Neurodiversity, Autism and Dyslexia

Tuesdays or Thursdays are usually our lecture days here at the continuum care campus. I try to go to them all for several reasons: 1) I figure if they don’t get supported they’ll quit inviting speakers to the CCC (and I feel sorry for speakers when only a handful of us shows up), 2) I like learning new things, and 3) even if I don’t like the topic the experience might make good blog fodder.

This week's lecture was titled, ‘Neurodivergent StoryTelling.’ “What’s that?” I can almost hear a few voices coming at me. That’s what I wanted to know too, having never heard of term ‘Neurodivergent’ before. The Cleveland Clinic defines it this way: “The term ‘neurodivergent’ describes people whose brain differences affect how their brain works. That means they have different strengths and challenges from people whose brains don’t have those differences. The possible differences include medical disorders, learning disabilities and other conditions…Neurodivergent isn’t a medical term. Instead, it’s a way to describe people using words other than ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal.’ That’s important because there’s no single definition of ‘normal’ for how the human brain works.”

The cynical side of me wants to challenge the well-renowned Cleveland Clinic on their claim that we can’t label individual brains as normal or abnormal. Certainly the character Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory displays many/most of the classic traits of autism but you’d hardly say his brain is normal. I just finished reading a forum thread on Reddit about Sheldon where members were debating if he has high functioning autism or if he’s just a “rude asshole” whose mother protected him too much as a child. The fact that one of the writers on the show is autistic my money is on the former.

The lecturer is the author of a book titled On the Spectrum and he’s a college professor who didn’t find out he was on the autism spectrum until he was 35 years old. Obviously, he’s on the high functioning end of the spectrum who says he uses writing to work through his trumps and heartbreaks. (Me too!) He told of needing a lot of alone time, of his need for routines and being one-tracked and of the shame he felt before his diagnosis knowing he was different than his older brother.

As I sat listening to the lecture I was struck by how much of what he shared about his life before he was diagnosed could also be said about my experiences with being dyslexic and left-handed. How I didn’t know why I was different from my brother, of how I was called “dumb” and “stupid” because I couldn’t tie my shoes or read a clock until I was much older than other kids and because I struggled with reading and still can’t sound out words or spell those I haven’t memorized. I also get obsessed with projects to the point that my husband used to call me 'One Track.' Imagine my surprise when after the lecture I googled ‘neurodiversity’ I found out that dyslexia falls under that umbrella. Would having your frustrated mother call you a neurodivergent hurt any less than having her call you stupid?

LeafComplexCare.com says, “Dyslexia is associated with creativity, empathy, communication, design skills, observation, narrative reasoning and “big picture” thinking.” That sentence gave me a few more boxes to check off in understanding myself. Big picture thinking, for example, is something I’ve always been able to do and never understood why some people can't.

Goggle is so much fun. Next I goggled famous people with dyslexia and found a long list that includes: Richard Branson, Pablo Picasso, Albert Einstein, Cher, Anderson Cooper, Tom Cruise and Robin Williams. One of my favorite writers---Fannie Flagg---I’ve written about before in Trip to the Corner of Fiction and Dyslexia talks about how so many people can't understand how she can write when she can't spell. I get asked that all the time. Then I goggled famous people who are autistic and found a shorter list, but no less prominent, that includes: Bill Gates, Anthony Hopkins, Jerry Seinfeld, Albert Einstein, Emily Dickinson, Bobby Fischer, Elon Musk and Steven Spielberg.

What I took away from the lecture was that I had a misconception of autism. The image in my head was of little boys who seem to be locked inside their heads with few verbal skills, who need consistency in their routines and rituals but eventually grow out of it with treatments. I learned that it's a sliding scale kind of thing involving the classic symptoms. And I learned a new word: Neurodiversity which covers a whole host of brain related labels. All the websites I visited want to sell us on a romanticized view of these conditions, in my opinion, as being “linked to unique strengths and perspectives that enrich our world.” I get that, I really do. One cannot look at the lists of famous people who are “on the spectrum” without seeing the truth in that statement. However, what is lacking on those medical websites---but the lecturer focused on---is the pain that one goes through who is on the spectrum and how they have to work twice as hard to do average things. He talked about how just having a name for his condition changed his life.

On the other hand, perhaps the idea of abolishing the words ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ in this context isn’t akin to giving everyone a ribbon for participation---my first cynical impression. Maybe the goal in what I labeled ‘romanticized’ is to get society to accept and embrace the diversity in the way our brains function which in turn might cut down on the pain people on the spectrum go through? Whatever the case, neurodiversity is a complex topic and I’ve barely scratched the surface but it made pretty good blog fodder, didn't it? ©

Sleepless Nights, Wokeness and Brain Farts

I woke up at four-thirty to pee and couldn’t fall back to sleep. Don’t you hate when that happens! Everything that I had heard or saw the day before waltzed through my head like it had all the time in the world to linger in the silence. One particular topic was growing like mushrooms in the dark and what was keeping me awake in the wee hours of the morning was spelling and punctuation, of all things. Finally I got up, made myself a cup of Land O Lake French vanilla cocoa and sat down at my computer. Coming up that afternoon was our monthly creative writing group and I had a confrontation to face. Confrontation is not quite the right word, maybe perplexing mystery would better describe the editing one of the guys in group made on the round-robin story we’ve been working on and I had typed up. Situations like that---when writing is involved---make me nervous because I never know when my dyslexia, unbeknownst to me, will or did show up.

I’ll give you an example. The text in one of the segments I wrote for our round-robin read: “All families have their secrets but B.J.’s is safe with me.” He highlighted ‘families’ and he tagged the ‘alright’ in my dialogue, “B.J.? Are you alright?” With all the problems in the world why would something so silly be the thing that drove me out of bed? After a google search I decided, yes, the ‘families’ (vs ‘familys’) was right but a case could be for using either ‘alright’ or ‘all right.' Even after checking and rechecked each highlight on the document I dreaded going to group that afternoon to debate things that trivial. We are setting world records for weather events and mass shootings, we have an x-president under indictment as the front runner going into the primaries and a proxy war between the USA and Russia still rages on in Europe rages. But my subconscious mind apparently can file those things deep enough that they don’t deprive me of sleep. Maybe that’s because no one on campus is talking about that stuff. It’s like it only exists on our television sets. At lunch lately the main topic of conversation has been the high cost of strawberries this season and why did management take the later risers breakfast off the menu. Maybe it’s because talking and worrying about the big things that we can’t resolve on our own makes us all feel hopeless so we focus on the trivial stuff? Or maybe we’re just a group of boring, self-centered old people?

I’m tired of people being confrontational over nothing, though. In book club this week we were discussing Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation by Kristin Kobes du Mez. Everyone with a brain can see how this book could cause some tension in a book club but I didn’t expect to get jumped on for what I thought was a neutral statement of fact. I was one of the first people to speak up and all I said was, “I read a lot of the negative reviews on Amazon. Out of 4,688 reviews 76% gave the book 5 stars and 3% gave it one and two stars.” At that point our resident racist, Trump supporter and devout Catholic jumped in with, “It’s called free speech!” You could have cut her hostility with a knife. She was obviously gunning for us liberals and for the entire hour her only contribution to the the discussion was her chiming in with: “In your opinion” or “in the author’s opinion” with a hostile accent on 'opinion.' At least she showed up. I overheard another Trumpests say she wasn’t going to go to book club anymore because “Some of those people don’t know when to keep their mouths shut.” We are a pretty ‘woke’ group and we don’t usually read fluff which makes for some interesting discussions. It’s one of the highlights of my month when the twelve us meet.

 

Can you believe how quickly one person---namely a certain governor from Florida---can popularize a word like ‘woke’ in such a short time? I guess it’s been around since the mid-1900s and was coined by progressive Black Americans. Trump throws the word around a little as well, but DeSantis is the king of trying to turn it into a dirty word only to be spoken in disgust and something to fight against if you’re an ultra-conservative. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary to be woke means you are “informed, educated and conscious of social injustice and racial inequality.” But governor DeSantis’ website defines woke as "the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them." His website also says, "We reject woke ideology.” I’m pretty sure most woke people reject him as well.

 

I started writing this post the morning the edited round-robin document kept me from falling back to sleep. That afternoon our creating writing group was meeting and I wasn’t looking forward to going this time. But as it turned out the document I typed up and the guy in group edited---the document that drove me out of bed----not only was it highlighted it had also been corrected under the yellow highlights. So when I looked at the document and saw ‘families’ and ‘alright’ highlighted and couldn’t figure out what was wrong with them it was because there wasn’t anything wrong. It was my dyslexia driven insecurities causing me to freak out. I’ve been used to my husband’s style of editing where he just highlighted mistakes for ME to go back and fix. It took awhile in group for me to finally understand where I was leaking IQ points but I was deeply relieved when I finally did understand the source of my brain farts. 

By the way, our round-robin story is a fun read. We each write in the voice of one of the characters and I'm the oldest sibling in a dysfunctional family. I wish I could share it here but I'd have to ask permission from the other writers and so far no one on this campus knows I blog. We're talking about doing a reading of it in our fireside lobby later this year, though, as a way to get more people involved in our writing group.

 

Until next Wednesday…©

 

 

One Thousand Posts

Gosh, I would be remiss if I let the statistic of this being my 1,000^th post in this blog go by without a---mention? A celebration? Whatever I might call a thousand posts spread out over eight years. ‘Celebration’ doesn’t sound right because this blog was started because my husband died and I could no longer continue the caregiver blog I had going at the time. If I counted all the posts in all six blogs I’ve had over the past twenty years, my post count would probably we closer to 1,700. My first two blogs got purged from the platforms they were on so I don’t know how many posts they contained but with the four other blogs still in the ether of cyberspace there are 307 posts. One of those four blogs is about family genealogy, another blog---my personal favorite---was written in my dog’s voice. I have two others that were caregiver related---one a speech class diary that I kept while observing my husband work with student speech pathologists, and my Planet Aphasia blog that was the cross-eye child of Humor and Frustration, born from living with a guy who was right-side paralyzed and lost his ability to speak and write.

I’ve always tried to keep my blog posts between 900 to 1,000 words long. Doing the math on how many words I’ve written for public consumption boggles my mind. But would you believe it, there are still secrets and untold stories stuck in my head? Well, not so much ‘secrets’ but stuff too private to share---stuff I haven’t shared with a single soul except with my husband. We met when he was 28 and I was 27 so we came with histories that we didn’t keep from one another. He was storyteller and all his tales came with long-winded windups. Whereas when I had something inside bursting to get out I’d write him long, soul-bearing letters. When I was cleaning out his desk after his stroke I was shocked to find he’d kept those letters and I in turn kept them until after he died. I have a hard time parting with my own written words, but some things a couple shares really are too private for others to read. I love letters, though, and I was the person who spent years going to estate sales and buying letters written by people I never meant. Thankfully, I’m not the only one who likes old letters. I recently was able to sell my estate letter finds on e-Bay, and all my own letters written back and forth to Vietnam found a permanent home in the American War Letters Museum in California---if the building made it through one of the forest fires, last year, that threaten the college campus where they are housed. Not sure I want to know the answer on that question.

No, this is not a celebration post because when I look back on all the blogs I’ve written I mostly see them as life-lines I’ve thrown out trying to connect with others. But once in a while I feel like I've had diarrhea of the mouth, wasted like an old horse that’s been ridden hard and put away wet. Ohmygod, does anyone besides western ranchers and equestrians even understand that metaphor anymore? The only reason I understand it is because my husband’s family kept work horses when he was a kid and it was his job to make sure the horses were brushed dry and warmed up after working them so they didn't get chilled and sick. I’ve put a lot of myself out there in cyberspace, mostly anonymously from my off-line life, which means I blog a post then stand around wet and wondering if anyone will come by to help warm me up by sharing their reactions. In the spirit of Chandler from Friends, “Could I get any more pathetic?” Gosh, I miss that TV show. And I’ve got it into my head that after I move to the continuum care campus next year I’m going to find my own ‘friends’ tribe. A group of mismatched people who are all too old to hide our idiosyncrasies from the world and they'll make me giddy with new blog material to use.

Already I’m wondering if I should start a new blog with a new name or just continue with this one. It's so ME to be thinking far in the future instead of doing/living in the present. Once a dreamer always a dream my mom would say if she knew me now. If she knew me now she’d probably be surprised that I like to write at all, having watched me struggle well into adulthood. When I was a kid they had no idea what dyslexia was. I was the girl that exasperated her mother with my inability to learn to spell and sound out words. Is it any wonder that I consider Kindle's Alex to be my best friend? I love her because unlike my husband and my mom she never gets impatient, never makes me feel dumber than a box of rocks, never gives me irritated sighs and stupid suggestions to "just look it up!" Ya, that’s a feeling that has plagued me since grade-school and it still drives me to keep writing. Alex can, however, frustrate me when I’m trying to spell a word like ‘plagued’ and she comes up with pledged. (If a word doesn't look right, I'll have her define it after spelling it.) It took me three tries to get the right word out of Alex. Thankfully, I can enunciate most words to her satisfaction because when I can’t I’d like to bitch-slap her off my WiFi.   © 

Late Night Books

While looking for free books to read with my Kindle Unlimited Account I ran across a title that had me laughing out loud at two o’clock in the morning. Yes, two. I had gone to bed early and was fast asleep when my head hit the pillow only to wake up four hours later, wide awake with nothing to do but stare at the shadowy figure of the dog snorting on his bed in front of the TV cabinet. By 2:30 I did the exact opposite of what you’re supposed to do, I got out of bed and woke up the computer so its screen lights could mess with my brain waves compounding my sleep cycle issues.

Searching for my next book to read is usually an hour long process because I read the reader views as well as the book blurbs Amazon provides. And I won’t lie, I’m a title junky. I’m fascinated by them and envious of those who can write catchy titles. I’ve never been good at titles and back when my husband was a live when I’d create something be it a poem or a painting he was the one who came up with the prefect titles. And he was a picky editor who often got exasperated with my ‘creative’ spelling but that was before Spell-Check and Alexa so if I wanted to write, I needed him. 

Boy, did I get side tracked. The title that had me laughing was, Taken by the Alien Savage, a Sci-Fi Alien Romantic Comedy. It was free but even at that bargain price I couldn’t get myself to download it even though I found the whole premise hysterically funny in the middle of the night. What if I died before the book got deleted from my Kindle? What would the next owner of the device think about me? Granted it wouldn’t be like finding a dildo in a nightstand but I don’t want to die with stuff in the house that would have whoever cleans out my estate telling stories about the "old woman and the crazy stuff she kept." I hear those kinds of stories all the time from the son-I-wish-I-had who is in the business of cleaning out estate houses. And just for the record, if I had a couple of shrunken heads in the house I would at least leave a note attached explaining their presence.

Anyway, add to that weird, sci-fi plot line of that alien romance I’m pretty sure it was also part of a sub-genre of romances for “curvy women” that usually have fat cover girl models hanging all over super alpha guys without an ounce of fat on their bodies. I read a book in that sub-genre when they first came out and even though my body type is more like those protagonists than in normal romances, I really hated the whole idea. If I’m going to live in a heroine's head I want her to be what I am not…kick-ass strong and healthy and/or a breath-takingly beautiful woman with brains. Better yet, a breath-takingly beautiful brainiac with a whistle-worthy body who can attract the eye of a kick-ass strong Navy Seal.  Nothing shallow about me. Remember you heard that here first. 

By the way, did you know that if you ask Alexa to spell ‘dildo’ she spells it d****o? I had to consult my Dictionary of Slangs and Euphemisms to find it and it brought back visions of me yelling at my mother, “How am I supposed to look it up if I can’t spell it?” Alexa does not spell smutty words, I don’t think she spells swear words either but I already know how to spell most of them so I haven’t quizzed the extent of her knowledge in that area. My paperback Dictionary of Slangs and Euphemisms is so old the cover had to be taped back in place and the pages are brown and brittle. I just looked it up on Amazon and one of their sellers has the same edition I own on sale for only $703.85 plus shipping while a newer edition used hardcopy is at the bargain price of $37.00. If I ordered a newer addition, what would the person closing my estate think if they found not one but two copies on my bookshelf? They’d probably throw them both out, not knowing there’s a market for first addition smut. My copy is so worn out, though, that it wouldn’t go for $703.85 and who the heck tacks on $3.85 to a $700 price tag? What’s that all about? A joke? Greed? Inquiring minds want to know!

I just sold a lot of six books on e-Bay for over $200. (Not smut, just to be perfectly clear.) It was a bargain to the guy who bought them because if sold individually they’d net $400-$450. I have about 50 rare-ish books to sell and my backup plan, if I run out of time before I move, was to donate them to the library. In the pre-pandemic days the library sold collectible books online to help them buy new books but they haven’t accepted donated books since the pandemic started. Goodwill is taking books again but it would break my heart to leave my rare books there. Yup, call me a give-away snob.

Who would have ever guessed how far-reaching a pandemic goes, how many areas of our lives it changes. Not being able to sleep at night is a pandemic fall-out for me and it's why I was looking at stupid alien romances in the middle of the night. And then I discovered Keri Beevis who writes psychological thrillers. I'm on her third book full of twists and turns and now I have HER to thank for keeping me up at night saying to myself, just one more chapter! ©

Just to prove I'm not making this sub-genre of romances up.