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9:58pm May 28, 2014

Maybe I’ve gone overboard, without noticing it.

So there was a time, when people like me were all but invisible in online communities.  Whether it was the autistic community, or broader communities, our particular natural set of abilities and difficulties was being left out in a major way.

So I began posting about people like me, and putting us in a positive light. Some examples:

  • Thinking outside of ideas and language can come to solutions that you can’t ever find from inside ideas and language.
  • Rather than an empty, barren landscape of hopelessness?  That realm outside of language and ideas and thought?  Is rich and complex and beautiful.
  • It’s possible to approach politics without a network of ideologies in your head.  It’s possible to approach it with a few values in your heart and let reality hold the complexity, rather than trying to hold all that complexity in your head by creating complicated ideologies with networks of what I’d call ‘mental widgets’.
  • It’s possible for some autistic people to not only communicate outside of language, but to excel at doing so, to do so beautifully.  Yet we’re assumed that if we have little to no obvious language, then we’ll have no nonverbal communication between each other either.
  • It’s possible for an autistic person to be grossly misjudged, because they worked hard and became good at some aspect of language.  Yet they can still have the basic underlying pattern of skills I describe here.

For years, I’ve been describing the skills we do have, in intense, loving detail.  I’ve described why these skills are good things.  I’ve described why sometimes they can get things done that other methods can’t.  I’ve spent a lot of effort describing why relying on widgets alone will doom something to failure.  (And I still believe that.  Not because I want to devalue widgety thinking, but because I’m pretty sure it’s a fact.  I think you can use that kind of thinking minimally in certain ways and be okay, but use it for all or even most things and it’s not going to work.)

And now I can see how this could look to some people.

People whose set of skills may be the opposite of mine.

Who see me celebrating these skills, and wonder whether there’s something wrong with them that they don’t have the ability to do the exact things I’m celebrating.  And think that, rather than celebrating the skills of people like me in a world that refuses to celebrate them, I’m instead trying to say that my skills are better, or the best, or the only way to do anything right.

And I can honestly see how sometimes I have made it sound that way.

It’s hard to tell, though because like… I invented the term 'widget’ in order to describe a way of thinking that I don’t have, so that I could describe a way of thinking that I do have.  And this one guy, who was being an asshole anyway, started talking about how the word 'widgety’ was abusive because it described how he thought and was putting him down for having that cognitive style.  When it was more like, “Without some kind of word for it, I’m unable to describe what my cognitive style is not.”   

But other times I’ve had fairly legit people become upset by things I said, thinking they meant that it would be best if everyone was like me.

And if I’ve ever, ever given that impression, I want to apologize a thousand times over.

My belief is that humanity needs every kind of diversity it can get.  That includes diversity in terms of every type of disability that exists out there.  Which in itself includes diversity in terms of every kind of thinking style that exists out there.  My thinking style is good for certain things, and I have highlighted those things in depth because most people assume a thinking style like mine is, put bluntly, stupid and boring and maybe nonexistent.  But my thinking style is only one of hundreds, and those other hundreds have their pros and cons as well.

Never forget that when you read my writing:  I always mean it to be taken as one opinion among many, one life experience among many, one little package sitting on the street that you can open and read my thoughts, among many other such packages, all just sitting there waiting to be read.  I never mean for mine to be the only, or the best.  Only for it to be the best that I can give.  Sometimes, that isn’t enough, but I seriously try.

But I can see that what started out an attempt to celebrate cognitive diversity in the fact of cognitive ableism, could turn out looking like I was putting down more typical kinds of cognition, and cognition that resembles that.

Anyway, I’m sorry.