Theme
11:02pm August 19, 2014

When I was in special ed, I was part of something called the WorkAbility Program. This is why I identify with Cassie. Read on…

It was not the first job training program I had done.  My first one was when I had done a lot of different work, from caring for animals to painting fences, at a group home, and been taught how to fill out time cards for it so I could get paid minimum wage.  And I was very proud of that work.

But the WorkAbility Program wanted me working in an actual store, stocking shelves.  They chose a bookstore.  It was a disaster.  I couldn’t follow instructions, because they were either too vague or too specific.  They’d tell me “Just do what you think is right” which always turned out to be wrong.  I found out they had another autistic worker there from my school, who ended up eating their calendars out of sheer frustration.  I didn’t do anything so dramatic to get fired, but I got fired anyway.

I felt like a failure, but they weren’t done with me yet.  Instead of setting me up with paid employment, they set me up as a volunteer at a wildlife rescue group near my school.  I could walk there from school and back so it was very convenient to them, and lots of kids from the school did a lot of work for them, from caring for the animals to doing their laundry.

I was shown all the different things I could do, and allowed to choose the ones that suited me best.  I got very good at tube-feeding baby birds, and at feeding the baby mockingbirds who don’t require a tube and who have a satiety mechanism that protects them from overfeeding.  I also liked sorting feeding syringes after they were washed.  I did not like mixing up the bird food (which I swear looks and smells exactly like my tubefeeding formula, Osmolite) because it was very hard on the blender and it hurt my hands.  So mostly what I did was feeding the birds, taking care of the birds in other ways, and washing and sorting feeding syringes.

And I loved it there.  We even had a few birds who weren’t going to make it in the wild so they remained with us, like an owl.  And we had a woman with a home aviary who did a raptor program, and we were all invited to the raptor releases, which were every bit as majestic as you imagine, watching them wheel back into the sky where they came from.  

We also had mammals, but I never worked with them much.  Mostly the cutest baby squirrels you could imagine.

The people there… they treated me okay.  Some of them were condescending, and I think all of them saw me as “that [r-word] girl from the school nearby who comes here as a labor of love” and other romanticized sort of notions of my disability and why I was there and things like that.  Sometimes I caught them looking at me all misty-eyed as I did my work.   But they allowed me to fit in, they allowed me to do what I did best, and to choose which things I liked, same as any other employee, and that meant a lot to me.

Anyway this is why I liked Cassie in Animorphs.  I don’t know her very well yet.  But I know her parents run a wildlife rescue center much like the one I worked at.  And I understand how she feels about animals, because I worked at a place like that too.  I guess I can identify with her a bit.  I’m sure this will come back to bite me in the ass at some point during character development, but that’s how I feel about her right now, after reading the first few books, including just having finished her first POV book (which I won’t write about yet because it isn’t time yet).

And I can understand her ease of morphing coming from spending a lot of time getting to know the animals she morphs into.  She also probably gets in a lot of practice when nobody is around, taking DNA from all the various animals she comes into contact with.  And I like that her character is based around empathy to some degree, that’s something else I can identify with.

Again, I’m sure it’ll all bite me in the ass.  This is my first read of the series and I can already tell my friends are not as happy with Cassie as I am.   But for me, Cassie and Tobias are easily my two favorite characters, and the two most interesting characters, so far.

Oh, and having failed miserably at paid employment even in a program designed to maximize my success at paid employment as a disabled worker, probably had a lot to do with getting SSI on my first try with no effort at all on my part.  We had so much documentation of my failure to be employable even in the most sheltered of settings, that it was ridiculous.  They even told us at the meeting that they were sure, with the amount of documentation we’d given, that I would get SSI with no problem, and that’s not something the interiewers generally are going to say to you unless they’re pretty damn sure.  So this is also my story of how I got SSI on my first try – fail miserably at job placements even within a program designed to help disabled workers succeed at their job placements.

Anyway… yeah.  I really like Cassie because I can see a lot of myself in her.  She’s very passive in many ways (including ways that end up hurting herself and other people, much as my own tendencies towards passivity do), she loves animals, she works in wildlife rescue, she’s highly empathetic (especially with animals), she comes from a family with a farming background, etc.  There are plenty of things we don’t have in common, but plenty that we do, as well.