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10:17am November 28, 2012

I’m 32. Really. That’s all.

Don’t think I don’t understand you, when the doors close behind your eyes. And you look at your companion, and the doors open just long enough for both of you to convey information to each other:

“She doesn’t understand. She can’t understand. She won’t ever understand. Because she’s really much more like a young child than an adult. It’s not worth trying to explain to her, which is quite annoying. Because some things are just beyond the grasp of children. And if she is wrong, this is exactly why.”

Don’t think I need to be looking directly at your eyes to pick up on this. And don’t pretend you’re not doing it. I know you too well, or if I don’t, I know the look too well. Autism doesn’t prevent me from picking up on this stuff, it just changes which things I pick up and how I pick them up.

Don’t think that just because I’ve put this in the #actuallyautistic tag, that I’m purely talking about nonautistic people here. In fact, the example I’m drawing on most heavily for this post happened many years ago, between two autistic people I know and otherwise like. (Think there’s no such thing as autistic people who can exchange knowing, patronizing glances? Think again.) There are plenty of autistic or other cognitively disabled people willing to create hierarchies between themselves and other people they consider more like adult-sized children.

I admit the reason I’m remembering these things right now with such intensity. I’m still more cognitively impaired than I was before I went into the hospital. I’m still aware of how people respond to me when I either am or seem to have more cognitive impairment than they are comfortable with. I know how giving each other those looks gives you an easy out in conversations with me.

And I’ve been doing things like reading and watching Netflix to get my brain to stop coasting on idle. When I was in the hospital, I couldn’t even follow the simplest children’s programming they had there, although their Cat in the Hat stuff was the easiest. These days, I’ve worked my way up to mostly books, movies, and shows intended for ages seven to twelve. With exceptions of course, because intended age ranges don’t always reflect cognitive complexity, and because I still have bad days. But they do often enough that I can rely on them as a good guide to planning what I can deal with next.

Apparently my main cognitive problem is that in the hospital my brain put down a lot of ruts into delirium and generally coasting without doing anything. And I discovered that exercising my brain pulls me out of those ruts, unless I overdo it and fall back into them. But even though I’m getting back to normal-for-me every day, it’s a really slow process. And it’s complicated by Acute Stress Disorder/PTSD-type reactions to stuff that went on in there. Including some people treating me like a child.

So making my brain do gradually more complicated and difficult things is pulling me out of this. But it’s also slow. I’ve always found children’s books easier than adult books, but right now it’s more than that, it’s that when it is a matter of cognitive aspects of the books and not just subject matter, I can’t get past children’s books yet.

Which makes me nervous in a world that sees cognitive impairment of nearly any kind (I use the term broadly), or even falsely perceived cognitive impairment, as “really being a child inside”.

Oh and I’m still finding it impossible to follow a lot of tumblr posts that I used to find merely difficult or painful to follow. Not always post length as much as content.

But I can follow very well what happens when to you I become a child in an adult body. And it’s just as bad when you see me as an endearing child, as it is when you see me in a negative light. I’m 32 years old. This changes not at all based on any of my cognitive abilities, no matter how good or bad they get, or how good or bad you perceive them to be. And that’s even when they come with ideas normally attached to age, such as my current reading levels (which are sometimes better and sometimes worse than my writing abilities lately). I think I’m familiar with nearly all of the looks and sounds adults make, to me or to each other, when in the presence of an adult they see as a child. And it’s never fun to be the target of stuff like that.