as small as a world and as large as alone, Does anyone else (with or without auditory or...

3:38am January 12, 2015

Does anyone else (with or without auditory or language processing problems) remember this commercial? If you do, read below the cut. If you don’t, watch the video then go behind the cut:

So anyone can anwer this question (and in fact I kind of would like neurotypical nondisabled people for comparison purposes, not that I probably have many such people in my followers, most of my mutuals have disabilities), but I’m especially looking for people like:the following:

People with autism. Anywhere on the real or purported spectrum. No official diagnosis required — if you’re similar enough to us to think you might be diagnosable, that’s autistic enough in my book.(1)
Autistic cousins. These are people who might also be said, more clinically, to be in the ‘broader autism phenotype’, at least there’s a ton of overlap between BAPs and cousins. A cousin is someone who is not autistic, but who has enough autistic-like traits that they can get along with or understand autistic people. There’s no specific diagnosis that is a “cousin diagnosis” nor one that is absolutely not a “cousin diagnosis”. But the first person to be graced with the title of “Cousin” had hydrocephalus.(2)
Cousins tend to share some combination of sensory-perceptual, cognitive, movement, and social traits with autistic people.(3)
Other neurodivergent people, whether similar to autistic people or not.
People with Central Auditory Processing Disorder, and people who are hard of hearing, or d/Deaf but able to hear some speech with hearing aids. (This is all about speech perception, and the videos aren’ captioned (and if they were that would give you the answer anyway)).
People with language impairments of any kind, but especially receptive.

Now.. if you haven’t watched the video, then try to watch it and come back. (I’m leaving some blank stuff so you don’t scroll down to the answer by mistake.)

What I want to know is: Am I the only person who, growing up and now, continues to hear that sentence the girl keeps repeating as ‘It will hurt if I swell up.” I didn’t know what “swell up” meant, but it sounded utterly awful. If I’d known what it meant, I’d have imagined swelling until you burst, and probably developed a phobia connected to where and when I first saw the commercial

(I was good at creating phobias. :-/ I’m so glad my OCD mellowed out as a teenager, because it was brutal as a child.)

BTW, the child is saying “It will hurt if I swallow.” But with the “swell up”, which I’d heard in awful contexts and connected to those contexts, without understanding the word — that’s how I handled language back then in general… it was almost like a short horror film. “It will hurt if I swell up… it will hurt if I swell up… it will hurt if I swell up… MOMMMMMY!!!!!!” I figured with the “mommy” at the end it had to be really bad. Especially since I only got that freaked out about medical stuff that it would make me approach my parents so frequently, if it was something serious or if I perceived it as serious.

Anyway, you don’t have to do this if you don’t want to, i’m just trying to figure out if i’m alone in this. (Also whether there are other wrong ways to hear it.)

…and all of the above is why people constantly, in a hostile voice, asked me “Do you have a hearing problem or something?” growing up. (Once diagnosed with CAPD, I could say “Yes, I have CAPD”, but that only pissed them off more. BTW why is there a Central Auditory Processing Disorder but no Central Vision Processing Disorder? I’d probably have pretty severe CVPD and moderate CAPD.)

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(1) The idea that undiagnosed people have it easy, deserves a slow, painful death. Like those of undiagnosed autistic people living on the street and/or starving to death because nobody in power gives a crap about the consequences of being undiagnosed (or having the “wrong” diagnosis, or having too high an IQ)to access services. But I’l get off my soapbox now because I didn’t come here to discuss diagnostic issues right this instance. Suffice to say, self-diagnoed counts, self-diagnosed and peer-confirmed counts, peer-diagnosed and self-confirmed counts. If you think you’re autistic, then even on the off chance you’re not, you’ve probably got enough in common with autistic people for the purposes of my question. (See bullet point #2. above, for an alternate categorization that used to be so common and taken for granted that it was unthinkable it would fade away the way it has. I do my best to revive it.

(2) He was a professional at an autism conference, but he ended up spending all his time at the ANI (Autism Network International) booth because he could understand them and they could understand him. Xenia Grant, who is both the most truly outgoing person I’ve ever met, and one of them most obviously autistic person I’ve met among so-called high functioning autistic people… she surveyed him for a moment, and then exclaiemd “Cousin!” This led to the term “AC” which was a shorthand for “Autistics and Cousins”.

(3) They may not be diagnosed with anything, but if they are, here are some common ones: Hydrocephalus, schizophrenia, schizoid personality disorder, schizotypal personality disorder, bipolar, cerebral palsy, Parkinson’s, stroke, brain damage of various sorts, agnosia/dysgnosia of various sorts, aphasia/dysphasia of various sorts, apraxia/dyspraxia of various sorts, sensory integration dysfunction, I could probably go on for hours. But I won’t. I’m already stretching things by putting way too much into footnotes.