Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness

So the couple I work for (both autistic/ADHD) have moved on from prefacing things they say with "I know you think you're neurotypical, but..." and now they just side-eye stuff I say and go "Holly. You. Are. Not. Neurotypical."

It's so funny and cute.

(I don't actually think I'm neurotypical, I've been agnostic on the subject for some years. I think various traits of being blind and being an immigrant overlap with neuroatypicality. I think having had to provide two people's worth of executive function was definitely too much for me. But I've never argued with them that I really am neurotypical or anything like that, it's just funnier phrased that way.)

Proud of Andrew. He's a candidate in our area for upcoming local city council elections so he got invited to a hustings tonight.

He did a totally badass job of putting forward what seem like basic points but that are mostly missing from partisan politics: no platform for fascists, freedom of movement is a good thing, we have costed plans to make the city better in a manifesto called "Not Putting Up with This Shit Anymore."

In previous years there'd been shouting and nastiness from activists in another party so Andrew was dreading the hustings but he came away amazed at how much nicer this was -- and that was with a few troublemakers in the corner near me who shouted over people and ranted at any opportunity.

Andrew got lots of applause, the room was friendly, he might've even won us a vote or two.

It's hard for him to do stuff like this because autism but I think that also makes him good at it: like Greta Thunberg says, autism "makes me see things from outside the box. I don’t easily fall for lies, I can see through things." The article goes on to say "The result of her simplistic approach, fuelled by her condition, is that she has presented this issue with more clarity and competence." And -- while I'm not happy about the word "simplistic" here, I know what the writer means, I just wish he could've used a less negative-sounding word -- I've always thought this is true of Andrew as well.

This is an article about how badly prejudiced our society is against autistic people.

It's about a lot of other things, too, of course: parents' desire to protect and control their children, the manifestation of anxieties about a world too complex and specialized for most of us to feel we can grasp, the power of narrative over facts and anecdotes over data.

Those are all the things I expect that story to be about. I expected it to be sad and frustrating. I didn't expect quite so much of it to be about how awful it would be to have a child who is autistic. I didn't expect it to make me so angry, and so protective of the neurodiverse people who form so much of my circles of care that I sometimes feel like I'm the neurologically atypical one.

I keep coming back to this quote, from a mother talking about the MMR vaccine.

“It's the worst shot,” she said, with tears in her eyes. “Do you want to wake up one morning and the light is gone from her eyes with autism or something?”

...Or something?! I can't let this go unremarked-upon. What is it you think you're actually saving your child from? What the hell are you even talking about here?

That makes me so goddam angry because you will never see anyone's eyes light up like Andrew's when he sees that picture of the baby gorilla and the stethoscope or when he writes a poem using as many words that rhyme with "penis" as possible. How wrong do you have to be about autism before you think that it will steal your child from you? How can you think that's worse than the child getting a deadly or deforming disease?

Just yesterday Andrew said again that he hates Autism Speaks because they want him dead. I'm sure they're responsible for a large chunk of these people thinking that autism is a worse fate than death...with the corollary that having to parent a child with autism is even worse than that, of course.

How many kids wouldn't be getting measles, how many families wouldn't have to keep their unvaccinateable tiny babies and cute-bald-kid cancer patients shut in, how much less suffering and fear would there be, how much difference would it make in just this one respect if our society was not so afraid of and ignorant about autism?

Of course there's the point to be made that absolutely no connection has been found between vaccines and autism, and this is the way the argument is usually framed. That's fine as far as it goes, but I want to add something else to it: so fucking what if it did? Even if there was a 100% certainty that a hypothetical child of mine would get autism from a vaccine that would protect her from diseases like measles and contribute to public health, I'd still fucking do it. Autistic people are not a tragedy. They are not the worst thing that can happen to non-autistic people. Far from it: they've contributed to most of the best things that have happened to me.

I've got a splitting headache -- still sinuses, but the amount of red wine I imbibed can't be helping -- but I wanted to say something about what a nice evening I had.

rosamicula asked last night if Andrew or I wanted a free ticket to The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and I think we both agreed that I'd be better suited to it, and indeed I think Andrew would've struggled with Wagamama and red wine and socializing...though
Jane's friend's boyfriend turned out to be Vegan Chris from diffrentcolours's old/Andrew's current work. Jane was astounded when I sat down at the table and one of the first things I said was "I think I made you a chocolate cake when you fixed my laptop!" to him. This has convinced her still further that Andrew is the center of the universe, which he finds hilarious because he doesn't know anyone more antisocial than he is (but then, he wouldn't, would he).

I was a bit wary of the play, having agreed to go along mainly because I wanted to see Jane and it was free, because most depictions of autism are so awful and so far from my understanding or experience of it (limited though both of those things are, naturally). Admittedly, as Jane said afterward, "autism" is never used in the book or play, but the main character's distinguishing characteristics -- not wanting to be touched, being a smart kid at a "special school," remembering precise details, and "shutting down" when overwhelmed in ways that embarrass, anger or concern others --tick all the boxes. And Andrew said the Lowry, where it was on, are inviting autistic kids to performances and doing workshops with them for the duration of the play's time here, so clearly they see some connection with autism and it.

The acting -- particularly from the guy playing Christopher who was on stage the entire time, with a ton of lines to remember (including long lists of numbers and so on), extended semi-verbal meltdowns, even the solution to a geometry problem after the curtain call -- was great, but the setting and effects really made the production. When we sat down, Jane described the set, a huge black background with lit-up white lines dividing it into a big grid like giant graph paper as "a Blondie album cover, or something out of Doctor Who" (it reminded me of Tron, personally) but as the play went on many things were projected onto this huge graph paper: constellations, the outlines of the houses in Christopher's neighborhood, a map of train routes into London, and even Christopher's moments of sensory overload and then the prime numbers whose recitation he used to soothe himself.

I found the sensory-overload depictions (noises and flashing lights that overwhelmed even the neurotypical brains, as Christopher writhed and screamed on stage) particularly compelling and effective, especially that of Paddington station where Christopher first reached London. I had to smile a little at it being Paddington because my only association with that station (a certain bear from darkest Peru nonwithstanding) is being there with my parents, who found particularly the tube to be as upsetting and overwhelming as Christopher did in the play. And I do have a lot of sympathy: I'm not autistic but I'm apparently a couple of standard deviations away from truly neurotypical, thanks I suspect to my anxiety disorder, visual impairment, and living in a culture other than the one in which I grew up) I experience a not-dissimilar overload in noisy, unfamiliar places crowded with people and things to look at.

I remember Andrew telling me when, after reading questions out to him from an autism diagnosis test on the internet, that a lot of them would leave me scoring highly too, but because of my vision rather than my neurology, that this overlap in symptoms often makes it difficult to diagnose autism in blind people: we all struggle in unfamiliar places, fail to interpret body language or facial expressions (I can't remember if I wrote about this here but once Andrew asked me out of the blue "What is eye contact anyway? Is it just staring at someone's eyes for a long time?" and I replied that I'm probably the worst person out of all the people he knows to answer that and I've been told all my life I'm bad at it (even if I am looking at someone, it doesn't look to them like I am) and he ended up saying "I'm going to Wikipedia it!").

The use of very loud noises and bright flashing or running lights (the grid had LEDs at each vortex that could change color, which led to some dizzying effects) did a good job of expressing for us neurotypicals what "normal" sounds, textures and lighting can seem like to people on the... as did overlapping disjointed images and sounds, particularly of speech. Christopher's possibly-irrational-seeming behavior at times made a lot more sense when the world was shown as it appeared to him: how could anyone do anything but scream and flail with all this going on all the time? I must admit the intensity of noise and light did my sinus headache no good at all! But still, I appreciated what it was attempting to convey.

The one incident during this particular night-time that stands out to me is that while, like a good theatre-goer, I turned my phone onto silent before the performance began. I don't normally get notifications for anything but texts and calls anyway, but I've set my phone up so e-mails from Andrew (which I basically treat like texts since he won't use a mobile phone) will make it vibrate. So when I felt the ankle next to my handbag buzz, I half-pulled it out of its little pocket to sneak the quickest look at my phone. I know phones are taboo at things like this but he's autistic and I'm basically his carer and I take both of those things seriously. I had barely time to process the subject line of his e-mail (which luckily told me all I needed to know) before a man sitting two seats away from me reached over his companion to grab my left arm hard enough to snap my head toward him in alarm as I dropped my phone back into its pocket in my bag. He made some kind of gesture at me that disappointed my contrary nature because having inadvertently already done the thing he wanted me to do -- put my phone away -- I wasn't able to defy him.

But that irony, being shamed for checking up on my autistic husband during a play about an autistic kid, left a lingering bitterness that I hope made him glad that whoever he was with was sitting between him and me or he'd have gotten an earful on the subject!