8:46pm September 6, 2014

Today someone sent me a book for my autistic authors collection.

Thank you very much to the person who did this. I am always incredibly grateful. Like I literally cry every time I get something from my wish list, and especially if there’s a note, the notes are always really sweet and make me feel good. I haven’t been thanking everyone for everything I’ve gotten in the past few weeks, but thank you, everyone, seriously, I’m amazed by you.

Today I got Aspies Alone Together: My Story and A Survival Guide for Women Living with Asperger Syndrome by Elaine Day.

It was an extremely quick read, because one of its problems is it’s pretty light. Like it felt like what skimming something would feel like, like the meat isn’t quite there.

But it was great to read about a lesbian married couple in Vermont, the state I’m living in now. Vermont was the first to legalize civil unions, as far as I know, so it’s got a special place in a lot of lesbian and gay people’s hearts.

It was also good to read about the darker side of meltdowns. She talks about how she became verbally abusive to her wife, and how she had to learn to change that, she couldn’t just say “I had a meltdown, it’s no big deal” because her actions were having an effect on other people. And thankfully she was able to change a lot about her meltdowns, including just by learning how to prevent them, she has a sensory room in her house that she goes to when she’s melting down, it’s really cool. I wish I had enough rooms to have a sensory room. Maybe if I ever get my dream of having a big trailer house that I can just put in a trailer park anywhere…

Anyway, it was a good read, it just felt short. Like there could have been more to it, and like the details were removed. It’s about 83 pages long, if that gives you any idea. I think there’s a Kindle edition, too. Another thing about it was that the solutions to the problems were mostly solutions she herself had used, not necessarily solutions other autistic women had used. So YMMV as far as the effectiveness, but that goes for just about any book of advice by autistic people. And believe me, I’ve seen far worse.

(I once read a book on sexuality, by two autistic people, in which homosexuality was listed alongside drug abuse in a chapter called “The Road Less Traveled,” and gay people were urged not to “make a crusade out of being gay” because “people don’t like that,” and the authors talked about how they wouldn’t like it if their child was gay and they did think it was a choice a person could make. When I wrote a review condemning that section of the book, the response from the author was “She is someone who makes being gay into a crusade, obviously…” Arrrgh.)

Anyway, this book is happily pro-LGB because the author has been in lesbian relationships since she was a kid. And that was quite refreshing. A lot of books dealing with relationships are very straight-oriented, and either don’t mention LGB people or do worse than not mention us. No mention of trans people, but that wasn’t really the book’s focus, either. It mostly focused on her relationship to her wife and other relationships in her life.