11:13am July 12, 2013

➸ Urocyon's Jaunts: mousesinger: The sad part is that my issues don’t mean I’m a neat...

The sad part is that my issues don’t mean I’m a neat freak. They just mean I’ll sit in the middle of my mess and cry. My most compatible roommates and romantic partners have always been tidy people because they don’t add to my chaos, and if there is a structure - somebody who…

I got in a really frustrating conversation with, actually two separate stalkers (one more a fangirl type stalker, the other a malicious sociopath type stalker) over the role of autism in being a neat freak.

Both of them made the same assumption about me. Well with one it was an assumption, the other it might have been a deliberate put-down for the sake of being nasty.

But at any rate, both of them claimed they were ~ oh so much more classically autistic than me ~ because I can’t clean my apartment without help. They both insisted that I must just not need order in order to function, the way they did, or I’d magically come up with the ability to clean up after myself. The more malicious of the two went around publicly taunting me about being “a slob” and “living like a pig”.

Which is sort of like telling me that if I really needed to walk enough, I could get up out of my wheelchair and walk five blocks. Yeah .. doors not make sense.

Here’s the thing:

I badly need order in order to function.

But.

I can’t, even at my best, function well enough to create that order.

How hard is that to comprehend?

It goes back to that book, “Autism: Sensory-Movement Differences and Diversity” by Martha Leary and Anne Donnellan.

There’s a chart inside that basically says that in the areas of postures, actions, speech, thoughts, perceptions emotions, and memories. Autistic people find these things difficult or impossible: starting, stopping, executing (speed, intensity, rhythm, timing, direction, duration), continuing, combining, and switching.

Meaning that if you have sufficient problems in a sufficient number if areas, you’re going to find clanking up after yourself really damn difficult. No matter how much you want or need to do it in order to function in other ways. And if disorder affects functioning, then the messier it gets, the harder it is to clean.

Which means at least in those areas I have more difficulties related to autism than they do. Not that it’s a fucking contest, but both of them seem to think it is.

Anyway I totally get it about needing order and not being able to create it. Wish more people did.

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