I just realised that I actually hate my name

Well, a couple of hours ago, actually, but still.

I’ve always been kind of annoyed with my name for reasons I could never quite articulate.

It became easy to explain my annoyance, when I entered the English speaking universe, because my Norse name is a word used for something entirely else in English. Much to the mirth of many people I introduced myself to. Of course, every single English-speaking person whom I ever told my name (as in those who hadn’t been told my name before meeting me), said to me “Oh that’s funny, did you know that means [...] in English”.

What autistics want – may not be what you think

So very often when arguments are raging between people – especially between neurodiversity activists and self-proclaimed allies – the old line is trotted out again.

We all want the same thing, why can’t we all just set aside our differences and work towards our common goal?

On the surface this suggestion seems innocuous and, well, really rather good.

However, when you look a little closer it turns out that what people usually mean when they say this is

I haven’t really listened to you, so I have not realised that what you want is not actually what I want, but I’d like for you to stop disagreeing with me and work towards MY goal, so I can get what I want.

Doesn’t sound half as great now, does it?

Coping Methods: Mental Stims

This particular thing is oddly titled, because I have nothing else to call it. I have not fully developed this coping method yet, but I’m posting about it anyway, because my aide had never heard of doing something like this ever before, and maybe someone else will find inspiration in this to develop similar methods of their own.

I have spoken before of my physical stims, especially my nail biting, and about the things that function sort of like a stim only with added items.

I have also covered my frequent escapes into my inner worlds.

Sometimes escape to a different reality is not a viable option. Say for instance when there’s something you really need to do, like have a meeting with your case worker. You do need to be present for that. More than just bodily present. Having your mind with you there is also necessary. Other things like job interviews, job activities, navigating traffic, are also elements of ordinary life that we can’t just skip out of.

Additionally, I spoke of how a stim needs to match that which it’s supposed to help against, and that makes it very hard to stim for emotional triggers. Because how the hell do you stim emotionally?

Well, it’ll probably be different for everyone. Usually my nail biting works for emotional stuff and stress, too. But if I’m in a meeting, I can’t sit there with my fingers in my mouth gnawing away at them. So I needed something else. (Also because I really wanna stop the nail biting)

It was my aide who suggested something that I then modified to make it work. She knows that I love my cat a great deal, and she remembered how I’ve said that it’s therapeutic to just sit there with him; feeling his soft fur and the rumble of his purr.

So she suggested I think of him.

It wasn’t quite as simple as that, though. Because I’m sure we all know how well “think happy thoughts” works. It only works so far as your brain cooperates, and when your brain has already moved into the panicked-babble-sector, you can try as you might, but thinking any kind of sensible thought is really damned hard.

But I still liked her idea. Kaktus (my cat) is such an immense source of comfort for me that surely something can be worked out with this. Short of taking him with me to work – obviously – though that would be absolutely fantastic, I have to say.

I mulled it over in my head for a long time and it was inspiration from my conversations with inner friends, while still being attentive on the physical world that did the trick.

Leaving completely and entering an inner world was not a viable solution, and if I needed to have a conversation in the physical world, then having one with an inner friend at the same time would only make things worse. But I remembered what causes me the most discomfort: sensory stimuli - especially sounds. What is it that makes Kaktus such soothing company for me? His purr – his sound.

And so I decided to try and conjure up the sound of his purring in my mental ear. I had never tried this before, separating one sense out and stimulating it mentally, and it took a LOT of practice I tell you. I have not yet perfected it, either, but it is so far looking very positive.

I can, in fact, conjure up the sound of my purring cat in my head. It doesn’t have quite as much of an effect as actually having him with me, unfortunately, but with a little luck and well-timed efforts it’s enough to keep me from stressing out over things I don’t need to stress out over.

When I know I’m going in for a meeting that will be critical for whatever’s going on, I’m always majorly stressed out, and now I’m trying to counter this with the purr. It works to some degree. It cannot prevent melt-downs from things that are really bad, but it can give me a little less antsyness, and it can mean that I won’t have explosive diarrhea 12-24 hours after a stressful situation peaked, which is otherwise the norm for me.

It works like a mild sound stim only it is noiseless for everyone but me. And it doesn’t work against sounds in the physical world but rather against the chaos of panicky ’noisy’ thoughts, which my brain sometimes inflicts upon itself.

The purr also helps me calm down and fall asleep at night. It always takes awfully long for me to shut down my brain and go to sleep. There are so many thought processes running that I need to consciously stop, before I can mentally relax enough for sleep to arrive. This means I have a very long shut-down time before bedtime, I can’t go straight from a conversation and then fall asleep unless I am utterly exhausted. The purr speeds up the proces of sorting through everything and getting ready for sleep.

I’m practicing this mental stim every night (except for the nights when Kaktus sleeps on my pillow – then I have the real thing), in order to be able to pull it up in my mind faster and with greater certainty. It is my goal to be able to use this also in ‘emergencies’, when I have been surprised by something negative – like running into an asshole ex in the street or getting really bad news from someone. I cannot do this yet, but I hope to achieve it at some point.

So far, when I know a tense situation is coming up, I can reduce the anxiety and jumbled thoughts a little. I hope to be able to use it for more than that or perhaps develop other, similar methods later on. And I hope to get so practised at this that I’ll eventually do it automatically rather than having to think about it. That would be an immense succes for me.

Coping Methods: Inner Worlds

I have mentioned in two of my previous posts in the series that I have another reality in my head.

It is only very recently that I discovered that this is actually fairly common for aspies/auties to have, and so I think it is very important to spread the knowledge thereof, because I have spent many, many years thinking I’m crazy and trying to defend, explain and rationalise what I was doing – mostly by telling people I was thinking it up for novel-writing and publication purposes.

What do people do when a location/situation they are in becomes too much for them? They leave. This is why some people leave the pub after their fellow pub-goers become too loud and rowdy. This is why parents move their kids to different schools because of bullying. This is why you stop hanging out with people who treat you badly. This is why people get divorced (among several other reasons). If your situation is too much for you, then you leave it, if it is within your power to do so.

It’s that last part of the sentence that’s important, because auties do exactly what everyone else does too. We attempt to leave a situation that is too much. Our problem is, though, that the situation/location that’s being too much very often happens to be the world in general. That’s a pretty difficult location to leave. (I’m still hoping for intergalactic spaceflight in my time, heck, I’ll settle for interstellar )

Coping Methods: Items

I originally intended to write two posts about my therapeutic things. But I decided to mash them into one, because that makes more sense to me. Besides, I’ve written about some of this before, and there’s no reason to reiterate too much. And then again, maybe there is, since a lot of people do seem to still not get it.

Either way, I’ve covered my stims, and how they work and affect me. But stims are restricted to what I can do with myself and my body in a given situation. There are also items that relieve stress for me, because they possess a set of properties that work in a stim-like way.

It is not unusual for autistics to have what a lot of people would condescendingly term a “safety blanket”. The reason I find this condescending is fairly simple: The term safety blanket comes out of a set of concepts we connect with children and childhood, and autistics should not be infantilised. Most of us are, unsurprisingly, adults, and there’s no reason to treat us as if we’re children.

Evenso, the term safety blanket is stil far more neutral and factually accurate than the similar term in Danish, which is a lot worse in terms of the words used. I suppose that’s why I object to the term, because looking at the words “safety blanket” objectively they do actually describe the function of the items I want to talk about. Except that it’s far more complicated than being a matter of any random cloth.

The items we find comforting can be widely varied. Some have a specific clothing item, a shirt or a jacket or a cap they just cannot exist without. An autistic kid I know simply cannot function if he’s not wearing his cap. He cannot find calm unless he’s wearing it. Whether this has to do with the sensation of pressure on his skull, or whether it’s because far too many people have a tendency to touch his gorgeous red hair and thus overstimulate him badly, I don’t know. Either way, he wears his cap, he wears it to bed, even.

Coping Methods: Directed Stimming

Right, in my first post in the series I talked about one specific stim that I have: Nail biting.

In this post I will generalise a little more, and I’ll try to explain how I deal with my stimming.

I have several stims. Most (if not all – I’m not sure) autistics have one or more stims. They are the repetitive stereotypical movements that lead people to such misconceptions as: “Autistics? They’re the ones who bang their heads on the walls, yeah?” And no. We’re not. Not as a rule anyway.

Stims and stimming is short and slang-esque for stimulation. Now why might a person want or need stimulation? Because something needs to be let out, something needs to be vented, or repressed, or controlled. It can be any number of things. For many autistics that I’m aware of, it’s often a sensory thing. And it certainly is for me, too. But it is also a way to let out stress, which doesn’t have anything to do with sensory input and overload.

Stimming is often about giving yourself a sensory stimulus to “drown out” another stimulus that is causing discomfort and that you cannot simply remove.

The most effective stim is the stim that’s in the same category as the one that’s causing discomfort. Thus, if a sound is overloading me, I’ll need a sound to drown it out. If I can’t make any sounds, I’ll need a more intense form of stimming with a different sense. The function of the stim is to pull my attention away from what’s causing discomfort to something that’s not.

Coping Methods: Nail Biting

One of my first identifiable coping methods is nail biting. I’ve been biting my nails for almost as long as I can remember.

I have very, very vague memories of mum cutting my nails, because they were too long, when I was very, very young. very young indeed.

Much more clearly do I remember the multitudinous attempts by mostly my father to get me to stop biting my nails, because it makes them ugly. I’m not even going to get into the beauty-demands that underlie that fucked-up reason to not bite one’s nails.

By now, I have healthier reasons to not want to bite my nails – unfortunately, they don’t make it any easier to not do it.

“We all have our little quirks.”

Several people have said this to me after I have described one or more of my peculiarities to them.

Being autistic I have quite a few of those. Peculiarities, that is.

And by far the line that has been repeated at me most often is the headline of this post. “We all have our little quirks.” And indeed we do. People on the normalcy spectrum have quirks, too. Goodness, yes. It’s what makes all of us, neurotypical or not, individuals.

So saying this line is not an untruth. Not at all.

It’s all in the way it is said.

Intolerance: a rant about pots and kettles

Originally posted on Tumblr.

 

Today my newspaper writes about how the DF’ers (That’s the Danish People’s Party – bunch of racist fucks) think that every hospital patient should have the right to refuse treatment by woman wearing a traditional muslim headscarf, and if not possible in that hospital, should have the right to be transferred to another.

We do, in fact, have free choice of hospitals here in DK. We can always refuse to be treated, and we can always request to be transferred, though there’s no guarantee another hospital will have room, everywhere is notoriously understaffed. This is public healthcare. And now they’re making a fuss about one of their party members having to accept treatment from a muslim doctor wearing a headscarf. Oh the horror!

This pisses me off to no end.

Not so much that these racist fucks want nothing to do with muslims – I’m pretty sure most muslims would prefer to have nothing to do with these hateful people, anyway – but that they would actually waste public resources on administration and transfers of patients in our already heavily overloaded health care system.

Rambling thoughts on bullying

Originally posted on my Tumblr, now revised somewhat and re-posted here.

I have seen people chased off a forum because of bullying. I have seen people have tearful break-downs because of bullying. I have had those break-downs myself.

I have been bullied in meatspace – online I seem to have mostly escaped it, with a few notable exceptions I won’t be drawing into this post.

My point is: I write, not as an expert on bullying, but as someone who would like to think she has an ounce of empathy hidden away somewhere in the dark corners of her soul. (my what? I have one of those?!?!) I write, based on the observations I have made over the years, both in cases where I was bullied, but also where others were.

Bullying is incredibly harmful, let there be no doubt about that. Bullying kills. But let’s also be aware of the context in which bullying kills, because bullying is a much more complex thing than a bunch of mean kids saying a few nasty remarks to another kid.