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On the Spectrum of Acceptance and Improvement

On the Spectrum of Acceptance and Improvement

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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…

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Stimming Freely and Me

Stimming Freely and Me

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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…

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The Accountant: Autism and Pencak Silat in Contemporary Media

The Accountant: Autism and Pencak Silat in Contemporary Media

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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…

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A Brief Pause for Raisons D’être

A Brief Pause for Raisons D’être

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My pragmatic language is not a problem for me. It becomes a problem when society values attention over (and as an assumption of) intent. In addition to my ability to make consistent eye-contact (despite finding it uncomfortable in certain contexts), i have an impeccable ability to interpret others’ levels of comfortability and attention based on their body language. For example, i was greeting dogs properly since i was a child; their fear of direct eye-contact/approach and comfortability with indirect eye-contact…

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