3:05am June 4, 2014

can we also talk about…

youneedacat:

patternsmaybe:

The kind of ~acceptance~ where parents don’t try to teach their kids anything or plan for their adulthood and think of that as loving them the way they are?

I knew an autistic girl who grew up in that kind of ~acceptance~.

She started out a very kind and caring person. She was always asking about people and worrying about what happened to them and stuff. You could tell she cared about people.

Her parents let her do whatever she wanted. They never set limits. She was behind in all her classes but they told her she was in gifted classes and that she was ahead of age level, so she would feel better about it. She had a diagnosis of an intellectual disability and they lied to her about that.

She could basically do no wrong. No matter what she did, they would blame it on sensory issues or something. Eventually, they began competing, within the family, to see who could make her happier. She was desperately unhappy, and none of them could see that.

She is now an adult who does not care about people. She does not see other people as having any meaning at all, any rights, even the right to be alive. She has tried to kill both humans and animals over trivial things they did to annoy her. By tried to kill, I mean she has tried to poison them with things that would have worked, things like that. She knows exactly what she is doing, and to her, killing people is a perfectly good response to being angry at someone, no matter how petty the anger is.

I think her family are now afraid of her, so they are again locked into a cycle of competition to see who can make her the happiest. They plan to keep her in the family forever (which I think is a horrible idea, given the damage they’ve done to her already) and have no plans for what happens if they die before she does.

She is the most extreme example I have ever met, of someone for whom false ~acceptance~ has not only ruined her life, but ruined the lives of everyone around her. I have a sense of the shape of things among her family and it’s not good. And unfortunately, people assume that this is just autism, that this is just what autistic children are like. They have no concept that this is what one particular autistic child, a good child, a caring child, can be turned into by catering to her every whim for her entire childhood, never ever letting her be wrong, competing for her affection, and failing to teach her anything about the world.

What makes me angry, besides the fact that they have ruined this woman’s life. Is that they are doing exactly what the anti-acceptance parents think we’re all advocating. And it’s horrible, horrible, horrible. I’m really afraid one day she’ll kill someone, maybe already has killed animals. And meanwhile the anti-acceptance people can point at parents like hers and say “this is why we can’t just accept autism!” But what her problem is, isn’t autism. It’s being raised with no limits, being raised with everyone catering to your ego every step of the way. Horrible. Nightmarish, even.

I hate appropriating your Autism experience for my Crohn’s experience, but that’s pretty much how my parents where. I got everything I asked for (except love, *melodramatic sniffle*) and my father flat-out stated to me that they pitied me. Of course that was when I was cute and romanticized into being this poor sickly child of the Victorian novels. Now I’m adult who is just lazy and spoiled and who’s goddamn fault is that, paternal-genetic-donor-who-won’t-stop-shouting?

I really do have issues being an adult, though. I feel 15 inside, I don’t know how to handle money, I get overwhelmed just cleaning my room, and I’m pretty much fucked when I move out.

You’re not appropriating anything. People can identify with each other’s experiences, especially across disability categories, without appropriating anything at all. (Seriously I want to find whoever started broadening the word appropriation until it scared people out of identifying with each other, and hit them with a clue-bat.)

But you sound like you turned out a lot better than the girl I’m thinking of. It must vary a lot. Unless you’re secretly poisoning people and animals who piss you off?

Notes: