9:37pm November 16, 2014

It wasn’t for attention.

I was living in a residential facility at the time. All of a sudden my body would not stop moving. It felt like I was being carried along with it. Running in circles around the house, making yelping noises. Hands grabbing things, setting them down in new places. Or pounding the walls, flicking light switches on and off, opening and shutting drawers and cabinets. All on infinite repeat until I thought I would collapse.

Fortunately it was Nick on duty that night. Nick was the good staff person, the one the other kids conspired to get fired because he was nice to me and kept them from bullying me. (I heard them describing to each other how to systematically, one by one, come to the other staff and say that something about Nick made them “feel unsafe”, and how eventually if they just kept implying that he could be a chid molester, he’d get fired. They were right. He did. He was not a child molester and they knew it, they said out loud that they knew it. They did this to remove the protection that he represented for me and my roommate, both of whom were their prime bullying trgets because we both actually had severe cognitive and emotional problems, rather than being put there because the place had started admitting anyone whose parents wanted them off their hands because they were a general pain in the neck. Bad combination, that, but it happens all the time when facilities or schools start losing money.

But fortunately none of that had happened yet. So Nick came in and immediately knew something was very wrong. He asked me, “What’s wrong?” My entire demeanor said “I don’t know, and I’m scared, and I don’t know what’s going on, and I’m really scared, and I want to stop.” He could actually read me, so he took all that in. OTOH, my mouth said, lightly and breezily, “I just want the attention.”

He immediately said “No, I know you, and I know that’s not the reason.”

Not that we ever did figure out the reason until five years later. But I hate that I’d been told “you do stuff for attention” so much that I actually echoed it back as a reason for why I did something I didn’t understand. I used it the same way staff usually used it – “I don’t understand this person’s behavior, and so I will assume it’s just for attention because that’s convenient.”

I know other autistic and neurodivergent people who learned to say the same thing in response to the same line of questioning. I find this really upsetting. We get trained to do their job for them. To put ourselves in their compartments before they even need to get a chance to. It scares me, it disgusts me, it angers me.

The answer, by the way, is autistic catatonia, specifically catatonic excitement. Possibly with some akathisia thrown in. But those answers weren’t going to be found at a place that had me misdiagnosed with “infantile psychosis and childhood schizophrenia” like some kind of 1970s nightmare transplanted into the nineties. This sort of thing is why it’s a terrible thing for anyone – anyone – to automatically make the first assumption of a person’s motives as “attention”. Because usually it’s not. Usually there’s a reason. Sometimes that reason is really important to find out. Calling it attention-seeking means you stop looking. Catatonic excitement sometimes kills people.