Tuesday, August 5, 2008

To challenge a culture

Most of the time, I am too late in my readings and responses to be an "active part" of the autism blogging community. Neither does it help that my blog is most often read by people who search Google for keywords like "asperger no life" and "asperger never marry". Fact.

But today I came over an interesting blog entry, made by abfh, which mentions a comment Amanda made where she explain the use of the word meltdown in the autistic community. To prove a point, she quotes part of her comment;

I would never attempt to join a culture and then say within a few years of joining it, that the culture's longstanding words are inappropriate and just now being defined, just because the wider community doesn't know them yet.

I can agree to what Amanda is saying, but at the same time, I think it can be dangerous for any culture or group of people to never be challenged on their use of words, their paradigms, and such. If we never challenge what is already set in stone, there can be no evolution and no future for the culture. And to provide an image for this as I believe many people know, who's to say there is no black swan?

Amanda makes many very good arguments as to why it should be called a 'meltdown'. The argument that stands out to me is one she used in another comment, where she says that the use of these words ('meltdown', 'shutdown') came about because one did not want to use the clinical words used by professionals.

That, to me, says a lot. A culture will always have its own words. Some people call this slang. That the autistic community, not just online, use their own words for the feelings and situations, means that there is indeed a community, and a vibrant one at that. The argument over these words and the connotations they bring about is also a healthy sign. What, perhaps, is not as healthy, is when people say others are not as involved in the culture as others, and thus cannot voice their opinion.

It's not about the validity of the online autistic community, as abhf says, because we know the autistic online (and offline) community to be very valid. Not only just by what it can achieve when it comes to lobbying and "getting things done", but because it is a community, a culture, that cares greatly about itself and its members.

As a newcomer here, myself, I would like to think that I am just as welcome as a person who has known about her autism for 10 years, or, her entire life. Abhf made a parallel to the gay/LGBT community, which has faced criticism due to conformism, and thus I find his parallel to be a good one. Especially is the case here is that one has to conform into the culture adopted by many, rejected by a few.

The choice to use the Rainbow Infinity Symbol as a symbol of "pro-autism", and not the puzzle piece, has been an active choice in the autistic community. As the symbol represent, among other things, the spectrum of autism through the different colors (the differences in our symptoms), it can also represents the difference in our opinion about our culture. As I have previously mentioned, all cultures change. All paradigms are challenged. The Rainbow Infinity Symbol shows this never-ending cycle.

Friday, August 1, 2008

Learned Empathy

I remember when I was growing up in the mid-to-late 90's, there was a heavy emphasis on EQ, or Emotional Intelligence.

Not fitting in with my peers, I become very interested in this EQ-thing, as well as quasi-psychology as Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. It was the only thing I knew that could help me understand others, although I don't think the book was meant for, or written about, 10 year olds.

Looking back at it now, I can see it as a "symptom", if you will. Since I was not able to make and keep friends through normal means, I made my peers into "lab rats" and applied the theories I read in the books. It did not really help.

At the time, when EQ was very much in the limelight, I remember not feeling I "fit" with how one should be, EQ-wise. I felt that I did not fit the shape making out "a good person". In 1990, EQ was defined as "the ability to monitor one's own and others' feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one's thinking and actions.". Read that again, and think of the diagnostic criteria for Asperger's Syndrom.

I tried so hard to get a high EQ-score in the tests published in women's magazines. After taking a few, I saw a pattern and adapted my score, manipulating it, if you will, to be able to "brag" about my high scores. I learnt, through these tests and articles, how a "normal person" felt, thought, behaved and treated others. It's a lesson that has stuck with me through my life since then, making me the person I am today, through constant manipulation of my thoughts, feelings and behavior against others.

When I first started reading about Asperger's Syndrome, and autism, I was very against the idea that all autistics have problems with empathy. I still do, in a way, due to the notion that every autistic is different. What I had problems understanding is that there is a fine line between empathy and sympathy.

While empathy is the ability to recognize or understand other people's state of mind or emotion, and what is talked about as being able to "put one self in another person's shoes", sympathy is defined as concern and sorrow for another person's situation or misfortune. The idea that autistics lack empathy is known as Theory of Mind; the ability to attribute mental states—beliefs, intents, desires, pretending, knowledge, etc.—to oneself and others and to understand that others have beliefs, desires and intentions that are different from one's own.

Looking at it now, a couple of months on, and with new experiences and understandings of myself as well as autism, I can see that I do not employ this theory of mind. Most of the time I am able to "use" it through the things I have learns about other people, feelings and "common courtesy", but when I'm stressed out, angry and panicked, I catch myself speaking and acting out my true feelings.

One of my greater flaws is my perfectionism. Although I can be very hard on myself to be as perfect as possible, I might be even harder with others, be it the mailman who is an hour late, or a salesperson in a store I gone to to get something I simply must have straight away (yet another flaw, my impatience).

Being able to recognize this flaw, and putting in the context of autism, I see that it is not simply that I am unreasonable, although I clearly am, but it's an unreasonableness I cannot help. The unreasonableness is a product of my lack of empathy, and I have to stop and think about it when I've calmed myself down that maybe, just maybe, this person cannot really do anything more than she or he already is. That is no excuse, thought, because now that I am aware of it, it is something I can work on.