Note For Anyone Writing About Me

Guide to Writing About Me

I am an Autistic person,not a person with autism. I am also not Aspergers. The diagnosis isn't even in the DSM anymore, and yes, I agree with the consolidation of all autistic spectrum stuff under one umbrella. I have other issues with the DSM.

I don't like Autism Speaks. I'm Disabled, not differently abled, and I am an Autistic activist. Self-advocate is true, but incomplete.

Citing My Posts

MLA: Zisk, Alyssa Hillary. "Post Title." Yes, That Too. Day Month Year of post. Web. Day Month Year of retrieval.

APA: Zisk, A. H. (Year Month Day of post.) Post Title. [Web log post]. Retrieved from http://yesthattoo.blogspot.com/post-specific-URL.

Thursday, July 25, 2013

Book and Song Thoughts

Trigger Warning: references to caregiver violence, ableism, and eugenics

I read a lot of Tamora Pierce's work. I like it. I also listen to a lot of PONS. When I started listening to them, they were called High Tide.
I've been re-reading the entire works of Tamora Pierce lately because I'm writing a thing for FYTortall for them. I finished the rough draft a few days ago, and I think I'm going for a whole book on the topic. We will see. (Very few, if any, of the full-length sections will appear here. I will probably keep blogging short stuff about ideas I have and I might put up a list of topics I'm considering.)
Anyways, from Trickster's Queen:
"He was a great god and could do what he wished with her. If she was going to die, she wanted to die arguing."
That's Aly thinking. She's pretty cool.
The other words I've got in my head are from an older PONS song. It's part of a verse they have since cut, and sadly the only video I've found with the whole second verse is friends only...  (WHY is it that both times I've talked about PONS lyrics I've been unable to actually find a publicly available recording?) The song isn't actually about the stuff I'm getting out of this bit of it, but art's cool like that. (If it were about that, I don't think it would have gotten cut.)
Can we wait? Does it help if our cause is lost?
I won't give a second thought,
The solution is to trouble the waters, my friend.
You'd rather watch than sink or swim?
Yeah, I'm in a "I might not be able to win, but I am at least going to go down fighting" space at the moment. It's what happens when a large portion of the world is convinced that what we really need is for there to not be anymore people like me without even knowing what it means to be like me. Without knowing what it means to be like any of us. Without knowing what it means to be like Amy, or Henry, or Lydia. (Remember, if you're neurotypical and have an autistic kid, your kid won't be exactly like me because HELLO I AM AN ADULT AND YOUR KID IS A KID AND NO TWO PEOPLE ARE EXACTLY THE SAME, but I am like your kid in several important ways.)

Well, sometimes giving up is what happens, but remember, a lot of autistic people are really stubborn. And also we like being alive and we like who we are and maybe we don't think that "make sure no one is ever like us again" is a good goal. I don't.

And a lot of abled people have a lot of power over us. I'm safer from that than a lot of people are, since the services I need are ones that a person can hire due to being a busy professional as opposed to things that everyone knows are for disabled people. I could (and probably will- engineers tend make enough that I should be able to afford it) hire someone to do those things for me without telling them that I'm not actually capable of doing those things. Yes, I know how. No, I can't actually do them, and definitely not in the time frame needed for doing them all myself. But there are a lot of us where changing "great god" to "caregiver" would leave that first quote pretty much true. And a lot of us do die arguing. Some of us only live because we argued, knowing it was probably a lost cause and trying anyways.

So yeah. I'm stubborn. I'll trouble the water. I don't care how many people tell me it's a lost cause, or that I should want people like me to stop existing (why would someone want that?) or whatever else. I'm not going to watch; I'm going to argue.

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