Sunday, October 20, 2013

Back and Reviewing Unstrange Minds

Considering the short length of my inability to access blogger, I'm just copying the one real post I made in that time and putting it up a day later.
 
I read No, You Don't: Essays From an Unstrange Mind. I liked it. A lot. It wasn't happy, mostly, though there were happy parts. I do think you should get it, if you can and haven't. http://www.amazon.com/No-You-Dont-Essays-Unstrange-ebook/dp/B00FH2ND1O/
 
I got it when it was free. (haha :p)
 
Anyways, now that you know that I think you should get it, here's why. Sparrow writes important things. Not everything in her experience is true for all Autistic people, just like not everything a neurotypical person would write about their life would be true for all neurotypicals, but a lot applies to more than just her. Really. She talks about the things she's had to do to survive, and that's hard. She talks about the ways people react to those of us who are sometimes capable of speech and sometimes most emphatically *not* capable of speech. It's not nice. I've been really lucky, and no one's really taken issue with it in my time in China, which is important because I don't *have* the option of skipping class when I'm non-speaking. It happens too often, on too short notice, for me to do that when I'm in class 5 days a week and 3 absences is enough to start hurting my grade.
And she makes a metaphor about social interaction that I've made too: checkers and chess. You sit down at the checkerboard and it turns out your opponent is playing chess. This doesn't end well, by the way. Checkers loses very quickly. http://yesthattoo.blogspot.com/2012/10/checkers-part-2.html
It's honest. It's important. I think everyone who is autistic or interacts with autistic should read it if they can. Not because everything in it will apply to everyone: it won't. It can't. But some of it probably will, and the parts that apply are important.

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