Hi again!
I used to post here quite a bit back in 2018 and 2019.
Since the CoViD crisis hit, my life has become rather frantic most of the time, so I have not had much time for online social activity, beyond the regularly scheduled online chats that I've been hosting once or twice a month since then.
I work from home as a programmer, together with my boyfriend as a self-employed team -- not making anywhere near as much money as we could if we worked as corporate employees, but the latter is not an option for us for various reasons.
My boyfriend was diagnosed, back in 2000 or so, with what was then called Asperger's syndrome. Since I met him in late 2008, we both suspected that I was probably on the autism spectrum too. I didn't pursue a diagnosis until 2018, and finally received it in the spring of 2019.
Throughout my life, I have always felt like an oddball. Since my late teens, my strategy for coping with this has been to seek out fellow oddballs of one kind or another. To that end, I got involved in a variety of oddball subcultures over the years -- starting with being an LGBT rights activist (I'm bisexual) back in the late 1970's, long before the LGBT community became anywhere near as socially accepted as it is now. (I always expected that there would be SOME progress, but, back then, I never dared to hope that same-sex marriage would become legal within my lifetime!)
Due to my life experience of intermittent involvement in a social movement that has succeeded beyond my wildest dreams (although it still has a long way to go), I am cautiously optimistic about other kinds of social change as well, such as the autistic rights movement.
In some of the various oddball subcultures I have gotten involved in over the years, I have occasionally been a leader or co-leader (and sometimes a founder or co-founder) of a group of one kind or another. I'm far from the world's greatest leader/facilitator, but I seem to be better at leading/facilitating groups than I am at participating in groups led/facilitated by others. In groups led/facilitated by others, I too often have trouble figuring out when it's my turn to speak, and I often don't think of anything worthwhile to say on any given topic until the topic of conversation has moved on to something else. When I'm the leader/facilitator, I try to run a group in ways that make it possible for people who share my social difficulties to participate in it.
Anyhow, it seems to me that the autistic community is very under-developed as an organized subculture. I have a lot of ideas on how the autistic community can grow and develop to become generally much more useful, to make it easier for all of us to find friends and build the support networks that we will all eventually need as we get older, and to make life easier for us in other ways too, e.g. finding jobs. My thoughts about these matters are summed up in the following section of my website: Longterm visions for the autistic community.
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- Autistic in NYC - Resources and new ideas for the autistic adult community in the New York City metro area.
- Autistic peer-led groups (via text-based chat, currently) led or facilitated by members of the Autistic Peer Leadership Group.
- My Twitter / "X" (new as of 2021)
14 Oct 2020, 1:17 am
