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11:53pm January 24, 2013

I am so upset again that cognitively disabled people of any and all kinds are considered by most other people to be just obviously inferior to themselves. To have less life in us than they do. To be incompatible with being considered “gifted” because “gifted” is not only “real” but the special chosen people and cognitively disabled people are everyone else and never the twain shall meet. But that’s just a teeny bit of what bothers me.

It’s they can’t see we are ever right about the world when they are wrong. They can’t see our lives are as rich as any life. That what they see as only restriction, isn’t necessarily. I don’t like it. I know they’re wrong but there’s so many of them.

And even among cognitively disabled people there is this attitude. Autistic people are thought better than the rest except when we are worse than the rest. People draw weird lines of what counts as being cognitively disabled, as if “any disability involving cognition” wasn’t damn clear enough. People think that things have to be medical, have to have names.

I know the differences that make me cognitively disabled aren’t just one thing. But they act as one, as often as not, because only one mind here. Some are constant. Others are intermittent. Others are always there but their type fluctuates all the time between various arrangements and possibilities.

Words I know medical people have related to them, or could relate to them, include autism, developmental disorder NOS, brain damage, delirium, hyperlexia, temporal lobe epilepsy, learning disability (some verbal, some nonverbal), sensory integration dysfunction, movement disorders (some of which involve where cognition and motion connect), all kinds of things.

But how I see it, I just know that right here, right ow, the way I understand and interact with the world are far from typical. People remind me of how wrong it is. And maybe some of it I don’t like. Some of it can scare me. But a lot of it I see as okay. And all of it I consider to be okay as one possibility for interacting with the world right then.

I don’t know how to say what I mean. The world as I see it is infinitely full, no less so for me than for most people. Maybe I’ve already written this so many times before. Maybe I don’t need to write it again while fighting against mild hypoxia. Maybe I do need to write it again while fighting against that, because that’s part of my cognitive problems right now.

That’s the other thing. Cognitive impairments are not divorce from the rest of the body. I often experience cognitive impairments, even severe ones, because of a condition considered physical. Because even though most people don’t think of it this way, the brain is a part of the body. It’s not separable. If the body is sick enough,so will the brain be. And that’s how my delirium normally develops and then hangs around for years in the form of brain damage.

I feel like it doesn’t exactly matter if I like or dislike a particular cognitive trait. It’s there. That’s what matters. It’s part of me. That’s what matters. Even if right now it’s something infuriating that makes my fingers type gibberish every few words, while my mind drifts off into la la land.

Right now my mind does want to drift, a lot. If I don’t seize control of it, it goes blank. Or even weirder, it skips along, through darkness, and sees little patches of things,and tries to make them out. And when it can’t make them out, they come in little lines and shapes and twisty things that can’t be themselves made out, and all that feels like a tunnel through some horrid underground place. I have to keep it from doing that. Writing sort of helps.

But that’s as much part of me as the parts I like. Even though it inserts these big holes in what I write and I get off track and stuff. It’s still there. And it doesn’t make me less of a person. Not even if for some reason – I’m not expecting it – I got permanently lost in that underground maze full of things that I can only partially understand. I’d still be here. I’d still be me. I’d still be a worthwhile person capable of experiencing good things in life and not just bad ones.

There are good things in places where the cognitively exalted – that is nondisabled – can’t or won’t go. There are strange depths that are scary to them, even, often, to those of us that inhabit them, but that still contain good. There are places that are scary to them but that are almost entirely good to those of us who inhabit them. There are places where the goodness or scariness seems to depend more on personality than on the places themselves. And there are good things that can ONLY be found outside the realm of typical cognition. And I ain’t talking “gifted” FFS, that’s a classification I don’t believe in. I’m talking there are actually good parts of thinking only accessible to certain cognitively disabled people, just as there are actually good parts of thinking that are only accessible to people without certain cognitive impairments.

It’s too complex. Most people don’t want to know how complex. They just want easy answers about the whole thing.

But one thing I know, is people are people regardless edemdedekddfls. Leaving that gibberish in to explain what I have to delete every sentence or two. People are people regardless of how their mind works. And that’s important. Dd dddfśdkd.

I wish I could describe more of the unusual ways my mind works, both for good and bad, and in a way that collects them all together at once in one big description. But I have trouble dioippp doing that. Çm ,c I want to be able to show the mistakes and the good parts and the weird parts and the parts that are both much maligned and utterly beautiful.

But I can’t. I can’t even keep deleting my weird strings of leggy legs. K do dddfśdkd. Screw it. Posting now. Want to be able to post things here even when the letters or words are clearly totally wrong. Makes it easier to see this as so renters fomgnmfmdfk ldsfbblddd. I mean make it easier to see this as I wrote it, not in a finished state of construction. And make it easier for me to get used to writing things and putting them out there when they atr incomplete.

Didn’t mean to turn myself into Exhibit A or anything, it just happened, because I’m trying to write with too littlest genres dddfśdkd c. Arrrrgh. I’m trying to write with too little in my head working right for writing. There. Now publishing n hoping it actually got to a fucking point somewhere in there.