So There's No Confusion About the Camp I belong To

For the most part I consider myself to be a fairly controlled and collected individual. For the most part I can maintain a working relationship with people I'm not trying to impress or to endear myself to. Coworkers, for example, are people I only have to see in the confines of work and never again. So as long as I'm doing my job, I will always have a reason to talk to them.

When I try to talk to those same people in a social fashion is where I start to waiver.

Today I had one of those moments. A shop keeper who was rather friendly to me was in her store today. Against all of my instincts (the ones that say stop going into those places when you have no money to shop with) I went in. And as before we had a great conversation. Where did I mess up?

I started yammering away like an idiot about how I wanted to be a tarot reader, blah, blah, blah. Then when I was sure she didn't want to hear it all, I started apologizing about fifty times and repeating myself and...if you've ever had a kid with Asperger's or if you have the diagnosis, you might recognize the behavior.

This is the one aspect of my personality that I cannot deny. It is the one real aspect of Asperger's Syndrome that I can't tell someone I have complete control over. Because you see, it's not my ability to read social cues that's the issue. It's not talking a mile a minute about my favorite subjects and it isn't stimming or tics. I mean, I don't even think it's an issue I would ever ask for help with either but it's something that's there.

There's no doubt that socially I am a bit off. It happens more or less when I'm actively trying to fit in with a group, or trying to *shudder* make a friend, heaven forbid.

Sometimes it costs me when I fuck up as badly as I did today...in a shop owned by a Salem psychic. Other times the day is at least partially salvagable, like the time I tried to make my very own episode of The Hunted, with the help of Ned Donavon, Mark Bedell and their respective teams. After four or five minutes alone Mark and the others (while Ned went to get drinks) I was a bit of a bumbling idiot that didn't exactly inspire the feeling of "Lets give this guy a sword".

This entry isn't meant to be a pity the kid rant. It's more or less a statement that yes, I do acknowledge that I have some difficulties. Yes, Asperger's seems like the best word to describe them. I try to overcome them the only way I know how, by getting in with people who have the same goals as I have. Sometimes I succeed and sometimes I fall flat on my ass.

Sometimes, like is often the case with my own family, I piss people off whether I intend to or not. Sometimes I could care less if I do other times, it burns me in the long run and I stand there wondering what the hell just happened?

That's just a part of who I am. It's a part of the everyday challenge that is being me.

We Are the Cure

Without a doubt, X2 was the best of the X-men movies. There were memorable characters, a strong story, and even the most insignificant characters (in this incarnation of the X-men continuity) like Iceman, Rogue and the lizard tongued kid who only got two major scenes total got some modicum of development.

You know what, I loved X-men Origins: Wolverine too. Liev Schriber's Sabertooth could bend Tyler Mane's character over a table and make the latter feel greatful for the experience. And I don't care what anyone says, I think they gave us just enough Gambit to satisfy my love for seeing my two favorite X-men mutants in one movie.

It's this "I don't care what anyone says, I like X" mentality that irritates so many people. It's the idea that no matter what fault your favorite movie, show, book or political party possesses you will gleefully overlook it out of blind love.

There are many explanations people choose for this. You're "brainwashed", you're "stupid, retarted, etc." None of them are any better reasoned than your reasons for liking something that so many people hate. So it comes to that point where you have to just decide what is more important: Enjoying what you love and taking a bullet for it, or pleasing the crowd and renouncing your faith in it, convincing yourself that this is your opinion and not theirs.

God knows I've been in that situation time and again. When I was a kid I would outright declare my love for shows like Dinosaurs and Power Rangers, because it was true. I loved these shows. But if a group of kids I was trying to look cool for decided those shows sucked, I would immediately berate them just to get accepted into that group.

This was back when I was desperate to fit in, or when grown ups were more concerned with my fitting in than my having any individuality at all. The fact that I was fourteen and was in love with shows like Samurai Cyber Squad wasn't acceptable to them, so naturally I had something wrong with them.

It was that mentality more than anything that lead to the whole Asperger's diagnosis. It wasn't me feeling bad about myself and not understanding why I couldn't fit in. It wasn't like most stories I read about online where the kid always felt like he was different. I knew I was different and I just truly didn't care what anyone thought of me. The reason I wanted to fit in had nothing to do with liking anyone, it had to do with not wanting to get the crap kicked out of me on the way home from school. I figured if I had friends then maybe people wouldn't mess with me so much.

In high school this guy would give me a hard time, not for liking Star Trek, but for talking about it. In the mind of this pasty-faced emaciated child of a broken family, it was perfectly acceptable for him to threaten me, to follow me home and intimdate me, and to harrass me every second he could get. (Mind you he never actually attacked me. To this day I wish I had tested my theory of him being a weak little putz, but that was then and now I could go to prison for acting on the urge. Take note kids, if you think there's a chance in hell you could beat up your bully, do it and feel better for the effort rather than let him walk all over you.)

What made it worse, wasn't the bullying itself, but the fact that teachers and people who should have been punishing this awful behavior kept making excuses for it. There is no justification for bullying, ever. There's no justification for making someone's life a living hell just because you don't like them or what they have to say, but my own fucking high school principal continuously chose to look the other way instead of acting on her responsibility to keep her students safe.

I was being punished for...being who I was. There is no other way to say it.

And maybe when you read this entry, you will see why I obect to the reasoning that lead to my diagnosis. It wasn't out of some need to identify what was "wrong" with me. The diagnosis was forced on me by those very people who were supposed to protect me. It was a label that gave them a convenient out. Instead of addressing the problem of bullying, they blamed me, the victim and the bullies had carte blanche to treat me like shit because they knew there would be no consequence.

Asperger's Syndrome was not and still is not the answer to all of my trials and tribulations. It doesn't foster a desire in me to change and be more like others. All it does is remind me of yet another instance of feeling like I was being blamed for who I was.

This is what kind of prompts the title of the blog entry and the intro explaining my love of certain chapters of the X-men franchise. The quote comes from Magneto's speech in X-men Last Stand, a movie that most people agree was pretty crappy. That is also one that I can say I didn't find to be the best of the series. Although the Iceman/Pyro battle was worth waiting for.

Still, Magento's speech stands in my mind as kind of a pseudo-mission statement of sorts in response to certain events in the media.

Autism Speaks, for example, is gungho for a "cure" for Autism. Like the politicians in X-men who can only see the negative aspects of having a unique genetic mutation, the people who work for this organization suffer from a case of tunnel vision.  They can only see Autism and autistic spectrum disorders as a problem and the people who are afflicted are, in their minds, broken somehow. 

Jodi Piccoult, the author of House Rules doesn't do much better. Jacob, the main character is a character suffering from high functioning autism person with a love for forensic science who winds up in trial for murder. And the entire time, no one listens to him or his side of the story. The so called "neurotypical" people never once ask him if he committed the murder. They take everything at face value and weep for the poor sick, innocent boy who is only one "You don't got legs Lieutenant Dan" away from being the stereotype mentally disabled character.

Funny, I thought it was only us Aspies who were supposed to take everything literally and not be able to read beyond what we're shown. And the funny thing is, that like the lobbyists for Autism Speaks, and the fictional-yet-all-too-familiar behavior of the characters in House Rules, nobody is asking us if we want a cure or feel like there is something that needs to be cured.

Similarly, if I enjoy a movie, or anything really, what right is it of the average person to judge me based on that? I won't go so far as to say that there are some crappy movies out there. I've known people who are quite idiotic and yes, these are the people who call movies like Eragon "original and phenomenol", but my judgment against them is more or less based on what I all ready know about them. I know people who like Eragon but still manage to be decent people inspite of it.

What it comes right down to is this. The majority of Aspies I have met, the ones like Alex Plank who only try to foster understanding, would never try to force our beliefs on someone.

We love what we love certainly. At the drop of a hat, I could go on and on about what I love about Babylon 5, but I don't because I realize that not everyone wants to hear about it. That is a skill I have honed. Respect for another person's space and not using them as a thin occupying space is something that everyone should learn, not just Aspies. But the fact that I love Babylon 5 and am obsessed with it is not a symptom or a thing that needs to be removed to make me a better person. Toned down, certainly, but not removed.

Meltdowns

Yeah, I still get those. They weren't as bad as when I was in high school, but as melt downs are usually a direct cause of having no control in the situation, high school is sort of conducive to them. I suppose I was lucky enough to never be assaulted by staff members who were "trying to restrain me" the way some kids have. But considering what lead to the meltdowns, you may decide for yourself if the staff were guilty.

In most of my school years really, the meltdowns were the result of bullying. But it wasn't just the bullies that would cause it. First I would tell someone, like a teacher, that someone had threatened me. Then that teacher would be more concerned with semantics.

"Oh, you're not in school, even if you're walking home."

I would repeat myself. But this student is threatening to hurt me here.

"But you're not in school on your way home."

Looking back, I can see the point. I wasn't the school's responsibility on the way home, so they had no power over the student out there. But the nonchalant way they said it got on my nerves and it just added on with each pass. Finally I would stand up and start screaming, sweating, crying. I wasn't trying to be violent or rambunctios, but I was afraid. On the one hand, I was definitely being threatened.

These students would find out how I was walking home and try to catch me on the way. And no one, NOT ONE PERSON walking by would interfere if they saw me getting the crap kicked out of me.

So that, coupled with the fact that people who should have been protecting me refused to do or say anything to the students responsible, added to the fire. I would explode and I would wind up in the principal's office. Or the nurse. Or detention. Because clearly, it was all me. There was no way anyone else was the problem here. (My sarcasmatron is fully functioning, just in case you're a little slow on the uptake)

Like I said, I've long since graduated and except for my stint at Job Corps, my schooling has pretty much been completed for now. But lately the meltdowns come from something new. Largely, they're associated with the stress of living in a homeless shelter, looking for a job and trying to stay afloat in a world that doesn't slow down for anyone.

Sometimes it's just easier to let it run it's course. Other times it's all I can take to avoid them, or at least get to somewhere where it will not attract too much attention. Really, there is no convenient time to have a melt down. And it's especially difficult in a place where people don't know you, they don't recognize the difference between a meltdown and a raging psycho whose screaming in the streets, or they don't know squat about Asperger's or any of the related traits involved.

See, I don't go throwing the word around trying to fish out sympathy. But in situations where I'm trying to explain what might lead to a meltdown, having Asperger's and having people know what it means is a way of cramming it all into a nutshell, the way you might tell someone "I have an upset stomach" when you're visibly sick and someone shows concern.

Alas, we're still in a day and age when people are ignorant to the term. When Marc Brown knows about it, it's about time the rest of us got on board with it too.

Asperger's Syndrome...a word.

I was diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome in late 1996. At that time, the papers written by Hans Asperger's were only translated from the original German text two years prior by doctor Uta Frith and waiting for the right clinically appointed school lapdog came along to read them and subsequently slap me with the diagnosis. I later began to suspect that this was more or less so he could land himself a book deal, as, according to his own words, he was the first person in the area to do any serious reading into the Frith papers.

Since that time I have endured quite a bit of hassle associated with the title. And it's not from people who misunderstand the diagnosis, or didn't know what it was. No, because I never considered myself as having anything wrong with me. I was happy with who I was, so unlike a lot of kids who would have jumped on this Magical Cloak of Social Impunity +5. (Warning, the link is to a video that has some profanity, but it pretains to the episode of South Park that helped me to coin the phrase, so please do click the link if you're ears are fortified. You have been warned.)



The man who had a gift for languages as a child but needed someone else to translate
his work into English. Go figure.

No, the real  hassle came from people like my caseworkers and the other professionals who I worked with in the Southern Vermont Supervisory Union. (SVSU, of which my middle and high school were a part of.)

People like Gene, the woman who held my leash through all of high school. Only surrendering my life, that is taking me off the IEP plan that I wanted to be off when I was a sophomore, a month away from my graduation. Thanks Gene.

Oh and lets not forget my aunt, who still wins the accolades for the most obnoxiously loud and irrevocably stupid person on this Earth to ever share so much as a chromosone of genetic material in common with me. And since I'm related by blood to a person who allowed herself to be beaten for nearly fourteen years by two different boyfriends (I was ten and fourteen for both durations, so don't even think of implying that I had some way of doing something about it.) that is seriously saying something.

That's the woman who was most likely responsible for the Salem Witch Trials in her past life. No doubt crying everyone else's  business from the rooftops, thus leading to their unfair trial and subsequent execution at the end of a long rope. (If only she could join them now)

It's my aunt who ruined relationships and made advancing far in life very difficult because she would sneak around behind my back and tell employers and potential landlords that I had Aspergers. Because my not broadcasting it was, in her opinion, denial. Mind you, her son is at the time of this blog post, nineteen dropped out of high school, with no plans of getting his GED and yet, somehow, still living with her.

Way to go Aunty. You sure won parent of the year on that one.

So much hassle and pain came from that word. And it's all it was; a word. A word to decribe a handful of traits that the good doctor (and I use the word with full rancor) felt needed to be labeled. And, the worse part is, when I denied that there was anything wrong with me, my doctor and my own mother continued hammering the point home. It's like, "Not only are we going to diagnose you, but we are going to beat you over the head with the paperwork until you are on your knees and begging us to cure you."

A whole life time with literally no one on my side, and their weapon was a word.

It's why I try so hard, when I come across other people who have had the diagnosis, to emphasize that this word is just that. A word. It doesn't define who you are.

My name is not Asperger's Syndrome. My name is Nathanielle Sean Crawford.

I am not Asperger's Years old. I am twenty-eight years old as of December sixth.

Asperger's is not the reason I lost my job. It is not what got me hired or helped me keep a job for two years. Asperger's didn't help me get and maintain my own apartment. It didn't get me on stage to perform The Diary of Anne Frank on a genuine stage.

Asperger's is a word. That's all it is.