Last summer, my husband and I had some new friends over for lunch. They brought along their two young boys. Toward the end of the meal, the 5-year-old, who was sitting next to me, looked at me and said, “You scare me.” This was pre-Asperger’s, so like everyone else at the table, I laughed it … Continue reading You Scare Me
Last weekend, I had a meltdown and the next morning I tried to capture some scattered impressions of it to share. I’ve purposely left this raw and unedited, the way it unspooled in my head, to give you a feel for how chaotic a meltdown can be. While meltdowns are different for everyone, this is … Continue reading Anatomy of a Meltdown
Here’s something you probably won’t hear a lot of aspies say: I was a bully. Being teased and bullied is a painful reality for many young (and some not so young) people with autism. So it’s no surprise that I was teased and bullied as a kid. Just a few of the many humiliating experiences … Continue reading Confessions of a Mean Girl
Continued from Part 1 There was joy in that realization and also sadness. My diagnosis came too late to help me in my role as a mother when my daughter was young, a role that I often struggled with. Many aspects of being autistic can make the child-rearing years of motherhood challenging. Babies have round-the-clock … Continue reading At the Intersection of Gender and Autism – Part 2
When I decided to sign up for a triathlon back in June, my baseline goal was simply to finish. The distances all looked doable and I figured that as long as I didn’t get hurt, finishing the race was just a matter of pacing myself well. What I hadn’t counted on was 2-3 foot waves … Continue reading What I learned While Running, Swimming and Biking 293 Miles in 8 Weeks
I don’t know how to title this. I don’t know what verb to put in that gaping blank space. I don’t even know if body is the right word. Maybe brain is more correct, though my brain keeps reassuring me that it knows exactly what it’s doing. It points fingers at my uncooperative mouth and … Continue reading _________ing an Uncooperative Body
Something strange is going on in my brain. Aside from the usual strangeness, I mean, which I’m quite used to. Back in March I wrote about my missing word problem. Over the past few months, I’ve developed some funky new issues with writing: The missing words are no longer just small words like a or … Continue reading Uncooperative Words and Where I Go From Here
The first in a 3-part series on silence. * My silence is frustrating. For me. For others. I don’t mean the silence between the words, the comfortable kind, the long drive in the car, relaxed lunch in the park, playing video games for hours side-by-side on the couch, reading together kind of silence. Frustrating silence … Continue reading Silence I: Frustration
I’ve never been good at asking for help. A few memorable examples to help you understand how nonexistent my “asking for help” skills were as a kid: When I was five, I fell out of a tree that I was climbing and landed on my back. As you can imagine, I completely knocked the wind … Continue reading Asking for Help
Catastrophizing is one of those autistic traits that when I first read about it, I thought, “Oh, I never do that.” How wrong I was. I catastrophize daily. It’s usually small stuff that blows over quickly–I’m not going to get to the post office before it closes which means I won’t get my important overnight … Continue reading Catastrophizing Sucks
