as small as a world and as large as alone, The words of a group of autistic people who...

8:56pm October 1, 2014

The words of a group of autistic people who learned to type using the Rapid Prompting Method (RPM) – what Tito Mukhopadhyay was taught by, except it doesn’t involve hitting people anymore (which is actively discouraged by the same woman who did hit Tito in the course of his “training”).

I always notice that parts of the autistic community that are more connected to the general developmental disability community, and are more likely to have been labeled as intellectually disabled as well as autistic, and those made up largely of those labeled low functioning, are far more racially and ethnically diverse than the “AS/HFA communities” (in name or in practice) that I’ve found online and offline. The diversity in this video mirrors the diversity in my special ed school. I don’t know what it is about the “high functioning” communities that attract so damn many white people and shut out so many people of color, but the “low functioning” autistic communities don’t have that problem.

Also please note that nobody is obligated to enjoy being autistic, especially if their main experience of being autistic is being trapped and unable to communicate their thoughts for years or decades when they have thoughts as complex to communicate as any “high functioning” person. Lots of people who’ve gone years or decades with no communication system are highly ambivalent about their autism at best, and with good reason.. Not everyone, mind you, but that is a serious hardship to have to take on, and it’s not the same as having your speech shut down sometimes. It’s never, ever being able to say anything important, even when it’s super important, even when it’s life and death. And the people in these videos are the lucky ones for whom RPM was successful. There are plenty of people who won’t ever learn to type or speak, and some of them are okay with that and some aren’t (judging from the words of people who were once in that category for a long part of their life and then came out of it).

Anyway, I’m glad this video was made. All the words in the video are printed, not spoken. They’re either superimposed on the screen, or writteon on boards. So it’s not blind-accessible, and I don’t have the spoons to make a transcript.

And I’m reminded once again why autistic communities comprised mostly of nonspeaking people and people who’ve been in the DD system, tend to be more welcoming to me than other communities: They’re more diverse. Racially, ethnically, class, sexuality, gender, everything. And that makes it so there’s a much wider space for me to make into my own, in these communities. Even if they’re still not quite ‘home’. And even if I still don’t quite fit because my life story isn’t the one people expect of a nonspeaking autistic adult. But still. Things like this make me ache for community.

Just where I can fade into the background. That’s what I wish I could do. Fade into the background, not be a big name, just be me, just be me around people who can mostly read me even when I’m not typing. I’d love to find a community where nobody spoke and nobody typed for certain periods of time, whether they were ever capable of it or not, and nobody saw it as “Oh no people are overloaded we have to Do Something about this, it’s bad!” People would just see it as “Words are tiring and we’re not made of words and we want a break from words.”

Of course RPM often doesn’t allow that, at least during training sessions. They’re very big on not allowing autistic people a moment to process things, just shoving them to the next level as fast as they can. And it works, and I know exactly why it works, and many autistic people would gladly take that temporary tradeoff in order to learn to communicate in words. But many autistic people also need time away from words and that needs to be respected too.

TL;DR: I like this video. It’s by several nonspeaking autistic people who learned to type using the RPM (Rapid Prompting Method). I have my misgivings about the RPM but it does get results and those can be life-changing for those it works for. I miss communities (like AutCom) that form around autistic people who mostly haven’t been considered 'high functioning’, there’s a definite difference in diversity and in how welcoming they are to someone like me, versus the less diverse and less welcoming “AS/HFA communities” (whether they call themselves that or not, that’s what they are). I guess the perfect community for me would be the “I fluctuate between categories and eat their remains for breakfast” community but I haven’t found that one yet. Love the video. Keep them coming. All the words were written by autistic people. Until someone makes a transcript, this is Deaf-accessible but not Blind-accessible.