The Weekend Parade

I start my new job Monday, as a special-ed assistant, working with high-schoolers with autism.
Starting now, my weekends will be the standard Saturday & Sunday––and I expect I will do standard things like laundry & grocery shopping
... and TOY PARADES!

I. Parade!

I cut poster board in half, lengthwise, and yesterday bink and I started drawing the parade. (I especially like the balloon anchored with a rock.)

I want a parade on boards to go all the way around my walls. I will ask other people to help.
I invite YOU: the boards are 2 feet (.6 meters) high:
* * * send me a parade participant(s) drawing I can paste on!

Flying sardines?
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II. Ask!

KG lent me this book, Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity (2022), by social psychologist Devon Price. Price is Autistic, and he addresses other Autistic people in the book.
That's how he styles it, in caps, "Autistic people" = identity-first,
vs. "people with autism" = person-first.

Language preferences vary--here's an article about those terms: "Writing Respectfully: Person-First and Identity-First Language".

The article's recommendations basically boil down to Ask people. Don't assume what anything is for other people. This is a pet peeve of mine: Want or need to know something about me? ASK ME!

(When I asked the teacher interviewing me what she wanted most in an assistant, she said flexibility.)

Price's book is what I've wanted: an understanding from inside Autism. I've watched videos from Autistic people too, but this goes deeper. The main subject is masking = Autistic people adopting strategies to appear less "weird", to try to match neurotypical social norms, and how costly that is.

Price asks, what does unmasking look like, and what are its costs?

Price was diagnosed in his twenties, after he already had a PhD, and he writes to other adults.
I wonder what I'll see in high school...
Will some students be disability justice & inclusion rights activists?
I'll find out.
___________________________

III. Move!

This weekend, I'm going to go outside!
Since I quit the thrift store two weeks ago, I've mostly been a pudding, which has been great.
But this is my biggest concern about my new job:
the loss of built-in exercise.

It's easy enough to see the solution--exercise on purpose.
But I have not in my life been great at doing that. Maybe I'll be more motivated now, since I can tell it matters more as my body ages. Maybe.
That's my intention anyway.

I think the hack that will work best is if I WALK to work. It's only a mile, so biking there is almost no exercise, but a brisk walk there and back would be great--energizing, exercise + stress relief. Walk it off!

IV. Hack!

What I like for my own self in Price's book was the permission/ideas to do life hacks to avoid overwhelm.

Some neurotypical (NT) people say, "Everybody's a little bit autistic". That's simply not true--autism is a specific (if highly variable) neurological difference.
Like, everybody is not a little bit pregnant.

But a true thing that NT people mean is that Modern Life Is Too Much for the neurotypical brain, too. The expectations of Be More, Do More, Faster can be obliterating, draining, soul sucking.
I feel that!

Accommodations for disabilities often help everyone--that's the curb-cut effect: "the phenomenon of disability-friendly features being used and appreciated by a larger group than the people they were designed for. For example, many hearing people use closed captioning."

My favorite hack:
YOU DON'T HAVE TO FOLD YOUR LAUNDRY!
I am going to put up more clothes hooks to hang stuff.

This hack, below, is for kids but addresses something I feel--panic or paralysis in the face of Many Things to Do. It helps me (but sometimes I forget!) to break tasks into smaller steps--like this "First, Then" board:

Here's one list (there are many):
Autism Life Hacks, some of which I already do, like read to sleep.

It also includes, Take up crochet. (A friend who did four years in prison said crochet saved her.) Like fidget toys, but also, you're making something.

I wonder if high school students can crochet or knit in class...
I'd like that–– for myself! especially if I'm sitting in Gen-Ed classes listening to lectures on history or whatever. (I don’t know how much I’ll do this – – but part of the job might be attending these classes with the autistic students.)

The spring I was turning twelve, my father taught for a semester in Copenhagen, Denmark, and I went to a public grade school there, taught in Danish.
Come to think of it, I wonder if this was a little like an experience of being autistic? I often didn't know what the social rules were. (I didn’t even speak the same language.)

I guess my parents thought this Immersion experience would be good, but they did nothing to help with it, such as arrange for Danish lessons!

(Also at that same time, my mother was deeply depressed, and I spent hours after school sitting with her in a darkened room. She would lie on the couch, and I would rub her head, read to her, bring her cups of tea...)

Luckily, Danish children are taught to be inclusive (or were, this was the 1970s, and the society was mostly homogenous), and they and the teachers were very kind to me, this awkward foreigner.
But I was frightened or uncomfortable all the time, and mostly I held myself still and tried to be invisible.
I couldn't even pretend to "mask", not being able to speak Danish.

The children shocked me, but in a positive direction. At recess, for instance, the girls went out of their way to include the weirdest girl in their games.
At home, girls like her were called names, mocked, and actively excluded--"Don't invite her".

Anyway, I thought of this because it was normal for Danish girls to knit in class. So great! 

A trickier hack: saying no when you feel you should say yes. 

I just told my sister I didn’t want to see her for my birthday because my new job is going to be so involving and possibly overwhelming (even if it all goes perfectly beautifully).

My sister is not someone who reliably leaves me feeling good/cared for/seen. (For instance, she has asked me nothing about my job change.) I don’t know how much she means to upset me, but in she often feels to me like Lucy who delights in holding the football for Charlie Brown, only to endlessly pull it away.

So I don’t want to —and don’t feel it’d be smart for me to—take the risk of another interaction with her that leaves me feeling abraded.

The hack here is easy: Don’t.

Okay--going outside now. I hope you have good weekend, everyone!