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1:47pm August 22, 2014

karalianne:

nekobakaz:

karalianne:

Way back in the early 2000’s, I got myself a t-shirt that said “Atypical Neurotypical” across the back.

A few years later, on usenet, we decided that “ANT” would be a good term for people who were autistic cousins (ACs) but not diagnosed with anything. I was the queen ANT. (I had to abdicate when I was diagnosed with ADHD.) I probably still have the stuff we put together, but it’s all available on usenet anyway. This was a joke along the lines of the Institute for the Study of the Neurologically Typical (ISNT).

I feel like the kind of joke that ANT was… wouldn’t be well-received anymore. Like people take this stuff more seriously than it needs to be.

We need to be able to joke about things. That’s important.

I’m not old enough to have used the usenet, but I love the ISNT. It’s a language joke!!! It’s taking medical terminology and throwing it back at the medical doctors and professionals who insist on using bad, ableist terms. And it breaks stereotyping that we don’t have a sense of humour!!

A sense of humour is so important. Gotta joke about things, poke fun at things, or at least let others poke fun at things. Sarcasm can be a tool, satire is a tool, parody is a tool, and honestly, you need to stop to have fun while on the activism war path, or else you burn out way too fast. Gotta learn to pace yourself.

Yup.

Here’s the stuff from ANT. One nice thing about Google is how everything is pretty much still there.

Remember, this is a joke. (Some of the people on the thread didn’t get it.)

That was such a time of innocence, looking back…

I’ve lost friends from back then.  Someone convinced Hylander I’m a fraud, if you can believe it.  They played on his desire not to be taken for a fool… and took him for a fool.  I felt so betrayed.  They made it sound like it was news to him that I’d done drugs in college… I know he used to know that, I know I talked about it on Usenet, maybe he just didn’t read those threads.  But he was like “how could an autistic person get hold of drugs” (easy – be around druggies who think your autistic behavior is actually stoned behavior, get offered drugs).  So now he thinks I’m a liar about being autistic and a bunch of other things.

It makes me so angry when people are able to destroy relationships like that.  I was never close to him, but we were never enemies until some people stepped in.

And then there was a weird exchange with Vicky, where she was telling people that I was diagnosed with schizophrenia before I was diagnosed with autism, and I told her I was diagnosed with PDDNOS (and described as low functioning), then schizophrenia, then autism, and then she said something like “I am not going to say anything because I don’t feel like getting into a fight.”

And that was so weird because how would she know what was in my medical records?  Why would she think I was not telling the truth about something like that?  Why would she… I don’t even understand, I was so hurt when people started acting like they knew more about me than I knew about myself.  Like… I didn’t even know the thing about ‘low functioning’ until I found it in my medical file myself.  So why would she… like… why would she think I just made that up?  Why is it so hard to believe that I didn’t know everything in my medical file, when I first knew her?  That I was going on half-remembered bits of information?  That I had to get this giant box of records before I could even tease out which diagnosis had happened at what point in time?

It reminds me of another interaction with my stalker.

I remember telling her about a friend and how she had spoken mostly in a combination of words and gestures, but not fluent English, until she was in her twenties.

And my stalker was like “That is not accurate.  That is not accurate.”  And then she told me that my friend had never said anything about that and had always claimed to have spoken well as a teenager.

And the thing was… I remember this.  I remember when my friend found out that she hadn’t spoken as well as she thought she had.  What happened was there was a teaching assistant from her high school, who she met up with in her forties.  And she talked to him and he said that contrary to what she believed about her speech, it had actually not improved to fluency until her twenties, and that until then she’d spoken “her own language” that was a mixture of a few words and a lot of gestures.

But apparently this couldn’t be accurate, because people always remember their own history perfectly accurately (not), and people never encounter new information later that makes them realize their previous way of describing things was wrong.

It’s things like this that make me mad.

Because it’s things like this that my stalkers use to undermine friendships and undermine would-be friends and undermine communities.  They say “Well you remember she never said anything about those speech problems before…” when the person hadn't known the extent of her speech problems before.  She’d improved so much that she’d thought she’d attained fluency long before she had.  Or me not knowing the exact order in which I was diagnosed with different things, until I got my psychiatric records ordered.

These are not unusual things.  It is not unusual for a person to not know something about their life, and then find it out later.  But it’s very easy for someone to sow suspicion and discontent by making these things out to be more than they are.

And it pisses me off and it makes me sad because I want to go back to how things were then, without the suspicion, without the dishonesty (on the part of the stalkers I mean), back when assholes were just assholes, not master con artists who could turn good friends and communities against each other with a flick of their wrists.

I’m sure you remember how things used to be.  There were trolls but everyone knew there were trolls and you could killfile them.  There were fights but they were honest fights.  There wasn’t this suspicion and intrigue and shit.