5:53am June 27, 2014

Warning.

There’s a movie on Netflix called Best Kept Secret. I really wanted to like it because it’s about poor autistic students of color in a special ed high school, and you don’t normally hear about that. Even though, for instance, most of the autistic kids in my special ed high school were poor and of color. Everyone just assumes that autistic kids are white and well-off. That was way not the case where I went. And the teacher is a woman of color too.

But the teachers, holy crap, the teachers.

They use the Special Ed Voice.

I’d forgotten about the Special Ed Voice.

I don’t know if I can watch an entire movie with the Special Ed Voice in it. I might. I might tough it out because I want to see people, real people, who are underrepresented in everything about autism.

But if I tough it out, it will be in spite of the Special Ed Voice and all sorts of other things that are proving very triggering and traumatic to watch, but that most people would consider good things.

Chin grabbing, forced echolalia, holy crap no please no.

I never understand…

Everyone sees that and they see, something other than what I see.

They see a dedicated loving teacher doing her best to help her students succeed. I’m sure that’s what she sees. I’m sure to some extent that’s what she is. I’m sure her intentions are all honorable and wonderful and all that, and intentions do count for something in the world, and she doesn’t seem evil. The teachers at my school, some of them were evil, truly evil people. She doesn’t look evil, not the kind of evil I mean anyway.

But doesn’t anyone know what it feels like to have your chin grabbed, to have your eyes forced into someone else’s eyes, to have the entire world fall away and go blank and have them talking loud in your face as the entire world is going blank and expecting you to say things and repeat things and OMG don’t they know what that feels like, doesn’t anyone know what that feels like?

And some of these things are things I know what they feel like because they’ve been done to me.

Other of these thins are things I know what they feel like because I have empathy. Real empathy. The kind where I fall into people’s shoes before I even know I’m not them and they’re not me. Where I know how they feel because I am, suddenly, them. I’ve always had that kind of empathy. Lots of autistic people have more of that kind of empathy than nonautistic people.

That kind of empathy can make it hard to know where you start and other people stop. It can make you build up walls that make it look like you have less empathy than normal. It can make you react in ways that make it look like you have less empathy than normal. But really you have so much empathy that walking out in a schoolyard at recess is overwhelming because you feel every scraped knee, every hand on every ball hitting it too hard until it hurts, every sunburn, every raw throat screaming, every foot hitting the pavement, as if it’s your own.

And when I watch movies like this, I have two sets of reactions.

One “OMG I’ve been there.”

Two that kind of empathy.

And between the two I understand more than most nonautistic people ever will about what’s going on there.

And it’s horrible, and it’s horrible, and I can’t explain.

I can’t explain what it’s like to have it be horrible when well-intentioned people with smiles and smiley voices come up and do smiley things at you and smile at themselves about you and smile at you and smile in their voices and SMILE and be so damn friendly but not see you, not see you for an instant.

I can’t explain.

I can’t explain what it’s like to think “Finally, I’m seeing poor autistic people of color in special ed represented in a movie for real and these are real people and they’re real and these are the people I knew these are the people I went to school with this is like where I went to school and nobody ever talks about this please let it be real please let it be good” and then have to turn the movie off after ten minutes and hope that maybe I can last through the rest of it if I turn on tumblr and gripe about it. And how fucking disappointed I am whenever thing of this happened.

Can I explain?

Can’t.

I bet people here on #actuallyautistic understand.

I bet even people here without intense uncontrollable overwhelming involuntary sensing-based autistic-style empathy understand. I bet even people with other kinds of autistic-style empathy understand. I bet even people who think they have no empathy (but are probably wrong) understand.

I do wish I could put people in my shoes while I’m in other people’s shoes, though.

I wish I could give them the flashes of insight I get into other people’s lives.

I wish I could tell them why this movie is so triggering, even though it should be technically something I should want to watch and how angry it makes me that I can’t watch it the way I want to watch it.

And she means so well and that makes it so much worse than the monsters who taught at my school.

At my school there was a boy who had trouble standing up from the floor. To punish him for various minor things that he mostly didn’t have control over, his teacher would throw him onto the ground outside his classroom door. He would cry – wail – all day long. He wasn’t allowed to get up if he was still crying. He couldn’t get up on his own. He was trapped, outside, on the concrete, crying. You could hear him for hours. I could see him out the window of my own classroom.

If you saw something like that, you were not allowed to react to it.

If you reacted to it, they said “You are feeding off him” and then you would get punished.

“Feeding off him” was their word for having empathy.

You weren’t allowed to have empathy.

Nobody was allowed to have empathy. At least, you were not allowed to have empathy for any child who was being abused by teachers.

And any of the abuse was “they brought it on themselves because they were acting out”.

And yet when I left the place, I missed it.

I missed it because it was a place where everyone was different.

And when everyone is different, everyone, then everyone has to find ways to deal with each other’s difference. People don’t necessarily like each other – anyone who thinks they like all disabled people is a bigot who can’t see individual differences, and only teachers had the luxury of such bigotry. Students could like and dislike each other. Teachers saw themselves as superior and taught us we all had to like each other because they liked all of us and “we’re all here for a reason you know”. I wasn’t allowed to call the boy who sexually assaulted me a slimeball, I wasn’t even allowed to blame him for sexually assaulting me, I wasn’t allowed to mention it, even as he sexually assaulted more and more students and showed growing interest in hanging out with kids who wouldn’t be able to report sexual assault in a million years if it happened to them.

But to get back to my point.

In mainstream school, some kids get booted out into special ed if they’re too different.

In special ed, the only place you can get booted to from there is a residential institution. Special ed is basically an institution, but it’s not necessarily a residential institution (sometimes it occurs within one, or the school owns a group home too, or etc.). But anyway, in special ed, that’s close to the last stop for everyone different.

So all the people who get booted out of class for distracting the learning of other students? They get put in special ed, together, and somehow don’t distract each other nearly as much. Because typical students have the luxury, the sense of entitlement, to not being distracted by “behaviors”. Special ed students don’t have that sense of entitlement. We go to school with kids who run out into the courtyard and scream and cuss for ten minutes straight, we go to school hearing the screaming of the kids locked in the closets, we go to school with people who stim and tic and do all kinds of things, and we somehow manage, despite the fact that we usually have learning disabilities. So there’s no excuse for nondisabled kids to think they couldn’t put up with the same if they had to.

But that’s the thing special ed was horrible but I missed it when I left.

I missed it when I left. I went outside and saw people walking around and was surprised when none of them stopped in their tracks to rock a few steps, nobody yelled, nobody did anything out of place, I felt like an alien and I felt like I’d never belong again.

Except other aliens recognized me. Because I’d get all these homeless people with developmental disabilities or mental illness who would walk up to me every single time I went anywhere, and talk to me, in particular, and it got to the point where I thought it was normal, until a friend went out walking with me and asked “Do you always get approached like this?” and I realized that other people were spotting another alien like them and holding on for dear life the same way I was doing.

Because the one thing segregated settings have going for them is you’re around other people who are ‘abnormal’.

And I watch movies like this sometimes because it’s like being around people with disabilities.

But just like real special ed, it also means being around Special Ed Voice and all sorts of other awful things, and then I can’t handle it.

And nowI’m wondering, can I handle another hour and fifteen minutes of Special Ed Voice? If I do, will it be worth it, in order to be around poor autistic people of color again like I was when I was in special ed. To see people represented on the screen that I never expected to be represented.

Or will the representation fall flat because it’s not real representation. Their viewpoint is not represented. it’s the teacher’s viewpoint that matters. And the teacher’s viewpoint is not theirs. She’s dedicated, she’s devoted, and it’s probably a tragedy that the world has made her into the kind of teacher she is, because iIs n a better world a devoted teacher would not behave as she is behaving.

So is it really representation, when it’s all what I call 'view from above’, (read that link if the term confuses you) her point of view, not ours?

Is it worth it?

And will my intense, uncontrollable, involuntary, autistic-style, sensing-based empathy be able to take it? That’s another question. Or my PTSD for that matter.

ARRRRRGH.