4:17am January 5, 2015

➸ What is a Gadoodleborger? (Donna Williams)

From the blog of Donna Williams:

The Gadoodlborger is a term that denoted a person who could translate different ‘normalities’, a ‘bridgekeeper’ between different worlds. It was the highest compliment I could pay to those who understood instinctually there was no one ‘normality’ and the inherent equality in difference – what it was to be naturally and truly diversity friendly.

I love the idea of the Gadoodleborger. It has some overlap with ‘cousin’, but it’s actually quite different in some ways, especially in not being specific to autism. Anyway, she’s got a $5 ebook of a poem about a Gadoodleborger out if anyone wants to buy it. But don’t pass it around for free – this is money she needs for household expenses and the like.

There are several other ebooks on her site now. One of my favorites is the one on visual perception, because I’ve gotten so many blank stares and “that can’t be real"s and "that can’t be autism-related, because my autism doesn’t work that way"s.

And even stuff like "well studies don’t show this,” even though most studies of autistic people are of people who can use language accurately in a study context. That cuts out the majority of autistic people. IQ cutoffs – such as ones Donna has encountered as someone with an IQ of 67, and that for all I know I could encounter with my 85 IQ at last testing – cut off a lot of the rest of us, because visual-perceptual problems when combined with things like intense pressure to get things right, a sense of inferiority, test nerves, anxiety…. all those things can lower your IQ score.

So it’s not being studied much because those of us who most need to be studied in this way, are disqualified from studies in one way or another. If it’s not IQ, it’s having too many other conditions in addition to autism, which have a cumulative effect making visual perception worse. And if it’s not any of those, it’s the difficulty of picking up usable language when you have only learned through non-communicative echolalia to string plausible sentences together, but not necessarily being able to communicate what’s happening in your head, or explain it, especially in realtime, especially if you’ve never been asked those questions before. Plus, the very fact of having visual-perceptual problems gets in the way!

Some examples from my own life:

1. Non-communicative language wrecking test results.

When I was 12, I was given a series of personality tests as part of being in an academic summer camp. At one point, I was asked to list three traits to describe myself. This was during a time when everyone was calling me a hippie because of the way I dressed and my over-fondness for sixties pop culture. So I knew three words that I saw put about hippies a lot – “creative,” “open-minded,” and “idealistic”. So I wrote those down with no thought of whether they fit me or not, nor even the capacity to think of whether they fit me or not.

2. Visual perception interfering with test results.

When I was 18 my shrink gave me a bunch of tests he’d never given me before. I was shown 8 line drawings of a single object, like a coat, and asked to say which was were the same and which were different. I did terribly on this test. So I looked at miniscule portions of each coat and determined that each coat was entirely different from each other coat. I didn’t ge a single question right on that test. The pictures were too big.

Which brings me to an amazing revelation I had reading her stuff about visual perception. I have always done better, eyesight problems notwithstanding, at looking at little tiny pictures, little tiny objects, and little tiny letters. The only ball games I am good at have balls no larger than a ping-pong ball (there’s other factors there too). I always got college ruled paper when my teachers wanted us using wide ruled, because een that much difference was enough to make the letters fly into pieces.

Plus nobody ever seems to talk about visual agnosias/dysgnosias (except prosopagnosia, fae-blindness), meaning-blindness, visual fragmentaion, visual “snow”, the world turning into pixels, and images either “whiting out” and disappearing, or tiling their way across my visual field if I stared too long. Few prominent autistic people talk about visual perception in depth and I am grateful to anyone – anyone – who does. Because visual-percpetual problems are a HUGE part of what autism is for me, yet it’d discussed practically nowhere.

In general, I find that Donna will describe experiences that I have had, a lot of the time the first time I’ve ever heard another human being describe an experience I’ve had. EVER. Even if we often disagree as to the source of these various autistic expeience, she has gotten a lot of flack over the years for not being the typical autistic person you meet in the online autistic community. She knows this, too – it’s a pet peeve we have in common, the onine autistic commuity being largely out of touch with autistic people who will never be able to use a computer. Again, we come to different conclusions about what this all means, but we’re making the same observations.

And I just feel so lucky that the first autim book I picked up in a public library one day (intrigued by the front cover, which I couldn’t visully decipher but looked interesting. Rather than Emergence or Thinking in Pictures,both of which are written in a style I have trouble following, and while some aspects of Temple’s life resonate with mine, they didn’t deliver the wake-up calls that Donna’s books did about “Yes, that autism diagnosis was real, and not something my shrink pulled out of his ass.” There are times still when I can’t read her work because of the effects abuse has had on her over her lifetime (too close to home), but overall she has a lot to offer hat very few other people are offering. Shockingly few other people, in fact. And yet I know, in my bones, that these things are a huge part of why some people get diagnosed autism, that “sensory issues” don’t end at hyper/hypo-sensiivity or white noise, and just… I wish more prominent autistic people were discussing this stuff. I need to reread Alison Hle' My World Is Not Your World again, I can’t rememer if it dealt just with reading, or if it dealt with the whole gamut of visul problems. When I wen for Irlen teting, they said they generally got people with reading problems, and told e my Irlen syndrome was way more severe in terms of interfering with everyday life outside of reading, than they were used to seeing.