Strange Real Estate

Autism: telling my friends who I am

I am autistic.

Yeah, me.

“But you’re pretty social, “ some of you might say. 

Yes, I am fairly social in certain situations, but this took literally years of concentrated observation and intensive learning. If any of you knew me in elementary school (and some of you did), you would have seen a very different picture.

 “But why label yourself? Isn’t that limiting?”  

Ever since I can remember, I’ve felt different from just about everyone. Things that didn’t seem to bother anyone else would drive me to tears. Noises that no one else noticed drove me batty. I couldn’t go into shopping malls without feeling like a trapped animal. I was in Gifted education but couldn’t read a non-digital clockface or tie my shoes until 3rd grade. I never understood why people joined groups and I still don’t. Along the same lines, I never found a group of people I could relate to. 

I spent most of my school years lost in books, contemplating existence, and conversing with trees, and feeling a level of loneliness I couldn’t even begin to explain.

Around 5th grade, I met someone my age like me. It was like Robinson Crusoe finding someone else’s footprints on his island and it changed my life completely. Suddenly I had someone I could discuss human incomprehensibility with, someone who also saw pep rallies as unspeakably horrendous, someone who looked at Politics like you’d peer into the monkey cage at the zoo.. “Why are they doing THAT?” Most importantly, we could have a good laugh about it. 

Up until last year, I thought the scant handful of similar people I met were flukes, that this tribe of ours was too small to register on any radar. My good friend and I called it being “uncrowed”. Well, it turns out “uncrowed” is the same as “autistic”. Since I found this out, I have met some absolutely brilliant people, and for the first time I find myself relating to a group, truly identifying with them. And you know what? It’s pretty awesome! Saying that I’m autistic isn’t limiting. This is something that’s always been a part of me, I just have a name for it now. And I have a way to find others like me.

I have Asperger’s by the way, which is on the autistic spectrum. You might not think this to look at me, but this is why autism is a spectrum. This spectrum covers a wide range of people, from people who are mildly affected, to those who are unable to communicate conventionally at all. It is a physical difference in the way our brains work. Just like having brown hair or having blue eyes is a physical trait. Some people with brown hair happen to be disabled, some are not. All people with brown hair are not perfectly alike, of course. And all autistic people are not like Rain Man, waiting for Judge Wapner to show up on the television set. We’re not all math geeks or savants or computer programmers. Some of us are artists and dreamers. One thing we all have in common: we don’t fit into boxes and stereotypes very well.

Something that is extremely important to understand, is that regardless of level of ability, all autistic individuals are people. 

Yeah, I know that seems ridiculously obvious, right? But if you peruse the internet, you’ll find that some astoundingy ignorant things are said about those with autism. The whole “lack of empathy” bit for instance. This is considered a hallmark sign of autism, and it’s a major cornerstone of theories put forth by some of the most renowned autism “experts”. However, what is meant by the word empathy is not compassion, but social reciprocality: the ability to sense what other people need or expect from you in social situations.

That is all. 

But by using the word “empathy” instead, the experts are basically lumping us in the same category as sociopaths. These people lack empathy as well, do they not? And empathy is considered by many to be what makes us human. So what does it mean when they say autistic people lack empathy? It means nothing less than the dehumanization of an already deeply misunderstood group of people. If you know an autistic person, than you know that they do have feelings, and that if anything, they feel things much more intensely than most. They may just lack the ability to express these feelings in conventional ways. 

I have seen a primarily non-verbal “low-functioning” autistic man’s eyes light up with love when confronted with a newborn family member. Even though he could not look at the child directly or hold it, the feelings were unmistakably there. 

How can people persist with such inaccurate notions of autism? Well, I cannot help but notice that the most visible organization for Autism, Autism Speaks, does not actually let autistic people speak for themselves. This is a bit worrisome, don’t you think? How can you truly understand a group of people if you never let them share what it’s like to live inside their own experience?

Much of the information (I won’t say education) this organization provides concerning autism puts it in a negative, even dehumanizing light. One of their most watched videos on YouTube, Autism Every Day, features a parent who states that she has contemplated murder/suicide due to her autistic child. She actually says this in front of the child. 

Wow. 

To make matters worse, people have actually done this. Yes, raising a severely autistic child can be extremely difficult, but how does this justify deeming them unfit for life? That is the very essence of inhumanity right there.

As Autism Awareness Month draws to a close, please take the time to look for blogs and videos by autistic individuals. There are countless voices and viewpoints to be heard, and some truly amazing and unique people to be met. Let them speak to you.

Sensitivity or Why I’m taking a Vacation from Facebook

A father has just lost his child and the news reporter shoves her microphone into his face for a sound byte. His eyes are black pools pulling me into incomprehensible grief. He hasn’t even begun to realize what has happened to him. It’s only a moment, but it’s agonizing to watch.

The scene is still clear in my mind because it’s one of the last times I remember voluntarily watching the news. Since that time, I’ve come to understand my own sensitivity level and that exposing myself to these images does me harm. How much harm? Well, quite a few years ago there was a plane that blew up over the Atlantic due to a malfunction. I saw a snippet of the news that night. No survivors, they said. Then they showed an airport official who was helping set up a meeting area for the loved ones and family members of the dead. The official said one thing, “We’re trying to make them as comfortable as possible.” I turned off the TV but it was too late.

All I could think of was those people sitting in that airport lounge, going over the last moments with their wives, husbands, friends, children, sisters, brothers.. The trite phrases we always say to each other when we go on a trip: “See you soon”, “Love you”,”Call you when I get there”. The quick hug and then the retreating figure, and never the thought that this is the last time. 

Who were these people? Just nameless cogs in the media engine? A reason for increased ratings? No, these were shining threads in an unknowable tapestry, something impossibly sacred, too sacred to be reduced to a blurb at the bottom of a screen.

Each life with all it’s dreams, hopes, loves, and unique details. A treasure house, a storybook. Something precious and irreplaceable.

Why should I care? It wasn’t my loss. I didn’t know them.. but I didn’t have to know them. I could feel them. And I could feel the pain (a mere echo, but excruciating) of the people in that airport lounge. 

I was home by myself. I started to cry and couldn’t stop. Why did the news show this to me? I couldn’t help these people. I wasn’t a part of this terrible story, but now it was in my mind. That night I cut myself for the first and only time in my life. It was the only way I could dispel the grief that wasn’t even mine in the first place.

After hard lessons like these I know I have to be guarded about the media I expose myself to. If I come across a graphic image on my internet forays, I can’t just yawn and click the back button. I have to send a HazMat Cleanup Team into my own head and hope that there are no lingering toxic deposits left behind. If I get too many shocking images in the course of my week, I find myself sinking into a boiling tar pond of misanthropy. 

How do I and other highly-sensitive people exist in a world that is pathologically desensitized? 

We have to find safe harbors, places of positive information and energy. Places where we can tell each other stories of those who’ve survived, who’ve made a difference, or even just about the seemingly ordinary people who are living lives of kindness and humility.

To tell the unfortunate truth, Facebook is not a safe harbor. I see posts shared with good intentions (usually) that contain graphic images, images that make me cry, or make me want to avoid leaving the house. There are magnitudes of things out there that need changing, multitudes of people who sincerely need help, animals that are suffering, but do we need to use images as a cutting blade to initiate action? You see, the blade isn’t cutting those who are doing the wrong. It’s cutting friends and family, the small handful of people on Facebook who are much more sensitive than the average. This is not something these posters intend to do, they may just not realize how sensitive we are.

However, I cannot ask people not to express themselves freely. That would be unfair to them. And I can’t just unfollow certain people that are friends of mine simply because I am upset by their own expressions. These are things they believe in strongly. 

What I can do, however, is go on a Facebook vacation. This is a good thing. I want to see you guys in real life. I want to look you in the face over coffee and have a good laugh over some silly tale. I don’t want to simply scroll through your lives. Not like this. There must be better ways to keep in touch over the internet, and there are certainly better social sites out there.

I am rejecting Facebbook. Wholeheartedly.

I am NOT rejecting you guys. YOU are wonderful and brilliant.. YOU can not be contained behind a screen, in little boxes, in a litany of Like buttons, or in snippety little lines of text. YOU are larger than life! YOU are more than just a laundry list of definitions!

(Perhaps you can even join me and we can have a Facebook prison break! That would be awesome.)

So, I will be mostly absent from Facebook from here on. I will probably still post the occasional picture of the flowers in our yard or yet more cat photos (as if the internet hasn’t had enough of that). I will still be on Goodreads, Pinterest, and Twitter so you can find me there. (Or find me at Starbucks, since I’m there just about every day. I’ll look forward to seeing you!)

                                Love, Holly

2 poems on silence: Poem #2

Archaeology

I found you waiting at dusk
beside the ancient route
Flights of blackbirds filled the air with their sharp cries
While sunstruck clouds like chapel windows
flickered out
The deepest hues of night were blooming in your eyes

Come with me, you said,
to a kingdom lost in a well of silence
We’ll walk the mute streets
where arcane shadows creep
No footfalls but our own
and no living soul to deny entrance
To these libraries
where books of perished languages sleep

Our eyes drank in their vanished words and raptured songs
Of world trees awash in light
and wind ringing wild through leaves
Of canticles of seastone and coral,
lullabies to cure all wrongs
Moon madrigals, rain hymns,
siren’s croon,
and yet, who grieves?

With what perfect silence their shining empires fell
And no seer, priest, or sage could reveal
The first terrible seed of that dissonant spell
That stilled their sacred songs
In shrouds of the unreal

From abandoned towers and rooftops black banners unfurled
Desolate avenues and crumbling facades hid uncounted sorrows
Yet in ruined rooms dust motes like molten stars whirled
Echoes of light dancing
In a hundred dreaming windows

And the frozen air whispered the secret we could never tell
That one skylark voice still sang
From the bottom of the well

2 poems on silence: Poem #1

There are so many shades of silence.
Silence like an indrawn breath, anxious
like frayed threads
that lamp flickering Morse code at the end of the street.
Waiting in the dark at 3am, when even the crickets suddenly hush their jittery violins.
Is there something out there?

Claustrophobic silences, too close, suffocating…
Are they waiting for me to speak? I don’t know what to say…

Silences like an elixir.
Escaping into the silence between words.
Into the dappled sunlight drifting across the wall in late afternoon,
into hidden desert canyons where the silence is an infinite freedom
and suddenly you know where you are
and who you are.

Sometimes silence is small,
a thimble-full of hush, sometimes just big enough to escape into.
And sometimes silence makes you feel small,
the silence of space, vast furnace stars roaring away in soundless vacuum.

Sorrowful silences.
The homeless man weeping at the bus stop as you pass him in your car, his anguish beyond your reach to comfort.

The silence of aloneness.
The teenager in the coffeehouse watching the laughing group outside the window, lost in a wilderness of unwanted silence.

Joyful silences.
Sitting across the table from one who truly sees you and you don’t have to speak.
No ballast of words pulling you down, only warmth and love.
I know you.
I love you.

Let us find a moment tonight
to become reacquainted with silence.
Invite it in
and just listen to it.
You may find yourself surprised
by what it has to say.

The Graceful Bastion - William Carlos Williams

A white butterfly
in an August garden,
light as it may seem

among the zinnias
and verbenas,
fragile among the red

trumpeted petunias,
is ribbed with steel
wired to the sun

whose triumphant power
will keep it safe,
free as laughter,

secure against
bombardments no more
dangerous to its

armored might than if
the cotton clouds
should merely fall.


—-
This poem can be found in The New Yorker Book of Poems
Published by Morrow, 1974

Nothing Gold Can Stay - Frost

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

—-
This poem can be found in The Poetry of Robert Frost
Published by Holt Rinehart & Winston, 1969
 

Everything is plundered… - Anna Akhmatova

Everything is plundered, betrayed, sold,
Death’s great black wing scrapes the air,
Misery gnaws to the bone.
Why then do we not despair?

By day, from the surrounding woods,
cherries blow summer into town;
at night the deep transparent skies
glitter with new galaxies.

And the miraculous comes so close
to the ruined, dirty houses—
something not known to anyone at all,
but wild in our breast for centuries.


—-
This poem can be found in Poems of Akhmatova, translated by Stanley Kunitz
Published by Mariner Books, 1997