4:54pm June 23, 2014

Things I wish my parents and teachers would have known

walkingsaladshooterfromheaven:

lichgem:

walkingsaladshooterfromheaven:

You cannot train people with impaired executive functioning to have normal executive functioning.

What we need is to be given the time, space, and tools to learn how to function *without* the executive functioning skills that neurotypical people have.

My brain operates off of impulse and sensation and the seductive allure of logical patterns. I can’t change that.

But I can learn to use it.

By setting up routines and environmental cues and sensory stimuli that work for me.

This is so important. I can’t tell you how many ways my dad fucked me up in an attempt to ‘teach’ me to not have executive functioning issues.

He would criticize me for needing to have elaborate set-ups in place before doing my homework, which is something I did to soothe my anxiety about starting something that was hard for me…

He once took my laundry out of the communal laundry room so that I’d think someone stole it and panic, to ‘teach’ me not to be forgetful…

When I was having a good day and gushing about all the stuff I got done and was going to get done, he mocked me and called it all ‘fluff,’ just because it wasn’t up to his neurotypical standards of a productive day.

Or people would invalidate things I was working on by saying, ‘It’s already been hours/days/months and it’s not done yet, so obviously I need to take over for you.’

It’s like, when all of your most Herculean efforts are invisible and dismissed as ‘nothing’ and ‘not even trying,’ when people put time limits on things you can’t POSSIBLY work within, it’s only natural for you to develop a sense of despair. ‘Nothing I do matters and there’s not enough time anyway, so why bother?’ And then later you have to figure out how much of your problems are executive functioning and how much of them are anxiety and helplessness from the ableism you grew up with…

This. All of this.

People’s fucked-up attempts at “teaching” kids to do things the “right” way often end up making them more disabled in the end.

So that they have anxiety and learned helplessness and PTSD and trust issues on top of their original disability, and everything just compounds each other.

Yeah. Like there are so many times in my day when I think about improving a skill, but then I remember that it will probably take me a really long time, and I don’t know what the future is going to be like, I could be out on the streets next month, so I just don’t even start.

And the part where I got criticized for self-soothing really makes me angry because it’s not enough, apparently, for me to try, I also have to do it the nondisabled way. Like there’s no fucking reason I can’t have a cup of tea and make my work space relaxing before starting homework except that it somehow offends nondisabled people’s sensibilities. When abled people constantly slap coping mechanisms out of our hands they are making us LESS able to do things.

It really does. I feel like a staticky TV someone tried to fix by hitting it, and now I’m even worse than before, and I have to deal with that on my own, and no one will ever acknowledge what they did. *sigh*