9:33pm December 4, 2014

When my video went viral.

When my video went viral, I found it very upsetting. I wanted people to listen to my words, my ideas, but so many people made it about my being nonverbal, and autistic. The video’s content was never exclusive to autism, as one glance at the dedication should show you. I made it for Ashley X, and Ashley X is not autistic. And my being nonverbal had nothing to do with my message. If I’d still been able to talk well enough to narrate a video, I would have, and the meaning of the video would not have changed at all.

That said, there were three responses that made my day.

One was a group of women of color activists who connected the ideas in the video to growing up speaking only Spanish, and teachers looking down on them, seeing them as unintelligent.

One was a man who had done time in an aphasia rehab, and he talked about the way the staff discouraged people from finding their own ways to communicate — only words would do. He said some people stopped even trying to communicate, out of frustration. Then they were written off as hopeless.

Those two responses are about politics and power, and they were great responses because they followed my intent so exactly — take my ideas and apply them to other situations. That’s vital.

But my personal favorite responses were ones that went like this (paraphrased):

“I was watching your video and my autistic daughter came into the room. She is nonverbal, and had never shown the slightest interest in videos. But she was immediately attracted to this one, and figured out how to play it over and over, which would’ve continued all day long if we hadn’t had other things to do. I don’t know what she saw about this particular video but thank you for making something that caught my daughter’s interest.”

I can’t describe how happy that made me. I love when young autistic children have that kind of a response to me online or in person. And I was flooded with similar letters, including ones that were making the parents rethink what they’d assumed about their children’s cognitive abilities. But I got a lot of letters from parents of kids who would not stop watching the video.

And that made everything, even the bullies and cyberstalkers and death threats and attempts to denounce me as either too severely autistic to have written that, too mildly autistic to be worth listening to, or faking autism altogether.

There is no feeling better than knowing you might just have provided a young autistic child with their first glimpse of an adult who looks like them, presented in a positive light. I still remember how Nobody Nowhere, among others, made me feel, and part of what has driven me to improve my writing and communication skills, is wanting to give someone else that feeling I got when I realized there were others like me out there, others living lives I was not even being allowed to dream about.

I still hid under my desk sometimes when I saw my view count climbing. I’m still not comfortable with publicity, although I’ve learned to do it if I had to. But those children… That’s why I go to such lengths to describe the workings of my mind. It’s not primarily for nonautistic people. It’s for autistic people to understand themselves a little better, to feel less isolated, to dream about having real friends who understand them, and living an adulthood outside of institutions of any kind regardless of their skill levels. I love every story I hear of an autistic adult bring approached by autistic children who never approached anyone else. There’s a mutual recognition going on.

ETA: A bunch of proofreading edits just corrected. I was sleepy and using Swype when i first wrote this, which can be a dangerous combination. Especially since Swype typo are not like regular typos.

Regular typos, you can kind of see that someone meant to hit the wrong key.

Even normal autocorrect typos you can often learn to tell what the person meant to say. (Although you can go to Damn You Autocorrect for some really hilarious ones. Including one that would not be built into the normal autocorrect, so you know you’re actually seeing something about what the person has been writing, or possibly what websites they’ve visited.) But it’s still hard to tell what they meant, often times, because the typo looks like a whole word, and often looks like a word that would fit in context. It reminds me of my old echolalic speech and typing where i would say something I wasn’t thinking, but nobody would know because it sounded gramatically and often situationally appropriate.

But Swype (and other swipe keyboards) has so many built-in mechanisms to guess at what you’re trying to say, that when it gets it wrong, it gets it so wrong that if you come back an hour or two later to proofread, or, as in my case slept for a few hours, you have no idea what you were trying to say and have to try to repiece it together from scratch.

So right now I’m typing on my Bluetooth keyboard because at least now the typos will be recognizable as typos, and it will be easier to tell what i meant by them.