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12:05pm July 1, 2012
autisticspectrumpositives: [Image description: A white rectangle with orange lower-case text in the upper left-hand corner “as+” and orange lower-case text in the lower right-hand corner “autisticspectrumpositives.tumblr.com”. In the center of the page, there is black text “Never forgetting learned skills”. End description.] (I’ve been working a summer job which I’m often teaching kids how to do ‘basic’ crafts- braiding yarn, beading, etc- and despite having not done it in over a decade or so, I’m still able to produce a reasonable copy. Now, explaining how I do it is another matter, but a fair number of the kids I’m interacting with are brilliant at taking my weirdly presented instructions and example and building from it.) submitted by smartwittyurl I know that given the nature of autism, only some people will have any positive trait, and others will have its opposite. But holy crap is this not me. Because of my variant of autism, this is not me.  To quote Jim Sinclair:  "I taught myself to read at three, and I had to learn it again at ten, and yet again at seventeen, and at twenty-one, and at twenty-six.  The words that it took me twelve years to find have been lost again, and regained, and lost, and still have not come all the way back to where I can be reasonably confident they’ll be there when I need them.  It wasn’t enough to figure out just once how to keep track of my eyes and ears and hands and feet all at the same time; I’ve lost track of them and had to find them over and over again.“ That is so very much how I work.  With a certain kind of skills, I can’t ever be sure they’ll exist when I need them. Or whether I’ll need to relearn them. As if from scratch. Over. And over. And over. Again.  From the small amount of reading I’ve done from so-called autism experts, this happens a lot.  As in it’s a frequent complaint of parents, because complaints of autistic people rarely make it into such books. Except sometimes, and then mostly if our name is Temple Grandin. 

autisticspectrumpositives:

[Image description: A white rectangle with orange lower-case text in the upper left-hand corner “as+” and orange lower-case text in the lower right-hand corner “autisticspectrumpositives.tumblr.com”. In the center of the page, there is black text “Never forgetting learned skills”. End description.]

(I’ve been working a summer job which I’m often teaching kids how to do ‘basic’ crafts- braiding yarn, beading, etc- and despite having not done it in over a decade or so, I’m still able to produce a reasonable copy. Now, explaining how I do it is another matter, but a fair number of the kids I’m interacting with are brilliant at taking my weirdly presented instructions and example and building from it.)

submitted by smartwittyurl

I know that given the nature of autism, only some people will have any positive trait, and others will have its opposite. But holy crap is this not me. Because of my variant of autism, this is not me. 

To quote Jim Sinclair:  "I taught myself to read at three, and I had to learn it again at ten, and yet again at seventeen, and at twenty-one, and at twenty-six.  The words that it took me twelve years to find have been lost again, and regained, and lost, and still have not come all the way back to where I can be reasonably confident they’ll be there when I need them.  It wasn’t enough to figure out just once how to keep track of my eyes and ears and hands and feet all at the same time; I’ve lost track of them and had to find them over and over again.“

That is so very much how I work.  With a certain kind of skills, I can’t ever be sure they’ll exist when I need them. Or whether I’ll need to relearn them. As if from scratch. Over. And over. And over. Again.  From the small amount of reading I’ve done from so-called autism experts, this happens a lot.  As in it’s a frequent complaint of parents, because complaints of autistic people rarely make it into such books. Except sometimes, and then mostly if our name is Temple Grandin.