Heather at Especially Heather wrote:
I know that there are those out there who view her only as a disability. I know that these people exist, Ive met them first hand. I also know that Emma’s voice has just as much meaning as your’s and mine. Its awkward dance has just as much passion and definition. It’s unsteady flow does not negate it’s importance. It breaks my heart when I see people in the medical field refer to children like Emma Grace as “broken”, “retarded”, “Devoid”. It saddens me to think that there are campaigns in place right now that devastate mothers as soon as their child is diagnosed. I was so blessed to have the support system I had when Emma was first diagnosed. There is so much hope in this diagnosis. So much support and love. These children have voices, they have the ability to communicate, they just sometimes do it in ways that seem so trivial and unnatural to us.
All of these children have something to say, hopefully we will all take the time to stop and truly listen.
She did a video of her beautiful daughter here:
Another beautiful kid:
And a video written by a really cool autistic kid:
My favorite lines from the last one:
“My biggest joy in life iterates your insistence that I am not disordered. Other worldly to you, but to me it’s merely my everyday splendor.”
I have long had trouble understanding the idea that people like us are somehow otherworldly, and he puts it pretty succinctly.
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I enjoyed watching those videos. I wish the cure organisations would look at them and realise autism is not hopeless, is not terrible and that nobody should be written off because they don’t fit to a preconceived idea of what is expected.
Just so happens as I have just put my first video on Youtube, and my blog, and it is not about autism per se, it is about me, life, death, rebirth and where we are all going. Terra Incognita.
So there you are, Larry, the full monty.
Beautiful videos. But, I wonder about “otherworldliness”. I’m sure the use of the word was intended as a celebration of diversity, but in the back of my mind, otherworldliness has connotations of dehumanization of people who are different - not “meant to be here”. There are immense ranges of variations in *this* world. There are many different ways of being human, and none of them are otherworldly (until we colonize space, anyway).
I thought that was the point the kid was making — what other people call “otherworldly” is actually everyday for us, and in fact, is not in any way otherworldly.
Arguably, an autistic is less “otherworldly” than a “normal” person — an autistic is very much in the world, aware of it, while a “normal” person can ignore large parts of it more easily.
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