8:37am March 19, 2012

➸ if a shark stops stimming, it will die.: Pro-Tips for dealing with disabled people

flutter-sassy:

Using mobility aids doesn’t always mean they can’t walk at all without them or need them at all times. It usually means they choose to use them or it is easier to move around with them.

Walking with a limp or talking with a lisp or being mute or using a…

The entire notion of mental capacity as this thing that most people have, confuses me. And not like on an ideological level. It confuses me because mine is always changing. And I don’t mean just a little.

I mean that on a regular basis I swing from one extreme to another. At one point I may be able to, with effort, understand something really abstract. At another point I may not be able to tell light from dark – on a cognitive level, not in terms of how my eyes work. And everywhere in between.

And while you can sort of make guesses based on certain things, most people are totally unable to read my cognitive abilities reliably. When I understand them perfectly, they may say I have the mind of a baby. And when I’m just throwing out signals and words and stuff without understanding any of them, they may say I’m obviously very cognitively aware. And just… there’s very few people who can properly judge my cognitive skills, in either direction. People constantly over or under estimate me. And even when they’re right it’s often accidental.

And I seem to have no single, core level of cognitive capacity. What I have is at best a range.

At the lowest point in my range, there’s like… it’s really hard to describe to anyone without the reference points. But it’s like I’m aware, but I’m not even sure afterwards what it is that I was aware of. It had to be something, because there’s memory. But beyond that, I don’t know.

And at the highest point, it’s usually something much more brief. I call myself an intellectual sprinter for that reason. And it takes momentum. But whatever it is, I can comprehend things most people have trouble with.

But I spend most of my life in between those extremes. It’s like I have not just the one, broad range. I also have a smaller range that is more normal for me. But even the smaller range is pretty wide. And even all within the same day I can be all over the place.

(Which is why I get really testy when people try to tell me of my “real” capacity. What real capacity, and how the hell would someone outside me, who’s never been able to guess properly, even know what it was if I had one?)

Oh and to make things even more interesting, sometimes when I understand things people don’t it’s from lacking the cognitive capacity they have. Because sometimes all intellect does is confuse people. So sometimes it’s hard for me to tell if my understanding something is from more or less ability. So if I can’t tell, then someone outside me surely can’t tell either.

And to make matters more complicated, there’s different kinds of cognitive capacity. And I know that – how’s this for a tangle? – I often have a very high capacity in one area that most people have very low capacity at, because I have a much more low or at best inconsistent capacity in another area that most people have a very high capacity at. (If that doesn’t make sense, think of plants and trees that can’t grow under taller and shadier trees, but if you go somewhere those tall shady trees aren’t, the other ones flourish.)

So… yeah. I react to all attempts to estimate my cognitive capacity with extreme skepticism. Let alone attempts to figure out if I’m being overestimated or underestimated at a given time. It doesn’t help that most of the world believes in a fixed cognitive capacity and I’ve got anything but, so if I look at how people talk about this stuff it’s as if I don’t exist.

Oh and regarding ways of communicating, there’s also of course plenty beyond either speech or AAC devices.

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