Tag Archives: disability rights

My Reflection from class in the Fall on ‘The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime’ by Mark Haddon

SPOILER alert: For anyone who has not read this book yet!

In Mark Haddon’s book “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time,” it made me think of the visual thinking I have. The character in the book, Christopher, has much anxiety, panic attacks, sensory issues, and visualizing his plans to be able to function in a society which does not accommodate Autistic people like him that much. It showed how very intelligent, but concrete Christopher was too, even with math and science. It was pretty accurate portrayal of what goes on in my mind with a few differences.

I find that there were similar traits to how I feel in society. The similar traits between Christopher and myself are that we try to adapt to a society with many multi-sensory experiences in the world. For example, when Christopher was traveling to London to be reunited with his mother, he was trying to compensate by trying many different relaxation techniques. One of which was counting to 50 breaths so he could stay calm. He also was vocalizing a lot on the subways in London which I do a lot when I am on the subways in New York City. Some people actually are staring at me, but then I turn to say hello to not be known as a freak to them.

Christopher was very compassionate for animals and much feeling for the dog that his father killed which is why his father bought him a dog at the end of the story. Although his parents split up, his parents had their own way of living with their Autistic son, Christopher. In order for both of his parents to accept him for he is, the mother split a part from his father by finding another man which eventually she broke up with. The father hid letters the mother sent grieving for Christopher’s forgiveness in the way she used to treat him. When Christopher lived with his father solely, the father didn’t embrace and accept his son for he is, and always tried to construct his son to pass as normal as much as possible. His father eventually celebrated him too.

It was only until after Christopher found out his father killed the dog, Wellington, and Christopher sought out to find his mother, that both parents accepted their son. Acceptance is a process and everyone has the chance to work out their issues with themselves to celebrate who they are and other people. When a child has a disability like autism, many parents don’t want to accept their child is Autistic, instead find a way to ‘fix’ them or make them ‘pass’, and not honoring the person their child is. Many parents look to organizations like Autism Speaks and Autism Science Foundation to fix their child to be like everyone else in order to ‘normalize’ their child. But, what is normal, anyway?

All throughout my childhood, I was always Autistic, but was never diagnosed until I was an adult. I was always very anxious to be around society, I didn’t like people touching me in a certain way, and still don’t. I also had many other sensory issues like not wanting to be around abrupt noises and I do stim either with my hands or my whole body.

Autistic people need routines, a sense of knowing what is going to happen, and repetitive thinking in our way of doing things. Sometimes being Autistic can be frustratingly stressful causing a panic attack when we are not knowing what to expect from a new situation or person. New situations and people can be anxiety provoking for Autistic people like Christopher or myself. However, autism is a developmental delay which means we can learn to be comfortable with things in time at different times of our life. It is what makes an Autistic person a human being too.

When I meet other Autistic people I feel happier than when meeting a person who is not Autistic because I am able to communicate in the language of autism with anyone on the spectrum. I believe Christopher from Haddon’s book would feel the same way. It does not mean I don’t like meeting Non-Autistic people too, but there is a different feeling when meeting other Autistic people. Everyone has their unique properties of being Human, but most importantly everyone has people they are most comfortable with.

When I attended Autreat the last 2 years that Jim Sinclair ran it, I really loved being able to Flapplaud with our hands instead of clapping. The first year I attended Autreat, I loved being able to use interaction badges to know when we wanted to communicate with each other. I also enjoyed working with the Autistic children at Autreat in 2013 where I ran the children’s program there because my friend who ran it became ill during Autreat.

Autistic people need to have the community we live in, to adapt to our needs and wants too. Police officers and other authority figures are becoming increasingly aware of what it’s like for an Autistic person in the community. For each culture in Humanity, we learn different things from different people. It does not matter what culture we belong in, whether it’s Autistic culture or Deaf Culture or any other culture in Humanity, we need to find a way to communicate and accept each other.

Haddon, M. (2007). The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. National Geographic Books.

HOLIDAY SPECIAL: A Presentation on Autistic Artifacts from my project partner and I in “Disability and Embodiment” Class

TRIGGER Warning for everyone: We had used artifacts that were a part of the medical and charity models of disability towards the end of the presentation. This was only to show that they are artifacts too even though we all disagree with them.

I hope everyone enjoys the presentation my project partner from class did with me. We worked really hard as capturing the highlights of the many positive aspects of Autistic culture and the social model of disability!!!

Hopefully I can finally start Graduate School for next year 😀 It would only help me even more!!!!

Flapplauding always and Please ENJOY your HOLIDAY Present from me to you!!!!!

OUT, J

Know your Voice, Know your Identities, Know your supports, and Live a Self-Determined Life

An Open Letter to the many primary and secondary educators as well as the many professionals who try to create tokens to Autistic and other Disabled people who they don’t give proper education to own their identities and opinions,

It’s important to create a better way for the Autistic/Disabled children and adolescents of the future adults of the Disability community and the broader community in the world. It’s important as well to create a system where the adults in the Disability community today finally know their voice and their identities count too. People need to develop their own self without any one especially Non-Autistic/Non-Disabled people influencing them that they can’t do much in society. This leads to many of the children eventually living in group homes like many of the Autistic/Disabled adult peers who struggled with the teachers in the school system as well growing up without a chance to learn.

School is an important project for every child growing up. No one should be denied a proper education because many teachers don’t want to develop more patience and spend more time with their students to get them through 12 years of schooling and go to college. When I watch the amount of people entering into the caretaker world for Autistic/Disabled adults I noticed many of the Non-disabled people who work with them even some parents, don’t preserve self-determination. Sadly, I start realizing how the whole primary and secondary education system pretty much sucks in the United States. I am not just talking about the public schools, but the fact that these children are also going to Residential Treatment program schools as well that really are segregative and do suck!! It’s not even just the Disability community which is denied proper education, but many other cultures of people too who don’t get the education they need. This all leads to mental health issues and addiction.

Many educators seem to only care about the most gifted people who are usually non-Disabled or non-Autistic people to finish high school and go to college. It’s only if any student becomes a good advocate for themselves during public high school that they actually do succeed to lead their own life through college eventually earning a decent living. Instead many Autistic/Disabled people wind up going to Adult day hab centers and group homes because society gave up on them. It is a very sad situation that many of these educators and other professionals do not help my many young peers in the Autistic/Disability community to learn responsibility in order to live a self-determined life.

When these people eventually do go to group homes, day hab, and even work in sheltered workshops earning a dollar an hour in some cases, they are treated like children, and act out like children, always acting out negatively. They are considered to be ‘behavior problems’ in society because no one taught them any better about responsibilities while attending their school years from kindergarten through 12th grade. And yet, most of these people have sensory meltdowns too that were always misunderstood as tantrums instead.

Society graduated many of these people with a IEP diploma which just states that they attended school without earning grades. Moreover, these people are told to learn social skills in adult classes when these types of skills should have been taught in public elementary school with the Non-disabled students. Most of these people can’t read or do not even know what it means to understand what they read, to write an essay, to do simple math, to sign their name, or to even know how they want to represent themselves in society.

Our society created a system where Non-Autistic/Non-Disabled people will speak for many of them in the Disability community no matter what the situation entails including telling the world how they should be identified as. Many of these students in the Disability community are never given real choices because many people do not want them to be educated in school and earn a decent wage that can allow them to have independence too. Their education is pushed away from them while they are pushed to agency businesses to take care of them for the rest of their lives. Yes, many of us in the Disability community do need supports, and sometimes agencies help with these supports, but the supports should be given to us as an accommodation to live a self-determined life. We live in an Interdependent world, none of us are totally independent.

There are some people, but not many who’ve been considered lucky to not let this happen to them. However, luck was more of a determination to advocate for ourselves including some non-verbal self-advocates who fought for their rights for supports and independence. Many reached out and others continue to reach out to advocate against a system that society really pushes many Autistic and other Disabled people into: not having their own voice and identities. It’s important to always educate, teach self-advocacy, teach social skills, and teach that it’s okay to identify ourselves the way any one wants to throughout school and adulthood. Most importantly, it’s important to teach social skills in elementary school as well as teaching sexuality and gender identities to everyone no matter if the student is disabled or not. Society is so afraid of teaching any one who is not the so-called normal person in society.

We are all gifted, we can all live our life the way we want and need to, and we can all learn to be responsible self-determined adults with the supports we need along the way. Society needs to accommodate the Disability community with the many sensory and physical things that we need to be accommodated for so that we can live our life like any other person can. In the professional world, Social Workers read in their code of ethics about self-determination all the time, but many Social Workers do not practice this code of ethics unless it is to get a Autistic/Disabled person to obtain their benefits from society as a whole. Benefits are good and are needed for us including myself, but self-determination must always be preserved too. There needs to be balance between the benefits the Disability community receives or will receive, and self-determination.

When society sees a person like myself advocating for myself and working toward my goals of self-determination, they only want to create a token so that this person will speak like Non-Disabled people yet will still be considered Disabled by society. If society wants to really listen to the Disability community, they will need to allow us to speak our minds the way we feel and want to represent ourselves with our identities. It is unfair for the Disability community and most importantly it is an unfair education system for the many people who have been and are in the elementary and secondary school systems. It’s probably why bullying persists in our schools. Society needs to change. Society needs to create an education system where everyone has a chance to live a decent life and learn the responsibilities to live our lives eventually with wages that aren’t sub-minimum.

Don’t wait until they become adults because then it may already be too late! Please do all you can to educate everyone no matter who they are. We need to make the United States better than it is right now. For those educators who have begun this already, I say thank you to you, but help me create any teacher in every school to maintain any student to live their adult life with supports and self-determination.

A few people have tried to make me a token in the past, but it’s important to fight for our own voice to be heard not to be a token. I teach self-advocacy at a part time job, and will continue to teach these basic self-advocacy skills so everyone eventually will know their voice, their own opinions, and their own identities which will always be cherished.

Thank you for reading and hope everyone understands what I say!

OUT, J

Struggles for Control and Supporting Individualities within Caring Communities

Everyone in society likes to be in control. Being in control of another person is not being a community. Everyone loves it because they feel they have power over others. This also creates entitlement, sadly. It means that people tend to love their ego over themselves that they lose sight of who they are. Ego controls not only the person, but can control others within the community as well. If a person loses control over others, they will do harmful things to society and/or themselves. The only control we should have is the control of ourselves while following the laws the community created. By controlling what we do without experiencing being in control or being controlled, we become a better person within the community.

So, how did Control start? What does being in control mean?

Control means from the dictionary, the power to influence or direct people’s behavior or the course of events. When a person is in control of others, they lose sight of their own humanity, and their ego gets in the way. However, controlling others is something that happens because everyone feels they can not trust their peers. To build trust in others, we need to all let go of our fears and build community.

Community means from the dictionary, a group of people living in the same place or having a particular characteristic in common. However, it’s more than that, community is supportive of each other, it’s building relationships, is giving each member of the community the right to speak their mind, is about listening to everyone, it is not having a leader controlling others while instead mediating others, and being happy for everyone in that community who shares with all their peers. Community is not having a leader, community is not having one person in control of the whole community, and not having people in the community living exclusively in richer love than the others. No one needs to use their own agenda as the laws for the community because everyone practices the community’s bill of rights and commandments that everyone feels they want from the community. Everyone votes on it and practices the laws. An agenda everyone has for themselves should be individualized for that person only to build self-determination.

Looking back in History, there has been much control over others losing sight of our own self. However, if we look back thousands of years ago when the first Human beings were around, we didn’t have governments set up, we didn’t have religions, and we certainly didn’t have people controlling each other. There were just small tribes in the world building up the Human race with their own faith. Everyone lived with self-determination, but their were no laws or rules. There was just our human nature. However, being able to create a safe community, leaders were created to ensure every member of the community had support for everyone’s needs and wants. If the majority of people wanted certain rules or laws to be created for a safe and supportive community, then the community needs to follow those laws. Laws change in the community with every generation. When generations collide on theories of law like in terms of what Humanity would need or want, we begin our free will to argue and fight. For example, the fight between the Autism and Autistic communities. As the community grew in the past and continues to grow, the people do too, but so do their egos. As egos grew stronger, controlling others began becoming stronger within the community. These laws are what we call government today with the leaders we vote for to fight for what we want and need in the country we live in.

The United States is a free country because it’s a country where it’s citizens can talk to each other about what laws we don’t like and what laws we do like. Laws need to be followed to help guide us with living our own life. Everyone needs to know that the laws help support and protect us at the same time. We can not have anarchy anywhere in the world because human nature does not allow us to since there is ego.

Now, the Human race is more than 5 billion individuals in the world with millions of communities for people to live in different governments, and we have lost sight of the first community thousands of years ago which began humanity. Everyone has different perspectives, everyone has different ways of doing things, and no body is being supportive in the communities anymore. Instead everyone wants to be in control. Society even created the media to control what people will see by controlling what they want us to understand about what goes on in the Human race.

All in all, the community who has their individual people with their properties and practices which make them the person they are, can trust each other gaining invaluable interaction and experience from each other. We as a whole community wherever we live in the world need to continue supporting and promoting safe space, secure home life, and rules everyone can follow. We all live in this world to encourage each other to fulfill our paths whatever we do to contribute without controlling any one.

Out, J

Let’s Give Everyone Their Chance For their Own Success!

Being Disabled is not the same as being able. It’s hard dealing with people who just don’t understand us as being a part of the Disability community. I have met many people who look at me like I am an Able-bodied person, but don’t realize the many things that disable me from the rest of society. Being Autistic has it’s many gifts for me, but I still am disabled by society’s standards. I am very capable of doing the many things like everyone else, but much of society does not understand how to accommodate me. For example, there are different ways I get overloaded and overstimulated that I get very frustrated with and angry because the way society acts. If many people realized it, they could change their perception of how to act.

Everyone is capable of doing whatever they know they can do, but for some reason their is a disconnect between Able-bodied people and the Disabled. Whether the person is on the Autistic spectrum, has Cerebral Palsy, has Down’s Syndrome, is physically handicapped, has a mental health condition, has a rare illness that disables them from society, blind, deaf, etc. People need to remember whether the person is visibly disabled or invisibly disabled, everyone has right to their personal accommodation from the rest of society to do what they love to do.

There is no reason why a Disabled person should be left in the dark by themselves to be pitied or placed in Residential Treatment Placement Centers or Treated differently among the Healthcare system because the rest of society does not understand us. These are unacceptable ways to treat anyone, so why is society always thinking of using pity and torture in healthcare for people with disabilities. It really is very unfair and unconscionable for any Human being to be treated in such a fashion. For instance, just because someone is Autistic does not mean they need constant supervision, but it does not mean we don’t need supervision at all like everyone else. Society does not understand Disability culture, in addition to not being very concrete with Autistics.

Society is too overwhelming for us as a result, where we become very angry, confused, and frustrated because of it. Much of society still thinks that organizations like Autism Speaks will have all the answers and the mainstream media thinks they have the answers too. Instead of seeking answers from anyone, seek answers from those people who are struggling with society; the people with disabilities themselves! There are some Disabled people who may seem Neurotypical, but really are very much disabled themselves. You can’t walk in other shoes until you have experienced what a Disabled person experiences every day from our unique way of being in this so-called Able-bodied/Neurotypical world. Many people just don’t understand and think that they can talk down at us, that we need constant supervision, and that we need constant attention. However, disability is a part of humanity!!!

No one can discover their own self-determination and taking responsibility if the society’s communities does not understand everyone. Self-determination is very important and being included in conversations with the rest of society who talks about us is even more important. Society is overlooking the many factors of what it means for any one to be successful. Success does not mean making a lot of money. Success just means working hard to learning to build our own necessities to live our life and having our own self-worth to just be who we are. In the every end to self-determination, anyone reaps their rewards, with money, but not before the end.

I have found that there are too many professionals and many other people working to help people with disabilities who just don’t understand how to physically and mentally be there for any of us. As being a part of the subcategory, in the Autistic community, which is very broad and diverse of people in the world, many people seem to not understand us at all even a lot of professionals. This is very sad!!! Though, many people are learning lately, there is still much more learning, accepting us, and understanding about autism and disability that everyone needs to know in order to create a better society.

As we are in the middle of March, we are almost beginning Autism Acceptance Month in April, which means we are 3 and a half months until Autistic Pride Day in June. I thank many people who are beginning to learn or are learning, but I think society still has a long road of learning and understanding until they can begin accepting. Much of society is still not very concrete, not very understanding, and certainly not very accepting of Human diversity of what people can do for themselves where any one can take ownership of who they are, building their life.

There are many people in society who just don’t think that Disabled people can be included, have their own voice, and strive for their own success. Some people, but not all, who do take on people with disabilities including Autistic people, use some people in the disability community as a Token, because they want us to spread their word of pity in order to be called an inspiration to us all. This is not right and not fair! However, much of society needs to learn that everyone can be successful in what they know they want to do, can have a supportive network of people like anyone else to live life, and be independent when we need to be.

Stay true to yourself and always remember that no matter what we all our living as Human beings in the vast Human spectrum!!