The unsupported use case of Bix Frankonis’ disordered, surplus, mediocre midlife in St. Johns, Oregon.
No fear, no hate, no thoughtless bullshit, and no nazis.
Out of the 4257 posts across 16 sources in the 25 years since March 2000, these 24 posts were published on bix.today.
After reading a Seattle Times report on Clark County declaring an emergency over measles cases appearing in the Portland area, I dug into my Kaiser Permanente records because I had a recollection of getting tested in the recent past for immunity to measles, mumps, and rubella, probably during the last measles scare.
I swore that I would not subject myself to the new Rolling Stone interview with Jack Dorsey (the writer of the piece took my tweet as an insult to him, told me to “fuck off”, and then blocked me), but I did anyway.
A major thread of autism advocacy is the social model of disability. There do seem to be many aspects of being autistic that are limiting not because of any inherent flaw, per se, but because of a mismatch between the wiring of an autistic brain and the social and cultural structures of the society in which that brain operates.
It doesn’t matter whether you subscribe to a medical model of disability or a social one when it comes to autism. Either way, I am disabled. The easiest way to understand why, and how, is to talk about talking on the telephone.
“I’m assuming,” wrote a family member, “that you have the desire to change your life.” This in the wake of me pointing out that by the necessary rules of surviving in society, I appear to be worthless.
The thing about how even one of the good days can almost break you is that when you have a good day like that, the next day is basically shot to hell, too.
Sobbing breakdowns, or the narrow averting of them, aren’t just something that happens on a bad day. This is one of the things I’m not sure people understand about the autistic brain.
Out this week is a new study published in Autism: The International Journal of Research & Practice, which, according to the press release, “demonstrates that there is an urgent need for tailored treatment pathways in mental health services for autistic people”. The group’s research, conducted in the United Kingdom, was “designed in partnership with autistic people, has strong implications for services, and [the] need for an autism specific mental health pathway”.
When I wrote about trying to standardize some terminology when discussing my autism with my therapist (or, now, ex-therapist), I left out one experience because I couldn’t remember the word, and if I’d sat around wracking my brain for it I never would have written anything at all.
I once wrote, “I don’t seem to have the same degree of sensory issues as do other people writing about their autism.” I wrote this early on in my writing about being autistic and while I understand why I said it, and believed it, at the time, and while it’s true that I think I have fewer sensory issues than do many other autistics, it’s also true that I’ve since learned that it understates things a bit.
What I mean here is that the process of psychotherapy as generally understood and undertaken often seems itself to be a collection of stressors that only make me feel worse. Certainly, that’s been my most recent experience.
I’ve always got at least one rewatch going amongst all the current television I follow, and these days it’s Star Trek: Deep Space Nine—still the best Trek series, and Benjamin Sisko is still the best commander/captain. It’s more relaxed than my typical rewatches in that I’m comfortable skipping an episode here and there (somewhere in season two there’s inexplicably two Quark episodes in a row?), something I’m usually loathe to do.
I just rediscovered the study ”‘Putting on My Best Normal’: Social Camouflaging in Adults with Autism Spectrum Conditions” in an app that lets you highlight on the web. I do not appear to have highlighted the entire thing, but it seems a close call. Here are some of the passages that really are popping out at me right now.
If there is one new-to-me thing about autism that I want everyone to consider, it is monotropism. If there are six things that I want everyone to know about monotropism, they are these six things from Fergus Murray.
So, okay, great. Now when actually autistic people try to talk about autistic burnout, we will be dismissed as trying to hop onto a millennial brandwagon. All because BuzzFeed decided that millennials are “the burnout generation”.
According to the year-end wrap-up provided by Goodreads, in 2018 I read 12,290 pages across 37 books (I had a reading challenge goal of 35), from the 93 pages of The Only Harmless Great Thing by Brooke Bolander to the 598 pages of The Friendly Orange Glow by Brian Dear.
After two weeks of not being entirely clear why I was seeing a psychoconsultant again beyond the idea that it’s what I’m “supposed” to be doing, today we did something of a pivot after my thoughts about being nitroglycerin and my attempt to define and distinguish reactions from responses.
By the time today that I’d gotten up far too early for me, had what little breakfast I had time to make, stopped to get coffee only to find the coffeeshop wasn’t opening until ten minutes before the only bus I could take to my psychoconsult was due to arrive, waited half a block away from jackhammering for them to open, suffered through being on public transit, slow-walked from the bus to my appointment, got through my appointment, suffered through more public transit, got to my breakfast spot, ate, suffered through more public transit, and got to the zoo for what’s supposed to be my weekly mental health trip, I already was exhausted.
Something I am not sure anyone in my family ever understood is that I did not enjoy the performative aspects of Christmas or birthdays. I can’t imagine I ever mentioned it, because enjoying Christmas and birthdays is what people did.
“Oregon Zoo otter known for slam dunking and self-pleasuring,” headlined The Oregonian, ”dies at age 20.”
One thing about being a midlife-diagnosed autistic is that people get caught up in the occasional post-mortem of the pre-diagnosis decades, especially the childhood years.
“If you didn’t know you were autistic,” I was asked today, “and were (as you are) strung out with the herd move issues, worried about money, and dealing with sleep and muscle pain issues, would this situation have affected you the same awful way? Would you have been able to deal with it better?”
Buried and mostly unaddressed in “An Expert Discussion on Autism and Empathy” from the forthcoming journal Autism in Adulthood, Dr. Christina Nicolaidis posed what for me is a crucial question.
I was intrigued yesterday by someone elsewhere asking if younger autistics were more comfortable talking to older adults than to people their own age, as well as one person’s suggestion that discomfort interacting with people one’s own age when younger might be due to the “direct comparison” that can occur and prompt masking.