Today is the last day of 2023, and i haven’t posted since August 2022, however, it is merely a coincidence that i am posting at this time after so long. Big changes are coming to my life (and this website), and i want to inform those of you who are tuned in to what you might expect of me in 2024. As of this month, and despite chronic hopelessness and emotional anguish (2023 has looked/felt like hell on Earth to…
It hadn’t dawned on me until this week that the reason i’ve been attracted to martial arts most of my life is directly because of my autistic-ness (e.g., my love and need for stimming; routines; structure; etc.). While i waltzed ignorantly into my first experience with martial arts (Kun Khmer), i pursued Pencak Silat (abbr., silat) out of a fascination for its beauty that i could not explain until — seriously — just this week. My fascination for silat came…
Discovering as an adult that i am autistic has meant re-framing the cornucopia of my life-long struggles. For example, i have shitty fine-motor skills; i suck at balancing; i sometimes look away in conversation; i bite my cheeks; i have sweaty extremities; i am pained by bright lighting; i repeat things spontaneously. Or, i’m weird; i’m awkward; i’m different; i’m flawed; i’m gifted; i’m wrong; i’m special. The best thing about this discovery? I’ve finally identified a single “cause” for…
Allists tap their fingers, but autists self-stimulate (abbr., stim). Put another way, as autistic author melanie yergeau writes, being diagnosed meant that “my hand and full-body movements became self-stimulatory behaviors”. But everyone stims(!), with contemporary (but nascent) research suggesting that “autism traits” are “distributed normally” throughout the entire human population (as discussed here). Semantics aside, stimming has been “re-claimed” (read: claimed) by actual autists (e.g., #StimFreely) as a means of taking pride in our bodies. This post, then, is meant to…
Content Warning: trauma, bullying, violence, death, micro-aggressions, spoilers I think i’ll take this week to switch things up with a film analysis. While i’ve previously discussed autism in contemporary media twice — the film Mary and Max, here, and the U.S. TV series The Office, here — i’ve not done so in a while, nor at such length. Today i want to explore The Accountant‘s portrayals of autism, disability, and pencak silat (abbr., silat) I saw it in theaters with…