Aspies are normal too!

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I find it ironic. Though I am disabled, I have always found myself in a carer role, with everyone I have ever known. That's where people have wanted to put me, anyway. It does get old, and a little mind-boggling that way too.

I get put in a carer role, too, and I've figured -- at least in my case -- it because people see a certain vulnerability in me. It is too easy for others to manipulate me into situations and then once I'm there I feel responsible and unable to break away. Right now, I'm giving up at least 70% of my own life and will to take care of someone who is chronically ill and I find that as much as I don't want to be doing this, I feel paralyzed in place and able only to wait for them to die (while not wishing ill upon them) because they will never get better and there is no one else to take care of them.

There's a force in our culture that I call "need based". It wants us all to be consumers and it drives markets. The "need based force" wants everyone to need something. Sometimes we cannot escape needing certain necessities, like food, water, shelter, air, but it's mandatory that we have other needs as well, needs that aren't really needs, merely suggestions. This need based force dominates our media. You see it in advertising and in news broadcasts. The creators of this force know that if we all believe we are broken, it's easier to get us to pay for various rememdies, therapies, treatments, etc. This allows the creators to sell more product. Everyone must have some sort of problem, or there's, ironically, something wrong with them. Thus, the idea of abnormality is perpetuated, even in those who do not vary strongly from the mainstream. You are made to feel like you are hopelessly different from everyone else. You aren't normal. You are broken and need fixing. If you only do what they say or take what they offer, you will have a perfect life.
Normal doesn't exist. That's what the creators of the Need Based Force don't tell you. They don't want you to think this because then you would be empowering yourself and you might not feel you have a need to buy what they are selling.

I hear you, and it sounds extremely hard. I survived what I have gone through, but only barely. Please take care of yourself, too.

I think it's far more specific than "severly disabled". I think there is one and only one disability that gets people put in that category: severe cognitive disability. Somebody can be paralyzed from the neck down or totally blind or totally deaf or totally any sort of disability except cognitive and stay in the human like the rest of us category. But a severe cognitive disability puts people on the other side of a giant divide. Like you say, it's more of a subconscious thing (with the exception of Peter Singer- he's too much to get into now but he's absolutely conscious of it).

I think it's a Theory of Mind thing. As people have noted here, the much vaunted NT Theory of Mind doesn't seem to extend to being able to make accurate guesses about what an autistic person is thinking. Thus so much misunderstanding. As has been discussed in other threads, NT Theory of Mind is really just people making an educated guess about what somebody else is thinking based on how often they were right about other peoples' motives and based on some overlap in neurology- enough overlap to make the guesses at least sort of right at least some of the time. It breaks down badly between autistic people and non-autistic people. But I think it really breaks down with severe cognitive disability- severe enough to make posting here an impossibility. To post here means to share a common language and enough neurological similarity to communicate thoughts to each other. Any random NT person who stumbles on here (not just people like me with some sort of connection) can figure out what people are talking about, regardless of the differeing neurology. The gap just isn't that large. But what of people whose neurology is so dissimilar that this common ground just isn't possible? It's all too easy to fall into the trap of thinking "one of us but not really one of us" because of having no shared common ground. The slide to "human? are they?" is likely subconscious (except for Peter Singer- google him) but it happens anyway unless the person with the severe cognitive disability finds a way to communicate and then what actually happens I think is that the act of communication makes people feel that the severity of the disability was an illusion and they get pulled back into the "human like us" category. I think that's what's happening with all those stories about people presumed severly mentally ret*d until they got hold of a keyboard or some other means of communication. But this leaves people who couldn't communicate regardless of the technology out in the cold permanently.

I admit I have had to fight against this feeling myself. There is something about the act of communicating that makes a person feel more "like me". I know for a pure fact that human=human. But there is that little twinge of "like me" that neverthless happens when I realize that the person I thought I couldn't communicate with I actually can communicate with. I've felt this paradigm shift inside my head when the person who is "not like me" points to pictures and I know what he means or I realize I can understand the sentence even if it's mostly vowels but it's still a sentence or anything else that is communication. I can actually feel the shift to "oh...like me" once the communication opens up. I know this is horribly unfair to people who simply never actually will communicate regardless. They are every bit as human as me. I know this for a fact. But this lack of communication is such a gulf that it's a fact I have to keep in mind by conscious will because their brains seem so incredibly different from mine. Why should an act of communication cross this gulf? I suppose it's because once it happens, I have some sort of image of what they are thinking (because they communicated it) and it's this image that I recognize. I think this happens with a lot of people. The divide isn't wheelchairs or canes or sign language or mental retardation that doesn't prevent a person from communicating in some way (even if non-verbally). The true divide is the ability to communicate and if somebody is on the other side of it, they will be considered too utterly alien by many.

Is true. But I was just trying to explain the word ''normal'' as ''the majority''.

It goes both ways. If a person *can* communicate, others think "oh, like me" and are unable to see the real and often huge differences.

I'm currently having this problem with a neighbor. She keeps her apartment door open a crack and when she sees people entering or leaving the building, she comes out to socialize with them. I assume she's lonely.

But she will do things to me that my brain just can't handle. And I've explained to her again and again that my brain is different and I can't do X or Y or I can do X and Y at the same time, or whatever it is that she's trying to do to my brain that is just hurting and frustrating me. And she says, "oh, okay," and then goes right back to doing exactly what I just asked her not to do to my brain.

And I don't know what to do (other than only leave or enter the apartment at a dead sprint so as to avoid her. But I don't have that much energy reserve, so I'm stuck with her) because she sees/hears "communication" and automatically thinks "like me" and then just goes about doing whatever it is that she normally does to people with zero regard for how much she's hurting me.

People have a difficult time accepting certain people can't socialize the way they can. This is the problem I have. It's not so much a matter of communication, more a matter of socialization. People have thought I was up to no good or viewed me as 'suspicious' just because I can't do what they want, cannot socialize in the way they expect me to, that is, bear the brunt of their disrespect with a cheerful smile on my face and in good spirit, the way everyone who is like me should. Some like myself can, but I can't, so I choose to avoid more often than not, and when I don't, I keep to just basic small talk, before I say, "I have to go now...".
When I try to get out of talking to them is when they make up rumors as to why I did that. "Why did she take off like that, what is she up to, what is it she doesn't want us to know? She must be doing drugs and she doesn't want us to find out..." blah blah blah. I've heard it all. The simple fact is, I just don't want to socialize the way they want me to so I choose not to. Sometimes the truth really is that boring.

*shrugs*

Last edited by ooOoOoOAnaOoOoOoo on 03 Oct 2010, 4:57 pm, edited 1 time in total.

^ I like how you put that.

Thanks, Meadow

You're welcome, Ana

I now think I'm not normal at all, so I feel depessed.

Last edited by Joe90 on 04 Oct 2010, 11:58 am, edited 2 times in total.

Swing to opposite extremes much?

Yeh because I thought about all the embarrassing things I have caused in my childhood, and I feel so embarrassed and angry with myself now. My mum told me that when I ws 10 years old I layed on the ground in public in the street bawling because my mum was speaking to her friend, and her friend had a 10 year old too who outgrew that a long time ago. And other things like that I feel embarrassed of now, and it's all come back to me now and I feel like a freak.
And all these Aspies here seem to think it ain't normal to have a few difficulies, so I may aswell agree.

Plus I've got PMT today - where I get angered out easier than other times. I hate being me.
But other days I do feel normal, so I suppose I, as an Aspie individual, feel normal in some ways, but in other ways I feel I do embarrassing things what aren't normal.

(that's right - I am a girl. Everybody thought I was a boy because of my stupid nickname. But can't change the nickname now)

Last edited by Joe90 on 04 Oct 2010, 12:01 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I didn't think you were a boy, but then I looked at your profile a while back.

Good