3:38am August 13, 2014

And by the way…

…until I read that book, I never understood the true lengths that a highly extraverted autistic person will go to, to get attention.  I loved that the man who wrote the book was excruciatingly honest about the things he’d done, because he helped me understand both the ways my own actions had been misunderstood, and the fact that there really are people who will go to those lengths to get attention.  And why.

I would name the book but I don’t remember the name, only what it looks like, and where it is on my shelf likely.  Which is in the other room, which is too hard for me to get into right now.

But it really let me see a side of some autistic people that you don’t normally see people talking openly about.  Which is, people so desperate to fit in that they will do anything, and everything, just to be the butt of the joke, because even that is something.  And that’s something I saw every day among undiagnosed autistic people I grew up around, people I am certain now, are autistic, but we didn’t have that word back then.  One of whom has, I suspect, unfortunately been roped into hurting me, because that brings him up the social ladder a little bit.  To be above me means to be above at least one person, and many autistic people mistakenly want to climb the social ladder in exactly that way, even as adults.  Meanwhile the people using him still look down on him as much as ever, but he doesn’t give a shit, he’s moving places.  For now.  Until the next joke’s on him, as always.

But until I read that book, I thought the thing about doing weird things for attention was just a myth.  I knew it was a myth when applied to me.  But I could tell the guy writing the book was being entirely honest, brutally honest, and that it wasn’t just that he’d absorbed the myth, it was actually the truth about his life.  And that in turn made me see my brother in a new light, like the time I found a citation he got at his movie theater job for running around with a popcorn box on his head.  His constant condemnation of my inadvertent weirdness as “attention seeking” began to make a lot more sense, even if I still couldn’t condone it given the effects it had on me.

The guy who wrote the book says he now tries to get attention by talking about autism.  He figures that even if his goal is still egotistical, he might be helping people along the way.

Man, I really need to catch up on my autiebiography collection.  There’s so many new ones out there, and so many of them look interesting and unique compared with the usual ones.  Of course every few years there’s a new trend, so everything looks interesting and unique after awhile.  But it’s always good to see the new trends, compare them with the old, and see the ones that buck the trends altogether.

Someone sent me Sparrow Rose’s autiebiography and I’m reading it right now.  That one is especially interesting to me because I knew her, slightly, online for awhile, and it’s always interesting to read autiebiographies by people you know, to a greater or lesser extent.  Even just people I’ve known in passing on mailing lists or tumblr are more interesting given that fact.

12 notes