ChatBrat wrote:
Amanda, I am very interested in knowing some things. I'm one of these people that have to know the particulars of an interesting situation so I can analyze it and study it. If you would be so kind to indulge me, I would appreciate it.
That is fine, although I am not too interested in self-dissecting infinitely, so I'll probably stop at this post. I understand the need to analyze things, but I am interviewed enough by the media it gets tiring to satisfy random people's curiosity as well. You can read Donna Williams's responses to this sort of thing
in the comments section to this post she made where she said, among other things, "I am not a press button interview, I’m not a data-output machine, It’s Christmas, There’s a human being in here.." ...if you want to get to know me, please
read my blog, where I have already answered these questions and probably anything else you could possibly want to know about me, in far more depth. (And that goes for anyone else too.)
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1.) Were you diagnosed with Autism as a child?
Yes, at age 14.
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2.) Were you in special classes in school?
I was in regular classes at first and then special classes later.
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3.) Have you always stimmed and/or has it increased as you have aged?
Yes, and yes. I did a lot of it when little, learned to hide it a bit somewhere during school age, and became more and more unable to hide it at the same time that there were many classroom changes in school and the bathrooms (where I mostly hid to do it) were more crowded.
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4.) Have you always hummed/chanted or is that a new stim?
It's a very old one, as old as any I can remember. I used to hum along to sounds I heard, or just hum in general. I also hummed in order to be able to deal with certain sounds, such as the vacuum cleaner, which I could not tolerate unless I hummed loudly in tune to it.
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5.) Were you verbal growing up?
I had some words, then lost them in infancy, then slowly regained them, then gradually (through a period of intermittent speech and non-speaking) lost them from puberty to adulthood, it was not abrupt or simple the way the article might have made it sound. The media always gets all the information from me that I can give them, but they always oversimplify it in one way or another because my life doesn't fit a sound bite very neatly.
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6.) Why did you stop talking a few years ago?
Because it was the end product of years and years of the periods of being unable to talk, or having speech not match what I meant to say, becoming longer and longer. As I said, it was not abrupt. When I was 12 I had only a few periods of being unable to talk, although not all my speech was to communicate my thoughts (a lot of it I thought of as like a puzzle I had to solve by finding the right words to say in response to other words I heard). When I was 15 there were enough periods of being unable to talk that being allowed to write instead was formally written down as an accommodation I might need in school sometimes. By the time I was 19 there were several periods of lack of speech every day, and that's when I finally got a communication device.
This is related to a movement disorder that some autistic people acquire in adolescence (or that worsens in adolescence from a milder form in childhood, they're not sure) that, sometimes gradually and sometimes abruptly, makes it more difficult to do various things, of which talking is only one. I learned of this movement disorder because of freezing in place at an autism-related event and having someone who had the disorder tell me what it was. I gave the literature to my doctor who had known me since early adolescence, and he told me that this was definitely the same pattern he had seen in me over the years, and added it to my diagnoses (I had had CNS disorder NOS diagnosed to explain the increase in difficulty with some things, and there were assorted references to catatonia or slowing/stopping of movement and/or speech in the records (some of which thought of it as 'dissociation' which had become a catch-all for everything including shutdowns), but he became more explicit in the notes after that diagnosis from then on). My own guess is that these things had always been hard, but the stresses and changes of adolescence made them, which had always been low on my brain's priority list, start cutting out more and more, to make room for other understandings and things that I had to be doing at the time (and this guess has happened among other people I know with this movement disorder as well).
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7.) Did you have a good support system growing up?
In some areas, an amazingly good one, in some areas, none at all.
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8.) Were you in counseling as a child and teenager?
Yes, starting at age 7 with an MFCC who wasn't well-versed in autism and explained away all my autistic traits as trauma-related (from an event I didn't actually find that traumatic), then going to more serious sorts of professionals at the age of 13 and 14.
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"In my world it's a place of patterns and feel. In my world it's a haven for what is real. It's my world, nobody can steal it, but people like me, we live in the shadows." -Donna Williams
27 Feb 2008, 4:25 am
