as small as a world and as large as alone

5:41am December 23, 2014

vensre replied to your post: I have a collection of books by autist…

I’m motivated now to seek out those of the books you mentioned that I haven’t read yet. Nobody Nowhere was so important to me when I was first diagnosed.

Some of them I like better than others, but all of them are real classics in terms of a time period when people were still working out what to say and what not to say about being autistic, so people were more open about things that today, they would never say, many of them.  Things have changed.  Of course even back then, they got crapped on for not being perfectly representative.  Some things never change.

Also understand that my taste in autism books is very idiosyncratic, so what’s  "OH WOW!“ to me may be "WTF?” to someone else.

But yes, Nobody Nowhere helped me a lot, as did Somebody Somewhere, Like Color to the Blind, Everyday Heaven, Autism and Sensing: the Unlost Instinct,  Autism: An Inside Out Approach, The Jumbled Jigsaw, and both editions of Not Just Anything.  I haven’t yet managed to get through Exposure Anxiety.  I’ve found that for exploring who I am with regard to certain experiences, reading her books is amazing, especially because she’s closer to me within the broad category of autism than most authors are.  But at the same time, she also falls for a lot of really weird pseudo-medical stuff, so I always make sure to check and double-check and triple-check and quadruple-check if necessary any health claims she make about various products and their effect on autism,  Because while she does draw line, she draws them way further out than I would.

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