since am one of those #ActuallyAutistic people Dx at the tender age of 50 (yes, 50. and yes am older now, shut up), am not acquainted with the american rituals of national days or awareness months involving autism.
@blogdiva It’s becoming obvious that the people who made the world interesting, colorful, exciting and creative, the explorers, the curious etc might have a good share of autism among them.
what that could mean is that you are dealing with someone who is a polyglot, expert in linguistics and the social semiological work (that some call emotional labor) of "reading people".
yet we live in a timeline that disrespects people who are really, really good at decoding texts, breaking down and explaining complex social/political/economics events and phenomena because the cool kids these days are those techbros who like to hark about being (themselves, when they are not) polymaths. 🧵
@blogdiva In an era that loves fakery and pretense, astute people are not liked because they tell the truth. Bad enough if you're white, worse if you're a person of colour.
BTW some of us could be polymaths if we wanted to. the dyslexic brain is a thing of wonder.
when teaching at Rutgers, was invited to participate in a study about bilinguism. they want to image brains to find an explanation for why some folks are fully bilingual and other aren't. images of my brain are somewhere in that campus.
a decade later, out of curiosity, searched if there was anything about that. welp, it seems they accidentally found out a good number of folks were dyslexic...
and years later, upon that study, there seems to be a correlation between not just the ability to speak two languages and dyslexia but with polyglots, dyslexia and autism.
so am a bit cocky when i say that some of us could be polymaths if we wanted to; or if we found the right mentors/teachers to engage us in not only maths but software development: it's called programming LANGUAGES, after all.
🧵
but the hegemonic culture is so pervasive to be perverse; ESPECIALLY when dealing with which autistic people get to be treated as a geniuses and who don't.
i would never be a polymath cuz, well... i fucking hate algorithms. algrebra is ARRRRGH and i just want to get shit done, so i copypasta my way into coding because i want shit done NOW.
but it means that still my tender +50 years old ass (shut up) is still teaching herself how to code cuz i haven't found an effective curriculum...🧵
and it's funny because i have two sons and neither has been interested in learning to code like their da (he does hifalutin ish in java and shit like that) nor have they fallen in love with Romance language or ANY languages to speak in anything other than English (i call this their form of rebellion against their parents).
so anyways... where was i? oh, right: us neurospicy non-hegemonic looking folks (go look up hegemonic. you're welcome)
did y'all know WOMEN used to do computer work, not men.
i didn't. i just found that out like 10 years ago and am still shook to this day.
especially when finding out about NASA team of Little Old Ladies and Native American and African American women used their CROCHET, CROSS STITCH & SEWING skills to embed memory chips into everything involving the Apollo project.
🗣 HOW WAS I NEVER TAUGHT THIS AT SCHOOL!!!
and guess what? by their "identity politics" some where bilingual, even polyglot...🧵
@blogdiva in the 1960s and 1970s as Santa Clara County, CA transitioned from orchards to chip foundries, Fairchild and Intel and National hired thousands of women (who had previously been slicing apricots and plums) to work in clean rooms staring into microscopes and attaching hair-thin gold wires between chips and their carriers. That almost exclusively female workforce built Silicon Valley.
@Cdespinosa this has had me thinking about why would Digital open, in the 1970s, a components factory in my mom's hometown in Puerto Rico. the LOLs story may explain it. that area supplied a lot of sweatshop workers for NYC's garment district. as a lot of those sweatshops were moved to Asia, people with those pattern drafting/cutting/assembling skills were needed for those early components. i got to play with a lot of those pieces of equipment. built Barbie houses with early motherboards.
so next time you see a NANNY, a NURSE, a SUPERMARKET WORKER a SHORT ORDER COOK who is Black, or Latine or Native American, or all three and even then A WOMAN, you may be dealing with a multilingual savant who was never given a chance to make their mark in history because of how they looked.
even worse, those people may even exhibit the characteristics of #autism#adhd#dyslexia and have never gotten the help & mentorship they needed because of what they look like and where they come from...🧵
Just when I think I'm starting to wrap my head around how bad things ACTUALLY are in this country, I hear more stuff that reminds me I barely have a clue.
Don't call 9-1-1 during a mental health crisis. Handle it within the family when possible. You may tell a 9-1-1 dispatcher that you want a clinician, but they will decide and typically send the police. Perhaps they think a person in behavioral crisis is often dangerous; perhaps they know most clinicians don't want to handle such cases. But the paradigm that police should be the first-responders for calls involving those with behavioral symptoms is wrong and it has to change. When police respond at least one gun is introduced when there may have previously been none. When police remove a gun from its holster in a crisis, one hand is occupied by a gun and unavailable for wrestling with a subject. it is hard to put a gun back in its holster in the midst of a crisis. And a police response creates the opportunity for a suicidal person to deliberately die. Do not introduce a gun to a situation where one is not already present.
Instead, send unarmed social workers or clinicians. Social workers know when they can handle a situation and when they need police support; let them decide. The CAHOOTS program in Oregon sends unarmed responders who are trained to handle these kind of situations. When I spoke to one of their representatives a few years ago, they told me none of their responders has ever been seriously injured by a client during the 30+ years the CAHOOTS program has existed.
A common saying among those wishing to de-stigmatize mental illness is that persons living with mental illness are typically not dangerous. If that is true, then why do we send police to behavioral health emergencies? Maybe it is because many don't truly believe those with behavioral symptoms are not dangerous; maybe it is because nobody else will do the job,; maybe it is because no one really cares.
think of all the menial jobs BIPoC women do, then think of all the languages you hear BIPOC women in menial jobs speak.
now, next time you see a BIPOC doing menial or "womanly" skills, think of those Little Old Ladies of NASA.
you may be in the presence of a savant with groundbreaking skills never to be manifested because of who gets to be called a brilliant in this country... 🧵
AND IF YOU ARE A TEACHER IN PARTICULAR it would be wise to reconsider how "slow" or "not so smart" is that bilingual kid in your class.
BILINGUISM IS NOT NORMAL so they fact they can speak more languages than YOU prove they can do more with their brain than you. so why treat them as defective, less than, even useless?
#Autism has taught me, the more neurospicy, the more hidden talents people have.
learning about the Little Old Ladies brought me joy and peace.
i broke almost a decade of creative blocks with sewing. when i can't do, i stitch because then i can write, code, build, paint... i've hacked my brain by teaching myself to find joy again in all i love & have autism to thank for that.
so next time you meet a Little Old BIPOC Lady, she might the savant, even autistic, you never knew she could be. /🧵
PS: this thread has generated some amazing conversations.
y'all reminded of CRAFTS IN AMERICA, a docuseries running on PBS; which highlights how art & crafts & tech & science & history & politics intertwine in what we call creativity.
JIM BASSLER a fiber artist & professor at UCLA makes some of these points.
@blogdiva I was "taught" this in school! At college (I was getting a tech degree) around 2006-ish(?) a professor commented on it in class and explained that when he entered the tech industry, the transition to the field becoming male-dominated had not quite happened so the field was actually about 50/50 at the start of his career.
It was unfortunately a fast transition and IMO the gender gap is a major factor in why tech has so much inequity in how it serves society.
@danherbert@blogdiva Men were so sure that they should be the masters of this new technology that they spent many hours in their own time exploring them, such that their wives called themselves "computer widows".
Not being married, I spent as much time as I liked learning computer skills, taught myself graphics, spreadsheet, html and of course WP.
I soon caught up to the males of my aquaintance who still spoke to me like I was a ninny. Even just using the terminology would get me a sneering response. I wasn't allowed to know anything.
My father is a math genius. His dyslexia turned out to be dysgraphia-- zero issues with reading, but he can't spell to save his life. I think his brain just dumps the illogical rules as junk information.
I can spell quite well, but only if I can look at it visually. Hopeless at spelling bees-- even if somebody is telling me one letter at a time how their name is spelled, I'll get it mixed up trying to write it down. Handwriting, I transpose letters like my brain is getting ahead of my hand. Still happens a bit with typing but not as bad. My math abilities are so-so.
Both of us very ADHD but never evaluated for autism (which my mother almost certainly has).
@violetmadder i have both, LOL. but here's the thing: it expresses more in ENGLISH than in Spanish. apparently, this is a very common thing in dyslexic polyglots. on a paper i say it had to do with the second dominant language but that was long ago and am wondering if "language family" has more to do with: english isn't a roman language although american english has been romanicized in a lot of different ways given Spanish is the 2nd most spoken language int he country (historically).
I relate so much with how your father reads. It's like each word is spelled with scrabble tiles mixed up in a little bag. In my mind, I perceive them simultaneously not linearly. In Scrabble, if there's not a line under a P, it could be a d or a q. So, as a child, I often spelled "dad" as "dap". When the words are printed, they are fixed in a linear fashion. When you're writing the word, the letters all come out at once, often in not quite the right order.
Sometimes I already sense in my peripheral vision that a word is misspelled on the page of a book I'm reading... right after I turn the page, and before I actually read it.
Oh but those tricksy tricks where they have you read a few sentences with repeated words at the end of a line and the beginning of the next one, that sort of thing, those get me BAD.
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