8:04pm June 28, 2013

➸ "You don't need this junk. You need a cat.": Be careful what you say.

youneedacat:

This is directed at other disabled people. But I’m sure I’ve done the same thing myself so I’m not pointing fingers, just trying to create more understanding.

I know an autistic woman who insists to me over and over, that the reason she can talk and I can’t anymore, is that she was left no…

OMFG I had one of those toxic “I know everything about the world so I’ll teach you and help you out" friends when I was in my late teens. (She was disabled but acted like because she could “tough through" the pain, this made her somehow not really disabled or something.)

And she told me just about everything you talked about here. I didn’t know that I was autistic at the time but I mentioned things like times when I couldn’t talk or understand what people were saying, and things that didn’t bother other people being intensely painful to me.

And when I said I thought this seemed to be something about my brain that I couldn’t change, and maybe other people should make accomodations for me instead, she got furious at me and went off on tirades about how you have to train things into children, sometimes violently, while their brains are “still flexible.“ Whatever the hell that means, as if the brain doesn’t continually change throughout life. And if you don’t, they’ll never be able to get along in society with everyone else and look normal, and this is the worst thing imaginable or something. She told me that if I had been forced into exposure therapy as a kid for all my sensory issues, then my brain would have rewired itself so those things would no longer bother me. (Like my family didn’t try forced exposure therapy on me, like lots of people didn’t do it to me throughout my life and told me it was good for me.)

And she also did the whole thing about “well if people tried and it didn’t work, then they just didn’t beat it into you hard enough." And she was also obsessed with the idea that she could do a bunch of things that she wouldn’t otherwise have been able to do because they had been beaten into her while she was still young.

I once read something by someone who was told “I bet if you were stranded on a deserted island and had to survive all by yourself, your disabilities would go away." She said that no, they wouldn’t go away, she’d just end up dead because she wouldn’t be able to do the things she needed to do to survive.

So yeah. This idea is just incredibly horrible and destructive all around.

Yeah I’ve been told over and over that I just wasn’t left to starve for long enough or I’d have figured out daily living skills. By other autistic people.

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