"spotting"

A phrasing that particularly angers me:

(From someone posting as "V." on I Blame the Patriarchy)
"And though I am neurotypical, I can spot a person with an autistic spectrum disorder a mile off–in other words, broadening the category hasn’t lessened my ability to distinguish ASD from nerotypical."

Well, gee, where were you the first seventeen years of my life to tell me the reason my grades sucked was ASD?

Backing off from my particular take on this instance of the "I can always just tell" (and the comment doesn't seem to be particularly egregious in any other way), this kind of othering really irks me. "I can always spot those queers/trannies/crips/auties/ferriners/what-have-you because they're not Real People like me." This establishes a fundamental difference between the speaker and these other folks and in my experience once you have a fundamental difference, a value judgement is not far behind.

To be fair, there are some categories that have defining and un-hideable features, be they physical or non. But there are very, very few of them that have nary an exception, nary a variation that might give an onlooker pause. Sure, there are people with ASD who can't "pass" to save their lives (and for many of them, this is very literally what they're trying to do). And then there's me, who despite intensive IQ testing at the age of eight (showing the exact same pattern that would later be the key to my diagnosis) went Stealth NT for almost two decades, figuring there was something wrong with me all along. There's enormous numbers of people just like me, who eventually figure out that maybe they're Asperger's or NLD or ASDNOS or in some other way not NT after a lifetime of almost fitting in. But if they'd just talked to the right people, those ones who can Always Just Tell, they'd've been spared all that because it was so obvious!

Hindsight bias is a wonderful thing. Give a bunch of people two opposite conclusions and the same data and they'll both find incontrovertible support for their conclusion. It's easy to look back and say "oh, it's so obvious, of course s/he is X, this and this and this happened". But somehow it never seems as obvious before you find out the answer.

Maybe I need a tag for "things that piss me off". Seems like everything would get it though, making it less than useful.

The funeral was very nice. I'm still across the country, but less depressed by Serious Blogs than I had feared.

change and control

Joel over at NTs Are Weird has a post up about anxiety, control, and change that really made me think. I think best in writing, so here we go. (Disclaimer: this is about *me* and my own experiences. I do not claim to represent Joel or anybody else regardless of diagnosis. Now hopefully I can keep myself from the urge to disclaim every sentence individually)

I commented, "I hadn’t thought about the relationship between change and control before. I’m not so fond of change myself, but I hadn’t previously tied it to how much I don’t like feeling helpless when things are out of my control. It makes a lot of sense to me that when I’m in a familiar environment or I have a routine, I expect to only come up against things I have control over, problems I have already solved, and this reduces my anxiety greatly."

This is part of it, for sure. I like to forget about my anxiety, dismissing it as something I overcame in high school (cognitive-behavioral therapy did *a lot* to help me get over my nasty social anxiety) or something that only happens when I'm really stressed, but my recent sojourn off my anti-depressants made me realise that I do have anxiety (Tangent: normally I hate that "have x" construction, because it distances the person from the condition, and in the case of mental, emotional, and congnitive stuff often seens to me to be avoidance of responsibility for one's own actions: "I do thus and so because I have x/because of my x". In this case, however, I would say that it is not true that I "am anxious" because it's sporadic, situational, specific. I may be deluding myself. Who knows. End tangent.) And it's worse when I'm in new situations or when I'm not in control of something.

I've also been realising lately the number of other ways in which my dislike of change surfaces. I like to do things in large chunks, with minimal switching between them. I am beginning to wonder if some of my sleep habits are down to this -- I don't want to go to bed (like right now for example, *cough*) because I'm "on a roll", there's something interesting me that I don't want to let go of, and telling myself that it will be there in the morning is wholly unsatisfactory (and half the time untrue, as I move on to something else).

I don't shower often enough because to do so involves stopping whatever I'm doing, going to shower, and then starting something up again. (Also, the physical sensation changes in temperature and wet/dry ness bother me, and I hate hate hate putting clothes on when I'm damp. Not to mention my thick, waist-length hair takes all day to dry. Tangent.) I realise as I think over this that one of the things the psychs keep saying is that I have "problems with initiation" -- with starting things. And maybe it's not only that I have trouble starting the "go take a shower" process, but also that I know I'll have to initiate something else after, that there's actually a whole mess of things that go along with stopping what I'm doing, and that my inertia is a reaction to this.

This inertia really frustrates me sometimes. It's not just that I have trouble starting schoolwork or unpleasant chores. I have trouble showering. I have trouble putting down my book to get up and do something else that I *want* to do, that I chose to do and have been telling myself to do all week. I have trouble making myself food. And yet I realise that part of me thinks of it all as "laziness", the part of me that thought too hard about test scores and my "academic potential". Sigh. I am slowly, slowly, working on excising that part of myself and coming to understand my shortcomings as part of myself, but it's hard.

Again, I seem to have strayed from my topic. Perhaps I will come back to this, pick out subtopics (this turned out to be broader than I'd thought) and write more in-depth on things.