them in my spam filter. Deleted comments disappear entirely.
If I do delete a comment it’s either because:
1. It violates my comment policy. (Which isn’t about agreeing or disagreeing with me, as you can tell by what I let through. However, I don’t allow hurtful gossip, and I don’t allow attempts to derail self-advocacy efforts by saying people aren’t autistic, or aren’t the kind of autistic people who matter, or, by virtue of being autistic, are clueless.)
2. It contains private information.
3. I misclicked (the new Wordpress dashboard makes it really, really easy to do that — instead of having checkboxes where I can click next to the ones I want deleted, then the ones I want to keep, etc, and then click something at the bottom of the page, there are little links on each comment now for approve, spam, delete, etc., and if I click “delete” by mistake, it’s gone forever).
If there are things from awhile ago that seem to violate my policy, that’s because the policy wasn’t always there. If there are things from now that seem to violate my policy, it’s probably because I don’t always read through comments very thoroughly before approving them. (And that “don’t” should really be “can’t”, or else I’d never find the time to approve them all.)
As I said before, if you’re attached to a comment, keep another copy. And also, don’t assume the worst if something doesn’t appear. I just got through a month’s worth of backlogged approving comments elsewhere, and a lot of them were people posting the same thing over and over and then sometimes going “You didn’t post my comment, that must be because __________”. No, seriously, I just didn’t get to it until now.
I’ve got 3172 comments in my spam filter right now. If some of them are yours, I’m truly sorry about the problems. I just don’t know a better way to handle the enormous volume of comment spam I get. Please keep copies of any comments you’re particularly attached to, and email me (my blog address with an @ after the first word instead of a dot) if they’re not getting through. I’ll try to find them in the spam filter through a search.
I do clear the spam filter from time to time though, and then there’s no going back unless someone posts the comment again.
Please also be aware I’m not in a position to answer all my emails, do everything I’m supposed to be doing, etc. I’m behind on that already. I’ve got a lot of stuff going on in real life right now. I’m not doing a tenth of what I should be, and I haven’t been as political as I’ve wanted to be lately. But I’m doing what I can, and I tend to assume that I’m not the only advocate out there and that other people are doing things when I can’t be doing them. Frankly I think I need to hang out in more political discussions than I have been lately, because I find that often it’s the environment that allows me to do, or not do, something.
At the same time… since I’ve gotten back online more thoroughly, I’ve been hit with a massive amount of requests, demands, questions, queries, etc. Many of them assume that I’ve stored knowledge I haven’t stored, know things I don’t know, remember things I don’t remember, and can do things I can’t do. I feel bad about it, because a lot of the things being requested, demanded, etc., are worth doing. But at the same time, feeling bad about it doesn’t exactly help anything. I’ve tried to do as much as I can, when I’ve been able to do it.
Just be aware that when you write to me about one thing, I’m also likely getting emails, phone calls, and a whole lot of other things, about a lot of other things. Some recent examples:
A person who worked at a school for autistic children, wanting advice on how to best get law enforcement’s attention about abuse there, and get the abuser fired, and is possibly facing retaliation.
A full-time caregiver of a girl who’s in the hospital with a life-threatening medical condition, the hospital might not be acting fast enough to save her life, the person who has actual guardianship over the girl is too strung out on drugs to care what happens to her.
An autistic person is trapped in the psychiatric system and their parents are trying to get them to sign over all their rights, and they have enough psych labels that their friends are afraid that most people in the autistic community would claim they belong in the system getting “treatment” they don’t want, and that they just lack insight, etc. And since I’ve been on the other end of that and have firm beliefs on that matter, I’m the one initially being written to about it.
Someone wants my help coming up with solutions to make certain online environments accessible to a broader range of people than most people think of accessibility in terms of.
Online meetings for a political autism-related group that I’m a co-founder of, that I’ve only managed to show up to one of in the past several months of weekly meetings, and that I’ve gotten weird reports of it being a ’support group’ now (not something it was intended to be) and of it ‘dying a slow death from neglect’ (well, yeah, but I’d hope that a group with lots of people could function with just two people not being there).
Someone wants me to work on the stylesheets for more than one website on this server, since I know my way around CSS and the like better than the person who does all the hardcore sysadmin stuff.
I have to email a few people about participating in a panel discussion at a conference, then write my own part in it (topic - force-fitting oneself to stereotypes, or being force-fit into them by others, and consequences, basically).
I have to write a longer speech for a different conference (where I’m hoping to incorporate concepts from disability politics into a discussion of autism, in order to get a different from usual perspective).
About 3 or 4 interview requests, one of which I’ve agreed to (specifically because I’m only one of several interviewees within the self-advocacy movement, instead of being made into some single representative of all autistic people and all our opinions, which is both impossible and not something I’ve ever been interested in), which means four or five days of my time doing things, and then another several days of way less ability to do things than usual.
Several people wanting to know about my life in general, in ways that I might or might not even tell a total stranger.
Several people apparently wanting me to jump in and help them with flamewars I’m not interested in engaging in.
People developing assistive technology wanting me to look over their ideas.
Many, many people wanting DVDs of various videos and/or permission to show them places.
Lots of comments that I haven’t yet moderated, in lots of places.
An entire list that I’ve been not managing to hang around to moderate much of either.
Lots of people (here and elsewhere) angry about their comments not showing up, and assuming the worst about the reasons.
Lots of people not angry about their comments not showing up, but just repeating their comments lots and lots of times because they think they didn’t get through even if it was just me not getting to them yet.
Someone wants proof that I can actually type, and is interpreting all of the previous results of making videos with my prior crappy camera with no tripod mount (and thus no way to tilt the camera or suspend it in various locations without a lot of duct tape and other contraptions that I don’t always have the ability to deal with), as intentional manipulation to make it look like I’m typing when I’m not. And, then, is going on to interpret my not getting to his requests for a video Right Now as proof that I’m not really typing.
Someone wants to name a robot after me.
That’s not all, that’s what I can remember right now.
Two things determine how I respond: Capability and priority. Sometimes something’s a high priority but I just can’t do it, sometimes something’s a low priority and I can, so the two don’t always go together and it’s as frustrating to me as it is to anyone else.
I’ve noticed Laura getting a lot of stuff too, and a lot of it being framed in terms of demands. One day, she’d been basically working all day and night on the server (which is well past her capacities as a sysadmin in some respects), as well as taking care of me. Note that she’s autistic and has a severe physical impairment as well. She took a break to watch her favorite news program for an hour, and then she was going to get my medications set up for me, and then she was going to do more work on the server.
Well… she got a phone call halfway into that news program, which was her only break for the day. The phone call was from someone who wanted a password. Fine. She said she’d get it within an hour or so. The person at the other end of the line apparently said, “No, not in an hour or so, now,” or something to that effect. Meanwhile, she was getting emails saying that she had to do something else, for a totally different website, right away, and that if she didn’t do it, she would have to do something else that was even more impossible to do right away.
This is one person trying to do a whole lot of work on an entire server full of websites, while also being thrown into the role of caregiver for that time, and everyone seemed to be pressuring her to do their part first, and right now, and no it couldn’t wait half an hour or an hour. Each one seeming to think they were the only one wanting her attention right then, and some of them frankly not seeming to be able to differentiate between a need and a want, or between a possibility and an impossibility.
To be fair, one of the people demanding things right away, while the things didn’t really need to be done right away, that particular person was experiencing enough hardship at the time that they must have viewed even Laura as having the luxury to do just about anything. That happens, I’ve even fallen prey to it, so has Laura I’m sure, but it’s not always the most accurate assessment of things.
I almost wish there was some way to show people exactly who we are, and what our lives are like, and what our abilities are like, though. Instead of that, I’ve just produced that list of stuff that people are writing to me about, in the hope that it will show exactly how many things there are to pay attention to. If I could really get to all of these at once, and the many other things I’ve accidentally let drop over the months or years, I would be at a workplace right now getting paid, instead of my actual situation which I think if anyone magically teleported here and looked in my room right now they’d see the problem right away. At any rate, I’m only one person, together we’re still only two people.
So also a blanket apology for several things:
To anyone I didn’t get to when something was really important, for not getting to them.
For not being as political as usual in my writing. And for allowing myself to mostly get sucked into apolitical sorts of things.
For the actions of my spam filter. (No, I didn’t cause it, but it still caused problems.)
For allowing myself to get extremely sloppy when I write about things, and often writing as if things are true that I know are not or are only approximations of the truth, because I can’t easily right now find the language for what I really mean. (An example would be discussing particular psychological terms without sufficient discussion of what destructive concepts they embody.) Or even things that I just outright don’t mean, because the phrases pop out of my fingers fully formed, triggered by the words before them.
For often writing only half of some idea without addressing the other half as much as I should.
Also, a new website on our server is this (edited to add: try clicking again, I gave the wrong web address before):
The Real Voices of Autism. It’s running social networking software, but the point is it’s for autistic people and our allies. Not for any one person to claim to be the only real voice of autism or anything. It’s intended to connect people with similar interests and stuff, but also to make it easier to form discussion groups and have discussions about how to do various actual projects in the real world and stuff like that. And to share links, and, etc. As Laura put it, “This is your site. Do what it what you will, provided of course that you’re not abusive.” (And “do what it what you will” is actually exactly the kind of thing I was talking about earlier with word trouble, only some of mine has been a lot worse than that, and I’m having real trouble reading lately.)
So… I hope any of this has made enough sense. I don’t want to intimidate anyone who’s trying to contact me, I just want people to be more aware of what the real situation is with requests for things.
This is my post for Blogging Against Disablism Day. You’ll have to wait on the poems/other writing, because I have to write this instead. I’m having trouble reading, so I am afraid this might be sloppy. And it is very long, getting into pretty high levels of detail on some things. I hope the intended ideas behind it are clear by the end. As usual, while I’m talking about specific sorts of situations with a narrowly-defined bunch of people, I’m thinking of something a lot more broadly applicable than that.
I have noticed a trend online, which is for people to say to others, “You are not autistic/AS, you are just using that as an excuse for poor social skills or an excuse to be a jerk.” I have an online friend who frequently gets this reaction, when she says something she considers just direct and someone else finds it insulting and flames her, and she tries to explain, only to get that response. Indeed, things like “Asperger’s is just an excuse to be socially inept” or “people who use Asperger’s as an excuse” have become givens in some parts of the Internet community. It is even accepted (with little to no apparent evidence) by some autistic people as fact.
There are several layers of disability stereotyping around this, and I want to attempt to disentangle as many of them as I can.
To lay some foundation, though, I want to talk about who autistic people are, using ‘autistic’ in the broadest possible sense. Please note that the statistics that bring us ‘1 in 166′ and ‘1 in 150′ and the like include people under the medicalized categories of not only autism but also things like Asperger’s and PDD-NOS, not that those three can even be distinguished at a superficial glance without knowing anything about a person’s early history. I don’t intend to talk more about who we are in terms of some sort of medical criteria though. I want to talk about who we are in the lives of people who know nothing about autism, or even those who know a little but believe themselves to know a lot. Because, with numbers so high, virtually everyone has known at least some of us.
Like a lot of autistic people, I have pretty good radar for other autistic people, or more broadly, other people who are neurologically atypical in some way. This doesn’t mean I can’t be wrong, but in all cases where I’ve been able to test it, I’ve been right. And these have been primarily places where a person would not be expected to be autistic. Prior to knowing about autism, I picked up on these things, but was only able to put them in relation to people I knew — people “like me” or “like my brother” or “like my father”, etc.
I have noticed, though, that other people, even many professionals, don’t always know what to look for. They think of “looking autistic” in a narrow way that has to involve, for instance, certain repetitive movements and a total lack of speech. When this is only one of many ways autistic people can look.
So I am going to attempt to describe what autistic people often look like. Be aware that non-autistic people can look like some of these things some of the time, and autistic people won’t all look like all of these all of the time. I’m trying to put into words something that I unconsciously map in a matter of seconds, and that will always be imperfect, much like all attempts I’ve seen so far to explain typical facial expressions to autistic people. But I hope to give other people some idea. It’s certain combinations of these things, not just one of them. And some relate directly to being autistic, while others are more about how autistic people might pass.
Some Of How I Notice Other Autistic People
One set of things I notice involves unusual patterns of movement.
The one most people know already, is what most people describe as ’stimming’. Repetitive, unusual movements. Rocking of the torso (many different rates and rhythms are possible), rocking or shaking of head (front to back or side to side), flapping of hands (different directions, rates, and rhythms are possible), twisting and flicking of fingers and wrists, bringing the hands together and apart again, wringing the hands, moving from foot to foot, and many complicated movements that defy description, involving twisting, rocking, flipping, flicking, etc of lots of different parts of the body.
This can be movements that are just there in the background, it can be ones that seem to be related to emotion or level of overload, and it can be ones that seem deliberate.
There are also many people who have learned to disguise this to some degree or another. They might do mannerisms that are more typical-looking, but with an odd rhythm or intensity. They might do less typical-looking mannerisms with lower intensity, or switch between them so rapidly that they would pass as little mannerisms a person might ordinarily have.
One woman I know developed a whole series of ’stims’ to do that cannot be seen if you are sitting in a desk, because she went to a fairly stereotypical Catholic school where you got whacked with a ruler for things like rocking. So she fidgets with her hands in front of her belly, and bounces her legs constantly. However, if she is forced to keep those body parts still, she will end up rocking or doing other things with her upper body. She can’t stop the movement, she can just move it to some other body part. Other people can actually stop these movements entirely.
I will also notice an unusual lack of movement. A person might move only as many body parts as they absolutely have to, in order to get the job done. Their body may, in between expressions and actions, remain as much as possible in a particular neutral position. This neutral position is one that other people can usually cover over more easily than autistic people, although some autistic people do manage to cover it well. I particularly notice their hands — slightly curled in, and their mouth — shaped like a trapezoid.
Their posture and walk can be unusually stiff or awkward-looking, or looking like someone much younger than they are would walk. Their arms might be straight down at their sides, held up with elbows bent near their chest, or clasped together. They might lean over slightly when they walk. They might have what seems to be a normal walk on one side of their body, and an unusual one on the other side. All of this may be more obvious when they run than when they walk. They might run with one arm held up in the traditional jogging position and the other flapping loosely at their side, or one rigid and one loose.
They might move with unusual speed or unusual slowness, or even a combination of both, with little to no movement in between the two extremes. Their movements may look heavily deliberate and premeditated, sometimes even if they’re not either one of those things, or not the sort of thing that ’should’ be either one of those things. They might be clumsy, or extremely agile, or a combination of both in a way that is very odd compared to standard movement. They might have a wide discrepancy between ‘triggered’ or involuntary movements (which might be agile, or at least more agile or rapid), and voluntary movements (which might be slow, clumsy, or non-existent). This may be similar to people with other sorts of movement disorders (such as parkinsonism) without actually being those same movement disorders.
They might seem to string together movements in an unusual way, going through an entire series of movements on autopilot just to try to do something that comes in the middle of that series of movements, and then having to trigger another set of movements in order to get to the next part of what they want to do, and so on.
Here is a video of an extreme version of what I mean, being my rendition of what an attempt to boil water in a teapot can look like on a very bad voluntary-movement day (simulated by using the camera by remote control while not putting a lot of effort into suppressing the triggered responses seen in this video; on a truly bad day that way, I would not be able to suppress this sort of thing even with a lot of effort):
But such things can also be a lot subtler, involving fewer tries to get it right, and lesser degrees of overshooting the mark. A person can also be unable to move voluntarily without involuntarily moving other body parts that aren’t at all necessary to the movement, and that also aren’t the kind of movement that neurologically standard people do. (Neurologically standard people do seem to move more than they have to, but the moves are all coordinated into particular expressions and postures and such that are very different than what I’m describing here. A person doing what I’m describing will normally look awkward or unusual when doing it.)
The person’s facial expressions can look blank, oddly plastered-on, or unusual for the situation. They might also have standard facial expressions, but in a way that is more fleeting than usual and only possible involuntarily, looking fairly fake when they try to do them on purpose. They might be giving only fake eye contact, or giving very intense eye contact. They may have exaggerated expressions, or expressions that are barely discernible (I have two different smiles for instance, both genuine, but one of them is impossible to tell is a smile unless you know the position my mouth starts in, and the other looks like a regular smile).
An autistic person who is passing for non-autistic can have the movement pattern normally seen by a person who is extremely insincere. Sometimes similar to the “used car salesman” look, or the “Hillary Clinton” look for that matter. Except that in an autistic person, the apparent insincerity is usually due to a poorly-concealed effort to pass for normal, rather than an effort to manipulate people into spending their money/votes/whatever (not that a person can’t be doing both, but I’ll get into that later).
Another thing I notice is unconscious echopraxia, involuntarily engaging in the same movements as someone else, with no conscious intent and outside the normal realm of social mirroring (although it might sometimes be in addition to what looks like social mirroring, because an echopraxic person will often mirror things in both standard and nonstandard ways).
And of course, less social mirroring than usual, too. When I was 12 years old, the person who’d go on to become my best friend told me something, both of us totally unaware of autism at the time. She said that if I was in a room full of people, she’d bet that I would be the one person whose body language, breathing, and other movements were not unconsciously synced up with everyone else’s. I was perplexed by this at the time, but it’s now one of the ways I can pick up on people who might be autistic, in a crowded room.
There can also be attempts to mask involuntary weirdness by appearing to be voluntarily weird. Since chosen non-conformity can in some circles have higher social status than involuntary non-conformity, and since it can lead to an internal sense of being in control of one’s own weirdness, even though of course the person isn’t really. The person can seem afraid of being discovered as doing this, in some cases, too. So there are often autistic people among people who appear deliberately and ostentatiously eccentric, just as there are often people with learning disabilities among class clowns who’ve figured out it’s better to be considered funny than considered stupid.
(Be aware, though, that it can be very hard to tell, in an autistic person, the difference between something done deliberately and ostentatiously, and something done without having any other choice. This is because some of us have subtle motor or proprioceptive trouble that can lead to that impression in people who don’t know what they’re looking at, just as people can sometimes believe that people with Tourette’s are just ticcing for ‘negative attention’.)
Another thing to look for is a certain surprise factor. I’ve spent my entire life watching people be surprised at me: They’re either surprised by my intelligence and other abilities, or surprised by what I can’t do. Surprised is the wrong word sometimes. Sometimes they’re so surprised that they either try to disprove my abilities, or try to disprove my difficulties. Autistic people can be that bright person that you just can’t believe is really so dumb or spaced-out sometimes, or that dumb or spaced-out person that you just can’t believe is so bright or talented sometimes. Many of us spend our lives either being accused of cheating or otherwise pretending to be competent, or accused of being lazy or otherwise pretending to be incompetent, and a surprising number of us get both at once from different people, depending on whether they saw a talent or an area of difficulty first. This happens because most people fill in the blank areas of someone who looks capable at one crucial thing with “all these things I haven’t seen them do, they must be able to do, and if they’re not doing them it’s just because they don’t want to right then” and fill in the blank areas of someone who looks incapable at one crucial thing with “all these things I haven’t seen them fail at, they must be unable to do, and if they’re doing them there must be some kind of trick to it”.
Another common feature of autistic people’s abilities is day-to-day variability, and variability based on situation. In one situation, we can do things. Change one thing, or wait until we’re tired, and we can’t. Autistic people of all perceived “levels of functioning” tend to be accused of laziness, manipulation, or “playing dumb” at that point unless people understand that it’s really that variable, or that changing one thing can really make that big of a difference.
If you’re not autistic, keep in mind that in our areas of difficulty, we often have to work hard just to get to the level that you might consider the most basic level possible, and that expecting us to sustain even that level of ability, let alone those above it, is like expecting most people to be able to do calculus all day. There’s just no way.
So what this all outwardly looks like is a lot of surprises and a lot of variability in what we are doing, or can do. People who are trying to mask their incompetence at certain things will sometimes portray themselves as either “lazy,” “just screwing with you,” or as free spirits doing what their whims tell them to do and passing from one desire to the next in some sort of floaty and ethereal way. There are always social roles these things can be masked by, and even when they’re not positive ones, they can be more positive in some situations than being considered truly incapable. And being unable to do something can always be masked by “not caring” about it — “I don’t care about these ridiculously strict notions of personal hygiene anyway”, whether true or false, is a great way to mask an extremely low level of self-care skills that would, if noticed for what it is, potentially lead to real trouble. Affecting an intellectual-snobbish air of indifference to “such trivial matters” as ordinary social interaction can work for some people, too.
In a person who is passing, there is also often tension between who they’re trying to appear to be, and who they are. It can look like the usual angstiness some people go through; after all, most people hide certain aspects of who they are in order to fit in. But passing as non-autistic is a bigger disconnect than pretending to like bands you really hate, or even than pretending to like people you really can’t stand, or to feel feelings different than the ones you know you have.
Passing can mean, in its most extreme forms of disconnect, having no or close to no understanding of most of the words one is using, most of the interactions one is engaging in, etc. Possibly even not understanding the true nature of words, while using them all the time. It can mean not just feigning interest in things one is disinterested in, but feigning interest in things one doesn’t even understand, while, further, not even understanding what this ‘interest’ thing is that one is feigning. It can mean not just putting on different feelings than the ones you have, but not understanding what feelings you are putting on, nor how (or even that) they are supposed to relate to those sensations you do intuitively understand that occur inside of you in response to situations.
Basically, a skilled enough autistic person can take patterns of behavior and language they see around them, absorb them for long enough to acquire a huge repertoire, and recombine it into something resembling an entirely different personality than they actually have. And they can, again if skilled enough, do this with a level of unawareness more than most people can even imagine. Most people assume it stops at “saying things you don’t mean,” rather than “saying things without awareness of that particular concept of meaning,” or even “saying things without knowing what language is for”. For an autistic person, it really can be that extreme (and with the usual fluctuations and shutdowns and juggling of abilities, can vary between that extreme and less extreme).
So one outward thing to look for, is gaps in this kind of act. Seemingly incongruous statements. Insistence in someone who seems otherwise normal or eccentric, that people don’t really know who they are (especially insistence despite people trying to tell them this is the usual existential angst, rather than the result of a profound disconnect between comprehension and behavior). Sudden and seemingly over-reacting levels of rejection of another person’s identification with the persona they’re passing as. Pauses during speech that occur at slightly unusual points in time. Seeming to have two “layers” to their actions that are utterly contradictory in nature, with one set of actions pointing to their actual levels of comprehension and thinking and interest, and another set of actions masking it that might seem to point to higher levels of comprehension than actually exist.
Be aware that when the above happens, the disconnect is on the level of a disabled person passing as non-disabled, not a whiny person who just doesn’t realize how much like everyone else they really are. Yes, there are things all humans have in common. No, that doesn’t solve the severity of depression, disconnect, and alienation that autistic people often experience when passing, particularly when the person they’re passing as (or being passed off as by others, since passing can be entirely in other people’s heads, too) understands things they don’t. It’s a lot closer to a deaf person passing for hearing (while entirely missing at least 80% of conversations as a result), or a blind person trying to drive a car without crashing it or letting on that they’re blind, or a person from one culture being thrown into a totally alien culture (where nobody’s ever even heard of one’s own culture) with no preparation and trying to pass as comprehending, than a person with certain abilities trying to pretend they are similar to someone with roughly the same set of abilities but a different personality. Not that that’s easy either, but there’s an order of magnitude or two here that needs to not be missed.
Of course, not all autistic people are in a situation where passing is possible, whether due to their own abilities, the expectations of those around them, or both. And passing has gradations, too. It’s not like there are those who pass and those who don’t pass. It’s more like there are those who pass to different degrees, as different things, and in different situations. Passing can also be wholly unintentional and unnoticed, but I’ll get into that later.
Speech opens up a whole other set of possibilities of things to notice.
Tone is important. Often I’ll notice someone having more of a monotone than usual. This can range from subtle lessening of tone variation, to absolutely robotic-sounding speech. Some people have very little variation in tone, but more variation in volume. Their voices can sound flat to most people, but do show inflection, just not by changing pitch.
A person can also have a rhythmically varying tone that varies always according to the same rate. It may be just as unvarying in some ways as a monotone, except on a broader range of pitches, like a sing-song voice that repeats the same tones over and over again.
A person’s voice could also sound like they are making speeches every time they talk. I know of a few autistic people who mastered public speaking before they mastered conversational speech, and it can sound like that.
Their voice can also sound like a mishmash of different tones, sometimes a totally different tone, and accent, for each word or clump of words. When it shifts very often, it can sound like one of those automated telephone services that have different words programmed in with different intonations for each one, and a computer picks the order they go in.
It can also sound like a more smoothed-over version of this, with longer uses of the same tonal pattern, but still spliced together to some extent. Or it can vary between several of the things I described above, based on a whole lot of different factors.
A lot of times people are easy to spot by not having normal levels of modulation to the volume or sound of their voice. A lot of autistic people have what most people would consider a very annoying voice: Too loud, too nasal, the wrong pitch, the wrong tone, etc. But we can also have voices that are too quiet, very breathy, almost whispering. And, like movement, some people can do one or the other, but have trouble finding a middle ground for long. Many autistic people I know have some ability to control the volume of their voice if they concentrate on it, but the moment they slip up, they go back to loud or quiet.
Many autistic people have a sound in their voice that I do not know how to describe, but it’s a sound I associate with being cognitively very distanced from the production of the words. Some other autistic people could hear it in my voice when I spoke with seeming fluency, and they pointed it out to me. I can hear it in the voices of some of my friends, and have one friend where I can always tell when he’s having more speech difficulties because the sound gets more pronounced.
Someone tried, without ever hearing this sound, to convince me it was just a matter of nasal resonance or something, but it’s not that simple. I can hear it the same way other people can hear excitement or anger in each other’s tones by recognizing what their own voices would sound like. I know from the inside what it feels like, and what I sounded like when I spoke, so I can hear it in others. So much for a lack of empathy.
In people who use delayed echolalia as a functional means of communicating, or even of feigning communication, there are often certain telltale signs as well. The phrases used might seem slightly out of place. There are pauses in unusual places during the person’s speech. There are sets of sentences and phrases they commonly repeat to fill space while trying to come up with more words. There can be, if the mechanism is not working right or if the communication is only feigned, things said that are not the sort of thing you would think the person would ever really mean. The person might on the other hand come up with entire paragraphs beforehand, and then spew them all rapidfire out of their mouth.
There is always immediate echolalia, which tends to be pretty obvious. But there are also hidden forms of that too. My father and I both sometimes mouth things that other people are saying either right along with them or just after they say them, and if I hear a sound of a certain pitch my throat tightens as if I were trying to sing that pitch. We might echo noises in our surroundings too, not just words. I often involuntarily do cat, bird, and microwave oven noises, and I have heard of other autistic people who do car alarms. Some of us repeat noises or words over and over to ourselves, or have vocal tics causing forceful and involuntary noises or words. (These may be disguised as “just being silly” or “nervous habits”.)
Also I often hear autistic people who don’t talk at a standard rate for the society they’re in, either very slowly or very quickly. Sometimes almost too fast to understand. I hear people having trouble pronouncing words, too, which makes some people sound almost as if they’re not speaking at all, and other people sound slurred or indistinct in other ways.
And some autistic people seem more likely to stutter, either on sounds or on entire words. Or not to talk at all.
Many autistic people, maybe even most, seem to have real trouble with keeping language consistent. So they may vary a lot in how often they can speak, or how fluent or relevant to their thoughts it is.
And language itself is a whole different thing. Some autistic people seem completely lost without it, some seem to have extreme difficulty with it, and some seem to have both situations going on. If I see a person who absolutely can’t seem to function in any situations except those using language, I do think of whether they might be autistic. But same with if I see someone to whom all language is foreign, regardless of how proficient they are or seem to be. (For instance, I’m a very fluent writer when I can write, but language is very foreign to me, and I know people who are not as fluent writers but the only way they understand anything at all is through language.)
Another thing I notice is when people relate to things around them in an unusual way that suggests they perceive them differently than usual. Sometimes this involves noticing the texture, pattern, material, and shape of something more than the identity it acquires with words and social understanding. It can also involve physically interacting with objects in an unusual way, like smelling or tapping them.
One thing I find hard to put into words is an aspect of noticing that is different. It’s not just noticing things other people don’t, although that is a part of it. It’s also that there seem to be a set of things that people, especially in groups, are locked into noticing at the expense of other things. If a group of people is sitting around all seeming to pay attention to the same things as each other, and one person is noticing and relating to something outside that set of things, that is another clue, and an important one if it happens often and there’s no other explanation for it.
There’s also an odd thing I notice where, despite our tendency to stand out in other situations, many autistic people seem to not be noticed by other people. They can be standing right in front of someone, talking right to them, and everyone acts like they’re not there. It’s not a malicious sort of thing, they just don’t seem to notice the person at all.
I notice that when in groups of people, autistic people will often laugh just after everyone else laughs. They might have an odd laugh, and laugh harder than necessary in an attempt to prove they “get it” (which usually backfires).
I notice people talking so much that other people get bored and want them to stop, and they don’t notice, and keep talking. And also having trouble starting to talk. (Even both in the same person.)
I notice reactions to things that change, that other people might not react to. Even changing over from one room to another might be difficult, or from sitting to standing, or from any action to another. When change is unexpected, there’s a sound I can hear in people’s voices of barely-suppressed panic. And of course sometimes panic becomes more obvious.
And some autistic people seem to try to get used to riding change like a surfer rides a wave. Or find ways of masking a difficulty with change (and all that new information to process). Often having familiar objects helps, although what these objects are might not be obvious: Many autistic women I know, including me, have at some point or another used jewelry for this purpose, because it can be easily and unobtrusively carried just about everywhere and fiddled with, and is culturally accepted for women.
I notice autistic people in various levels and kinds of of overload, shutdown, and meltdowns. I also notice autistic people reacting very strongly to specific sounds, colors, etc. Whether because it hurts them because they’re sensitive to it, or because they just hate the stimulus or something associated with it, on an involuntary but emotional rather than perceptual level.
I notice some autistic people seeming what most people would call very rigid, and others almost the opposite.
I could probably go on for the length of a book, but I won’t right now. I think I’ve made the point that there are a lot of ways that I notice autistic (and other neurologically atypical) people. Next, though, I want to talk about what other people generally seem to see autistic people as.
How Other People Often See Us
One really important thing to be aware of is that, even if everything I just discussed and more would now seem really obvious, most people don’t seem to think of autistic people as autistic people, because they don’t know this category. They have different ideas about who we are, and their perception of us tends to blend in with categories of people they’re more familiar with. We’re not one set of people, in the eyes of most people. We’re assorted specific people, but we’re not seen as who we are, either. We’re just seen according to what roles people perceive us as having.
Here are a number of qualities I’ve seen attributed to autistic people. I am not saying they are right or wrong. I am just saying, these are the attributes other people often tend to give us based on qualities that are specific to being autistic, or specific to being an autistic person who is passing or being passed by others as someone else.
We’re the people who try really hard to fit in, but everyone knows we don’t. Some of us might be able to fit in as long as we’re content to be used by others in various ways — as the butt of jokes, or to get back at each other.
We’re that person who everyone played jokes on, but who kept coming back for more, being excited to be in on the whole thing even if it was only as the target.
We’re that person who always makes a point of laughing at that other weird person, in a bid for acceptance. And we get only partial acceptance at that.
And we’re that other weird person, too.
We’re the person everyone loves to hate, and can usually come up with some excuse to do so out of a repository of things we’ve said or done. But it’s really not that thing we said or did that makes them hate us. It’s something else, something intangible, about who we are. The particular thing they cite is just an excuse.
We’re that person people are embarrassed to be around, but also embarrassed to be embarrassed by.
We’re the people that get called spaz, retard, psycho, nerd, dork, jerk, loser, idiot, flake, space-case, and geek, among many other names.
We’re just plain weird.
We’re that person who always seems to do weird things, which must be for attention, because that’s why people do weird things. Or something.
We’re the people who just don’t want to do things, and that’s why we don’t do them. It has to be disinterest, not difficulty.
We’re the people where people always say of something we aren’t consistently able to do, “He can do that. When he really wants to, ya know.” And the people who say the flip side about: “She can’t really do that, someone must have helped her,” or “He can’t really do that, you must be imagining things,” or “She can’t really do that, she must’ve cheated.” Often we’re both in the same lifetime, even sometimes at the same time.
Our silence can be interpreted as everything from lack of the ability to think, to being stuck up, to being the “Strong, Silent Type” to not feeling like talking.
We’re the people who others look at our strange reactions to things and say we’re on drugs, even if we’re not. We might also be people who consequently find acceptance of some amount among drug users.
We’re the person who everyone calls “retarded” who suddenly comes out with things that seem very intelligent, and the person everyone calls a “genius” who can’t do some really simple stuff.
We’re flamboyantly, deliberately weird, intentional nonconformists who don’t care what people think about us, or who want to feel special.
We’re stupid, boring, and self-centered.
And it goes on and on. The one thing we don’t have is a place in most people’s heads as who we are. There are already all the above explanations and more. (Not that medical explanations of autism say who we are either. But there’s a whole lot of who we are that gets missed if you take our differences in thinking and perception, the ones that get called autism in the end, out of the equation.)
Disability Stereotypes
There’s one particular disability stereotype that’s going to become very relevant here. It’s the idea that disabled people get so many cool things and exemptions from things everyone else has to do.
It doesn’t matter that the parking spaces are close to the building because we need them to be, other people often will see them as a luxury.
Instead of seeing accessibility as barrier removal, a lot of people see it as giving disabled people special rights, privileges, and luxuries.
And there’s one other common attitude towards disabled people that’s relevant here: There are a lot of disability-themed insults, and lots of hatred and bigotry towards disabled people, not to mention all the systemic injustice and all that. But at the same time, a lot of people would feel extremely guilty about teasing or bullying a disabled person, or getting mad at someone for being disabled.
Just combine those two perspectives about disability, and stir a little.
And then… cognitive dissonance.
So there’s all these ways that autistic people can stand out, but most of us don’t stand out to most people as autistic. Even the ones who are the most obvious, often are mistaken for some other kind of strange or disabled.
People already have these ways of relating to us.
And many of those ways are not complimentary. They have a lot bad to say about us, and to say or do to us.
And then it turns out… we’re autistic.
Then the little “I must feel guilty about this if they’re autistic” thing kicks in, if they’ve absorbed that particular way of seeing things.
And most people don’t want to see themselves as mean, or the “sort of person” who would do these things to a disabled person.
Some people will at that point apologize.
Others, though, will want to stay mad at us (because people who are mad at someone often do), or else want to continue to have their excuses (based in estimations of our character, covering for discomfort with the fact that we’re unusual in the first place) to treat us poorly.
It’s really hard for some people to go from, bullying the outcast nobody likes anyway (so it doesn’t even quite count as bullying, does it?), to bullying a person with a genuine disability. It’s really hard for some people to go from “I’m mad at someone because they said something offensive,” to “I’m mad at someone because they’re literal about language.”
It’s a lot easier, to think any of the following, “This is a jerk. This is a person with all those bad qualities that make them someone we love to hate. This is just some idiot who keeps coming back for more, so he deserves what he gets. This is a gullible person it’s fun to mess with.” Etc.
It can even seem like you are granting one of those special privileges out, if you say “Hold on, I was wrong to do this, or think this, about this person, because they’re being literal, not obnoxious.” Or whatever.
And so there’s guilt, there’s cognitive dissonance about not being “that sort of person”, there’s resentment of what seem to be special privileges.
And so it becomes either, “You don’t have Asperger’s, you’re just using it as an excuse,” or “You may be autistic, but that’s no excuse.”
As with any set of negative stereotypes, if a person comes a long who is both autistic and mean and seemingly uses autism as an excuse to be mean, they confirm the stereotype. And then everyone who is just doing things an autistic way, gets to confirm the stereotype without even fitting it.
By now, people at least ought to know that the presence of women who are or seem irrational doesn’t mean women are particularly and specifically irrational. But stereotypes like that are still confirmed in people’s heads by the existence of people who fit or seem to fit them.
And of course, if you hear something often enough, it seems true even if it’s not.
So then there’s this sort of urban legend, that the Internet is filled with hordes of jerks who use autism as an excuse to be jerks. And the moment an autistic person shows up using autism as an explanation of something about themselves, then that stereotype is thrown in their face.
And autistic people ourselves have certain choices of how to respond to that.
We can say, “Yes, that stereotype is true. But the people who fit it, make the rest of us look bad, make it worse for the rest of us by confirming it, etc.”
We can just watch it happen.
Or we can say, “Hey hold on a minute, that’s a stereotype, and a harmful one at that. An explanation isn’t an excuse. We do have this particular kind of trouble with language, or engaging in typical interactions, and we are going to make mistakes that can be explained by being autistic.”
I’m sure there are other things too.
But every time an autistic person uses the “They make the rest of us look bad” thing, they’re falling into the same trap as women who direct their anger at being considered irrational, at particularly irrational women, instead of at the source of the problem. They blame those who fit, or seem to fit, the stereotype, for its existence and continuance, even though that’s not the source of negative stereotypes about people.
And they then continue it.
And people then continue to use it against autistic people.
In the end, this stereotype itself looks to me like an example of something that is frequently as an excuse in order to be a jerk… towards autistic people.
Okay, I’ve got responses to some of the titles so far, I’ll make another post when I’m done with more of them. Today has been several times more chaotic than expected, and involved much rearranging of furniture, and much waiting upright while I should’ve been lying down.
I haven’t forgotten anyone, I’m still working on the rest. I think I managed the full range here from serious to silly. And one of them, “one together”, was not meant to be a title but rather a reply to my question, which I didn’t realize until I’d already written the poem.
Donna Williams gave me permission to use/modify her idea as long as I gave credit to her.
She does a thing called a 48-hour poetry challenge, where she asks people to give her a one-word or two-word title (no proper names allowed) and she writes a poem within 48 hours.
I’m going to modify it slightly: It might be a tiny bit longer than 48 hours, and the writing style can be broader than poetry. I’m trying to confine my responses to this weekend though, because on Monday morning I’ve got a lot of work to do and I can’t be sure how good I’ll be at any of this afterwards. (And, yes, I’ve got emails to answer. It’s hard to answer them when they’re spread over several computers not all of which I have access to right now, and I’m using webmail at the moment which is a lot harder than having my mail program sort everything for me first.)
I’ve just restored my blog from backup, and I see it didn’t restore the last entry, but the last entry was just talking about us being down for maintenance. We’re slowly getting everything set up, at the pace of a couple of autistic snails, but better to have a half-broken website than an all-broken webmaster.
The other blogs should be up shortly. We’re restoring them, as far as I know, in alphabetical order by subdomain. Everything is going smoothly, and because of this Laura is wondering precisely when the inevitable disaster will occur. She has stocked up on caffeine. I am being handed old envelopes with passwords scribbled on them, and my job appears to be to restore and maintain the blogs.
I still can’t check email efficiently. There is one person I replied to, who emailed me back, and now her email to me is stuck in my apartment and I’m still failing to be in my apartment, so I can only check webmail. Problem is I think her email address is lost. I owe emails to Roz Picard as well, and probably others.
And of course, I Am Kathleen, but I have been unable to write a post on the topic. I’ve got two saved as drafts (if the database backup process didn’t eat them somehow) but I was never able to finish them. And by now everyone knows about what’s happened to Kathleen anyway.
Obviously this would affect me as I am listed on the subpoena, and she is a trusted friend of mine, meaning that in addition to thinking this whole thing is utterly disgusting for Kathleen, my own privacy (and, relatedly, safety) is at stake here as well, because we keep in touch mostly through email. The only exchanges of money we’ve had have been over things like paying her back for pizza. Back before I’d met her, I sent her something I’d written that I only sent to a small number of people I trusted. It dealt with areas of my life that I was still only just daring to figure out.
I also think the little dig at her as a Muslim is both awful and silly: I am trying to imagine a Sufi conspiracy with Big Pharma, and it is about as ridiculous as a Quaker conspiracy with Big Pharma. Then again, Quakers tend to get put on lists too. But people are clearly trying to capitalize on fears about Muslims, and that’s just basically hate propaganda. As someone, somewhere, said about this whole thing, “Muslim is the new Communist.”
At any rate, Kathleen is my friend. We have gone out for Japanese food a few times and Middle Eastern food once. I have met her husband and her teenage autistic child. They are fun and delightfully geeky.
She has helped me as moral support at two separate meetings of a formal hearing when I filed a complaint about a case manager who wanted to put me in a more restrictive living situation. She also helped fold me and stick me in the van we were driving there in the time that I was frozen or semi-frozen the whole time.
She has also helped me sort through my extremely chaotic private medical records for CNN’s fact checkers, and helped me file them in a coherent order so I could find them. She has also been there as moral support at one of my interviews with CNN.
She has helped me navigate two conferences, that I have gone to as an autistic self-advocate (like Kassi says… and Kassi was at one of them), and she read aloud my speech at one of them when I didn’t have the communication equipment to do it myself. She has also assisted me with movement at these conferences by pushing my wheelchair, putting a hand on my back to help me through doorways and over other thresholds while I was walking on foot, and once helping support my arm so I could type when I would have otherwise been frozen. She has helped me negotiate travel and airports and all that kind of stuff. And she has helped me help Kassi as well (such as the time I lent Kassi my wheelchair because the hotel people had, in their infinite wisdom, put her in a room all the way down the hall when she had a bad ankle).
She has, despite malicious rumors to the contrary, never put her words in my mouth, and in fact has always been very careful not to attempt to speak for me. She is not my puppetmaster.
And aside from all this, and more than all this, she has been a good and trustworthy friend to me. Neither of us are in the pay of Big Pharma, neither of us is in on some Big Awful Conspiracy ™. And the way to find out if someone is in the pay of Big Pharma is not to invade the privacy of (and possibly, thus, endanger the safety of many people from) their entire blogroll.
And that’s about all I have to say on that matter right now. I hope Kathleen’s motion to quash succeeds. I was at one point planning to link to every single blog post about this, but, by now, that’s just impossible and I’ll never get this posted if I keep trying to do that. Kathleen and her family have my full support in all this, whatever amount I can give.
“She’s so happy” is what someone just told me about Fey, my cat, who’s visiting me where I’m staying right now.
Actually, while Fey is a lot of things right now, happiness isn’t what I’d summarize it as. She’s glad to see me, but she’s also edgy and scared about being in a new place (and about me not being home yet), angry at me for not being home, annoyed about having been picked up, and frantic in her attempts to get me to do something by nudging my hands and face hard and in rapid succession.
I notice this sort of thing often. I obviously can’t read a cat’s mind and know precisely what she’s thinking about everything, but I can get a pretty good clue through body language of the assorted layers of emotions she’s got going on.
Other people often seem to have a limited template of cat emotions in their heads.
Such as, as I finally deduced today, “Purring means the cat is happy.” Which is a gross oversimplification of the use of purring by cats, and which seems to lead to humans totally ceasing all further observation of what the cat happens to be doing in addition to purring, as well as all comparison of the sound of the purring to all other purring the cat has done.
Then there are more “subtle” things like not knowing the difference between a play-bite and an anger-bite. Which doesn’t seem subtle to me, but after watching a lot of people interact with cats, it seems like many people don’t get it. I’ve seen too many people attempt to “play with” (read: invade the space of) a heavily annoyed cat, only to conclude the cat is “mean” when they get hissed at and scratched. And all too often, even after the hissing and scratching, they might say in a sing-song voice, “You meanie,” and go back for more. Putting themselves at risk of a serious bite and taking every warning sign the cat has to offer as a sign of “playfulness”.
That last one, I had trouble understanding for awhile. I thought the humans doing those things were being cruel themselves. Then I ran across a person who seemed absolutely contradictory: She was very conscientious about most things, but at the same time she seemingly terrorized my cat and then laughed about it.
A friend pointed out that she probably wasn’t able to read feline social cues very well.
And that did turn out to be the problem after all.
But it seems like to many people there’s only one set of nonverbal cues that exist: That of the neurologically standard members of their own species in the culture or cultures they are most familiar with.
Anything beyond that appears less nuanced, but often they conclude that rather than being unable to pick up the nuances of an unfamiliar species, neurotype, or culture, then these nuances don’t exist unless the unfamiliar people in question develop nonverbal cues specifically intended to communicate to the person doing the observing. They might even, if they don’t even manage to learn an abbreviated version of the nonverbal cues in question, conclude that the unfamiliar species, culture, or neurotype has no body language. Which leads to being stereotyped as mysterious, sinister, defective, deficient, or some combination of the above.
I’ve always found it interesting, how if autistic people don’t understand certain things about non-autistic people, it’s because autistic people are disordered (deficient in understanding “nonverbal cues” in general, as if there is only one kind), but if non-autistic people don’t understand autistic people, it’s also because autistic people are disordered (deficient in our ability to produce “nonverbal cues” in general, as if there is only one kind). People seem very resistant to the idea that there are many levels of detail and nuance that they are missing in this regard.
I’m glad they got it reasonably accurate this time, and even finally included stuff from the interview with my case manager, although I still wish I’d seen more of the other people from the AutCom conference, since I know several were interviewed, and I’d participated in all of this mainly hoping that they would show me as only one of several people. (I’m hoping they’ll use some more of that later.) On the other hand, I’m glad they used more of that than before and emphasized that I’m not all that unique among the wider autistic community. And I’m slightly baffled as to why there were at least two parts of it that they repeated twice within the same hour, and one answer that seemed pasted in from a different question (I am pretty sure when asked why I made the In My Language video, I talked about Ashley X).
And also, my relationship with my friends is just that, we’re friends, I’m not some kind of one-way inspiration machine and I don’t aspire to be (that last link is very tongue-in-cheek).
If you’re new to the blog, some stuff that ought to be read first, although CNN did a more thorough job than before in covering some of that stuff:
Disclaimer on Assumptions, Let’s Play Assumption Ping-Pong, and Please Don’t Take Me As Typical are all things you might want to read if I end up not being quite who you would expect me to be, or if you expect my life, body language, etc. to correspond directly to every single other person who has the same set of labels I do. I try to cover everything that could surprise people, but I do forget stuff.
My comment policy (such as it is) is covered in some combination of the bottom of the About page and Gossip-Free Zone. The rest can be summarized by “Try not to be a jerk” (I’ll tend to delete that stuff, although if I have the time and there’s other substantive content I might just edit them). Be aware that my spam filters often mess up and throw things in the spam bin that are actually legitimate comments (this happens most often to Andrea Shettle for some reason, to the point where I search all spam for her name before deleting it). So you might want to keep a copy of your comment just in case. Things that are clearly intended to be private, I save. Things that aren’t but contain private information, I edit.
I had to deal with another professional trying to drag me to the hospital yesterday, insisting since I was weak enough to fall someone had to look at me. When I told him that my doctor had already looked at me, and that my doctor did not want me in the hospital, he wanted me right where I’m at (staying with a friend to make sure I don’t fall, and resting, which I can’t do in an emergency room), he was not at all pleased, and tried to convince me he was going to do it anyway unless I could sit up straight (which I couldn’t, but still insisted I wasn’t going).
I did not know this, but it’s illegal around here to force someone into medical treatment unless they can be proven disoriented. Which explains what happened next.
Normally, people describe me as oriented times three (to person, place, and time) even when I’m not, they don’t even bother doing the normal test of this. It’s the sort of thing most people just assume about you, unless they’re given serious reason not to. If they do ask, they generally ask you if you know who you are, where you are, what situation you’re in, and what day it is.
In this case, he didn’t just ask those things.
He wanted to know not only the date (something I normally have trouble with, but luckily knew yesterday), but the exact time of day, which is something most people don’t know without looking at a clock. Fortunately, a staff person had left shortly before that, so I said “after five”. He checked his watch (he didn’t even know the answer to the question!) and grudgingly admitted that it was just after five.
He went through a similar rigamarole when asking me where I was. He wasn’t satisfied with my description of where I was (a friend’s place, naming the friend) until I gave him the exact street address, something else that most people don’t memorize when they go to visit friends.
The thing about all this is, with orientation to time, they usually ask the year, the season, the month, and the day of the week, sometimes also the name of the president. I have been excused for not knowing the precise day of the week before if I was otherwise coherent, or for saying something like “I think it’s either Monday or Tuesday”. Knowing the time of day is above and beyond anything I’ve ever been asked, or heard other people asked in busy emergency rooms. Being expected to know the time of day when the examiner doesn’t know it is absurd.
With orientation to place, I’ve seen people passed or partially passed on these exams for simply knowing they were in a hospital, without knowing the specific name of it. (This would be like me saying “a house”.) I’ve never seen people asked anything beyond the specific name of the hospital. (This would be like me saying “Jim’s house”.) I’ve never, ever seen anyone asked a complete street address before.
And I’ve rarely seen a professional so angry as this guy was when I proved to be anything but disoriented.
Hint: If I’m able to coherently and rationally discuss, at fairly great length, while under pressure, despite total and obvious exhaustion, precisely what doctor I saw earlier today, his status among doctors around here, the problems I am having, the problems I am not having, and my doctor’s orders that I remain staying with this friend and not in the hospital where I would be put at risk of catching more diseases that could combine with this to make me really require hospitalization, then maybe I am alert and oriented enough to make my own medical decisions. If I have not injured myself, and am proven to be alert and oriented even beyond what is normally expected of a person, and have told you in detail about my visit to a doctor (since you seem to want me to undergo all the tests I’ve already undergone), you should be happy, not angry that you can’t force me to do what you want me to do.
I’ve already discussed it with my friend: Next time I fall, whatever people are around can make me as comfortable as possible on the floor and wait there until I’m strong enough to get up. I know I apparently look pretty awful, but I’m sick of people telling me to go to the hospital, especially after my doctor and I already came to the conclusion that this would be bad for my health unless I was actually seriously injured in a fall or any of the other usual things that would warrant this. Simply having trouble sitting or walking and “looking bad” isn’t enough.
