If they want to know what it's like to be autistic . . . or at least what it's like to be me . . . here is how they should spend their day:
1. Wake up in panic from some noise - possibly the alarm clock, possibly anything else. This is after being kept awake half the night by the sound of dripping water in the neighbor's apartment.
2. carry a kitchen timer and a laminated list around with them to make sure they eat, clean their body, check their e-mail (in case there's an important last minute announcement from a professor), pack their schoolbag, get clothes out, get dressed. The list is to make sure they get everything done and the timer is to make sure they don't spend too much time doing it. They must feel very rushed during this process, trying to get everything accomplished before timer beeps. And it will take three hours.
3. leave at the last possible minute because they still weren't able to get everything done and are either leaving without having eaten or without having washed or having forgotten to bring an important book. Heaven help if the thing forgotten is the netbook because they cannot take notes by hand due to the pain of dysgraphia.
4. Now they are on campus and will require an injection of adrenaline to simulate the stress of being in public. Sitting at their desk, the following accomodations should be made to help them feel more autistic: a special desk with raised sharp ridges to simulate the pain of sitting in a very uncomfortable chair. A spotlight pointed right at their face with a strobe set to simulate for their vision what a fluorescent light feels like to my vision. Make sure the room is too hot for how the person is dressed. When the professor begins to speak, there should be someone loudly rustling papers and coughing in their ear so they can only understand half of what the professor says. If the professor turns away so that her lips are not visible, she should only pretend to speak to simulate not being able to understand anything she says,
5. Next the class should break up for group discussions. A speaker should be placed right by our person's ear, emitting painful shrieking sounds to simulate what it sounds like to me when people scrape their desks across the floor. If the person has to cover their ears with their hands because of the noise, all people in proximity, especially the person whose desk made the awful sound, should laugh at the person's pain. When the desks are arranged in clumps, everyone int he room should start speaking in nonsense syllables as loudly as they possibly can so that the person is drowning in a sea of voice-sound and unable to pick actual words out of it or understand what the people in their group are saying. Nod along and pretend to be a part of the group without saying anything.
6. When the group session is over, the person should discover that their group has decided that they are the one who is chosen to represent their group's discussion tot he rest of the class. The person then gets to choose whether to try to make something up or make a spectacle of themselves by trying to get someone else to present. Bonus points if the group swears that no one else took notes because they thought you had agreed to present.
7. Repeat above process for a couple more classes. Include watching other people pair and group up between and before classes while the individual is completely ignored. Make sure to surround the person with total strangers to simulate face-blindness. Include at least one moment where someone seems to say hello to the person but as soon as they try to return the greeting they realize the person was actually saying hello to their cell phone. Bonus points if the person on the cell phone gives our person a dirty look for trying to talk to them while they were making a call.
I could go on, but I think I've made my point. I think if something like this were possible, it would give a much better feeling of what it would be like to have my particular variation of autism than just not tweeting or facebooking for a day.
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"In the end, we decide if we're remembered for what happened to us or for what we did with it."
-- Randy K. Milholland
Avatar=WWI propaganda poster promoting victory gardens.
27 Oct 2010, 5:40 pm
Yes, I have had quite a few of those things happen to me before.
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