I Thought it Would be Empowering, But I’m Just Embarrassed

A couple of months ago I decided to do a photoshoot for Hella Positive Pinup. This meant taking some of my clothes off in front of a camera, posing in ways that were supposed to capture what I felt was sexy, and generally help expand the concept of what “beautiful” is.

I’ve never been a big fan of gettin’ naked, but I saw a photo that inspired me to do it. It was a beautiful photo of a woman with major scarring. It made me cry. I’ve never seen scars look beautiful before, not like that, and I’ve never seen a body whose skin is like mine be held up and photographed. I wanted to do that for people whose bodies are like mine.

It was supposed to be empowering. It was supposed to be the next step in my recovery, where I can look at photos of my stripped bare body and feel comfortable. I knew I was pushing my boundaries by doing it, but my brain told me that I should go for it, I’d feel better after I did it.

You can read the rest of this post at Aut of Spoons.

My Gender

I don’t know what gender is anymore.

I say this not to invalidate people who feel gender deeply. I believe you when you say “I know I am a woman” or “It hurts me when you use female pronouns for me.” But I don’t understand, and I so deeply want to. I want to know why we care, why we are so obsessed with words that point to arbitrarily assigned characteristics.

I know a lot of things that gender isn’t. Gender isn’t our body parts. It isn’t our behavior. It isn’t our appearance, whether how our bodies look or what we choose to wear. Gender is not what you think or what you believe. Gender is not prescriptive, a set of rules that you HAVE to follow or a role you have to take. Gender is not binary, gender is not set, gender changes and grows all the time. But if it isn’t bodies or thoughts or appearances or behaviors or beliefs or rules or even feelings, then what the hell is it?

Read the rest of this post at Aut of Spoons, and make sure you update your links to http://www.autofspoons.com.

I Am Lucky To Be Autistic. You Shouldn’t Have To Be.

Three years ago I knew almost nothing about autism. I didn’t know what sensory sensitivities were, what a meltdown was, or why a weighted blanket might be someone’s lifeline. I had been diagnosed with depression, anxiety, anorexia, and subclinical borderline personality disorder. I had been in therapy for almost seven years, including two intensive programs, multiple groups, individual therapy, and family therapy.

Three years ago I would have laughed if you told me I was autistic. No therapist had ever suggested the diagnosis to me. I’m highly emotional, not analytical. I’m overly sensitive, not someone with flat affect. I’m highly successful in school, I don’t struggle at all.

Here I am three years later with an autism diagnosis that makes sense of my life in a way that no prior diagnosis ever has. And I have to be honest; it was luck and privilege that got me this diagnosis. Not only that, it was luck and privilege combined with my own determination, curiosity, and NEED to understand myself that got me the diagnosis.

That is entirely unacceptable.

If you want to read the rest of this post, head over to the new site, Aut of Spoons.

 

Announcing Aut of Spoons

For the last four years I have been blogging here at We Got So Far to Go. In that time, I’ve grown as a writer, my interests have changed, and my focus has shifted. In light of all of that, I’ve decided it’s time to move on to something that’s a little more fresh.

Don’t worry! I will still be blogging. I’m SO excited to be announcing the launch of Aut of Spoons, the new site of my blogging life. We Got So Far to Go will be remaining up and available at least through the end of 2017, but all new content will be appearing at Aut of Spoons, with a fresh new look, an easier URL (autofspoons.com), and a renewed focus on mental health, disability, autism, and neurodiversity. Check it out!

As part of this move, I have also decided that I’m going to be spending more time focused on this blog not just as a way to explore my own thoughts and beliefs, but as a more serious writing enterprise. With that in mind, I am launching a Patreon through which you can support my writing. There are all kinds of incentives to give you a little extra push to donate, but honestly the reason you should donate is because you’re here, consuming work that I’m producing, and you find it worthwhile. With your support I can create more and better content, pay my hosting fees, and maybe even give you some b-b-b-bonus content! I’d love it if you checked it out.

Thanks for being a part of We Got So Far To Go. Now let’s keep on going at Aut of Spoons.

 

The Real Violence of Mental Illness

One year ago Niki died. You may not know Niki. I wish you had. She was loud, smart, thoughtful, funny, and very, very ill.

She was physically ill and mentally ill. She was the kind of mentally ill that makes people look away, or say “Oh, THAT kind?” She was the kind of mentally ill that people sweep under the rug. She was the kind of mentally ill that doesn’t get services and doesn’t get PSAs and doesn’t get sympathy. She was the kind of mentally ill that makes service providers label you “resistant to treatment” or even avoid giving you a diagnosis because there’s too much stigma.

She was the kind of mentally ill that people bring up after shootings. In fact she was the kind of mentally ill that people are starting to talk about right now, after this very shooting, to explain how someone could be so violent.

And one year ago Niki died.

Niki died because she was the kind of ill that doesn’t get noticed, that doesn’t get services, that doesn’t get support. She died because she could not access disability services. She died because no one wanted to recognize that the people most likely to be hurt by someone who is mentally ill is the person themself.

All of you want to talk about mental illness. Let’s talk about the real violence that is associated with mental illness. Let’s talk about how this society is saturated with ableist cruelty that enacts violence, pain, and suffering on the mentally ill every day and ends in deaths like Niki’s every day.

I see you all talking about how we need better mental health care now that your comfortable neurotypical lives have been disrupted. I see your silence when people die of suicide. I see the way you blame us. I see your silence when funding for our services is on the table, and I see your silence when we want to talk openly about our lives and our struggles. I see you calling us dramatic, mocking us for asking for trigger warnings, ignoring our calls for help and support. I see you ignoring mental health parity in health care legislation.

And I SEE YOU only bringing up mental health care now. Now, when you can blame us. Now, when you need a way to understand violence that says “it’s over there. it doesn’t belong to me. It’s people like them. I am not responsible”

You want to say that it’s people like Niki. People like me. People with personality disorders, or “severe mental illness.” We are the violent ones.

Well guess the fuck what? You have done so much violence to us. How dare you, how fucking dare you point your finger at one of the most vulnerable communities when there is no evidence to suggest that mass shootings are more likely to be perpetrated by the mentally ill? How fucking dare you continue the stigma that literally kills people like Niki, and go on to say that we are the violent ones?

I know that there will be some of you out there saying “wait, but I support mental healthcare!” Fucking great. What are you doing about it? What are you doing about it all of the days that our media is not exploding with news of a mass shooting? Are you calling and writing your legislator? Are you openly talking about mental illness, therapy, and services to break down the stigma? Are you talking about the fact that people with mental illness are more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators, and looking for solutions?

Are you protecting people like Niki? Are you actively fighting the violence that happens to mentally ill people each and every day?

Or do you only care when it’s people like you, “normal” people, neurotypical people, the ones that you deem worth it?

I see you, and I have no more patience.

I Don’t Care if Our Attention Spans Are Shorter

The other day I heard a statistic that caused the people around me to gasp in horror: people now have attention spans shorter than a goldfish, only 6 seconds. Shock! Amazement! Terror! Technology will destroy us and we won’t be able to have meaningful lives or relationships anymore and we’ll never learn things or grow as people because we can’t focus for more than 6 seconds.

Fun fact, it took me more than 6 seconds to write that paragraph, uninterrupted. All I did was write that paragraph, for more than 6 seconds. I wonder if attention span science isn’t as great as it’s cracked up to be? Or perhaps our attention spans change based on context. Huh.

But if I’m honest, I actually don’t give a rat’s ass if our attention spans have grown shorter. We’ve been hearing this same kind of complaint about new technologies for literally thousands of years. Our dear pal Socrates was opposed to writing because “[Writing] will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.” (From the Phaedrus).

People have complained about technologies ranging from the printing press, to the telephone, to television and beyond, convinced that each of these technological improvements will make us less intelligent, or maybe just destroy society. Amazingly, here we all still are, capable of functioning, making new discoveries, improving technology even further, and maybe still remotely intelligent.

Because here’s the deal: our minds change in reaction to the world around us. We are adaptable and flexible beings. We change to fit the environment that we live in. Perhaps we do have worse memories than the ancient Greeks did. But you know what? I don’t care. There is nothing inherently better about being able to remember more things. The world that we have today is one in which we don’t need to remember things as much as we used to. It’s incredibly rare that we won’t be around a computer, phone, or other device that allows us to look things up. Being able to remember vast stores of information is no longer actually very helpful.

Instead, what is helpful is being able to sort through huge amounts of information, cope in a setting where there are many competing distractions, and suss out what is important or useful or true at any given point. No one seems to be asking whether the changes that are happening in human brains (if they are in fact happening) are USEFUL. Are we losing memory to make space for quick shifts in focus that allow us to notice the hundreds of distractions but still move back to what we were doing before? Are our brains beginning to pick up more of an ability to focus on multiple things at once? Why do we always assume change is bad?

Nowhere are we taking the time to ask what we get out of the change. Amazingly, things like this tend to happen for a reason other than “kids these days.”

I can’t help but feel as if all this worry about shorter attention spans and bad memories is just more angry old men yelling at clouds. I have yet to see any criticisms of these changes in the human brain that actually tell me WHY it’s bad for our brains to change in these ways. They all assume that we’re already on board, that we all want really long, focused attention spans or great memories. And it seems like the reason that they assume we’re already on board is because those are things we’ve prized in the past so they must be good now, even though the world is different now, our needs and abilities are different now, work is different now. Different is not less, even if we couch the difference in terms of deficits.

So no, I don’t care if our attention spans are shorter. I care if we are functional in the world we’ve got. And overall we seem to be doing pretty well.