Reports from a Resident Alien

Yesterday at the library I was goofing off instead of doing physics homework, and happened upon the latest issue of Psychology Today. Lo and behold, an article on autism. It's a cute little story about an autistic kid who loves animals; and for a change said kid is in the majority who has got the hang of language. That's a good sign, in general, and the article itself isn't bad. But it contains one little annoying phrase that's pretty high on my peeve-o-meter; and the result is this letter to the editor.

Two Minute Memoir: Cowboy and Wills

I read "Cowboy and Wills" with great interest; and part of the reason is that I'm an autistic animal-lover myself. There are a lot of us--not surprisingly, since animals allow for such safe, non-threatening social interaction. However, I was a little troubled by a popular misconception that was sprinkled through the article. The idea that one must pull an autistic child out of "his own world" seems to have become so prevalent that people don't think about it when they say it. The truth is, there's no need to pull anybody anywhere; it's just a matter of teaching. We are already in your world. Autistic people see the world and other people just like anyone does. We're very much present in the world; in fact, in most cases we notice more about it--all the little details most people filter out. The problem isn't a matter of being closed off in our own worlds, but of having difficulty understanding and communicating with other people. When you look at us and can't see what we're thinking or feeling, it's a communication issue, not a lack of presence. Sometimes, when I'm exhausted by the noise and smell and unpredictability of the world, I do withdraw. Having to constantly interact with people is difficult and stressful for me. But "my own world"--you have your own mental world, too, just like I do--isn't a frightening place in which I'm trapped. It's simply the act of relaxing, getting away from the need to socialize constantly. Without it, I'd be unable to function--and when I'm allowed to have my own space, away from the demands of life, I can use it as a safe home base from which to reach out to others. What happened with the little boy in the article is what should happen with every autistic child: He is given a welcoming environment and surrounded by people who help him to say what he is thinking and show what he is feeling. Gradually, he learns how to connect with other people--something which, if he is like most of the autistic people I know, he has been wanting to do all along.

A strategy that some people want to take when they try to increase acceptance is to emphasize the similarities between a minority individual and the "norm"; to try to explain to people that, "He's a lot like you. There's no need to reject him for being different because he's not really that different." It works pretty well with racial minorities, and to a degree with minority sexual orientations; and to some extent, it's even true of people with physical disabilities, because with these categories, the primary difference is one of culture and lifestyle, one which most people can understand. But "he's not so different" is a rather misguided approach when you try to use it to encourage acceptance of people with psychological and neurological disabilities.

The fact is that despite having more things in common than not with the average person--after all, we all share the fundamental experience of being human--people with mental disabilities have significant differences from the norm. A person with a mental difference--for example, bipolar disorder--is not just a typical person who also has bipolar disorder. Bipolar disorder, or any other cognitive or psychological difference, touches the person's experience of the world; the way he thinks; the way his personality is expressed. In any sense but the metaphysical, a person is his brain, and when the brain is different, the person is different.

If you try to get people to accept a person with this sort of disability, by emphasizing the parts of his life that are very much like most everyone else's, you may end up getting acceptance only of the person who would theoretically exist without the cognitive difference. That's bad enough when it happens with a physical disability (for example, people who treat Deaf folks as though they are just like hearing people, only without one particular sort of sensory input; ignoring the different experience of the world that they have, not to mention their different culture and language). It's even worse when the difference between the disabled fellow and Joe Average is something that touches the way you think, feel, and see the world.

If, for example, you gain acceptance for people with schizophrenia at the cost of getting people to accept schizophrenia itself, all you've done is gotten acceptance for their parallel-universe non-schizophrenic twins; and the best they can hope for is being treated as though they were those twins, with their differences uncomfortably ignored because they're still thought of as foreign and somewhat frightening. When people are judged acceptable because they're "not really so different", the polite thing becomes to ignore the differences. The differet-ness of these individuals become the elephant in the room, stunting relationships and forcing people to try to put on a show, acting as though these very important parts of their own lives and minds didn't exist.

When the cognitive or psychological difference becomes big enough, this sort of "acceptance" totally blocks communication, because the individual with a big enough cognitive difference sees things from such a different angle that he simply can't be understood under the presumption of sameness. Eventually, the charade that "we're all the same, deep down, really," breaks down; and with nothing to replace it, only the glaring differences remain, forcing rejection by people who don't know of any other possible reaction to unreconcilable difference.

It's probably going to be rather difficult to get people to accept these undeniably weird folks, instead of just assuming the differences must be insignificant. Neurotypicals, especially, but also some neurodiverse, are built to try to connect with people; and they do this by relating their own experiences of the world with the experiences of other people. That trick works fine when those differences are subtle; but it breaks down when they're significant. At that point, the predictable becomes the frightening unknown, and all too commonly,the result is rejection, marginalization, and sometimes even outright violence.

Well, here's my thoughts about self diagnosis...

If you self-diagnose with autism, there are four basic possibilities.

One, you self-diagnose and you actually have autism. Result: You get to know more about yourself, maybe solve some problems that weren't getting solved because you didn't know how to define them. Net benefit.

Two, you self-diagnose and, while most professionals wouldn't say you are autistic, you're very close to it and might have been diagnosable as a child. That would put you on the broader autism phenotype end of the spectrum, with autistic brain-wiring but not across the diagnostic threshold. Result: You get to know more about yourself and get to know other people who are similar to you; and while you don't have major problems, identifying as autistic still puts you in a community of people who are used to eccentrics and accept you more than the very difference-sensitive mainstream does. Still a net benefit.

Three, let's say you self-diagnose and you're totally neurotypical--no mental illness, no ADHD, no weirdness at all. Result: You start hanging out with autistic people, and you realize, hey, wait a minute, I don't really fit in here. These people are having experiences I'm not having and I have no clue what they're talking about. From there, you either get frustrated, leave, and hopefully deal with whatever problem wrongly pointed you to autism; or else you decide, well, these autistic people are OK for friends even if I'm not autistic myself, and you make some friends you wouldn't otherwise have had. In many cases, NTs who think they may be autistic have problems with making friends for some other reason; and in those cases, they may even find the friends they want among the autistic people they have got the chance to hang out with. Net result is just some wasted time, not the end of the world, and maybe a bonus to your ability to communicate with the neurodiverse, if you haven't had a lot of opportunity to hang out with the odd ducks of the world until then.

Four--and this is where the problems start--is if you self-diagnose and you don't actually have autism, but you do have some mental illness, neurological difference, or other diagnosable problem that is causing difficulty for you. In that case, the results aren't so benign, because just like an autistic person misdiagnosed as something else, you may try to deal with a problem while presuming a completely different cause for it than actually exists. In that case,  you may be leaving a problem unsolved when it could be solved if you knew the reason. Problems commonly confused with autism include social phobia, avoidant or schizoid personality disorder, intermittent explosive disorder, some kinds of epilepsy, depression (especially dysthymia, the long-term low-level variant), attention deficit disorder, or an eccentric personality combined with some kind of mental/neurological difference.

I'd like to address the possibility that people may self-diagnose and use it as a reason not to try to solve their problems. In my opinion, if you self-diagnose and start blaming your problems on your diagnosis, chances are that you would have found something else to blame, eventually, because you weren't looking for a solution when you labeled yourself--you were just looking for a reason to legitimately give up on finding a solution. That sort of avoidance will happen whether or not the person uses some psychological label as the immediate method; he might just as easily have blamed it on bad parenting, being from a minority race, or being average-looking.

This is pretty obvious when it pops up, though, since you'll find someone who isn't saying, "Oh, here's why I do this; how do you guys deal with this, how can I adapt those strategies," as most self-diagnosed people tend to do, but, "I'm autistic; I can't help it. Woe is me." I honestly don't see that second one very much. But I really don't think this problem has much to do with self-diagnosis, since you can use a correct diagnosis for an excuse just as much as an incorrect one; and would be using some other excuse if you hadn't picked autism. The problem here is avoidance and getting the idea in your head that you're helpless to change your circumstances; it's really got nothing to do with self-diagnosis.

So if you're considering self-diagnosis, how do you make sure you don't fall into the fourth category, the misdiagnosed problem that is harder to solve because it has the wrong label?

First of all, just rejecting self-diagnosis altogether doesn't make too much sense; because there is definitely a place for self-diagnosis. Since it's easier to think about diagnosis in terms of physical illness than in terms of neurological difference, here's an example:

We self-diagnose in other circumstances, and nobody seems to think it's odd. For example, last week, I had a stuffy nose, a headache, and a sore throat. I self-diagnosed the symptoms as a cold and treated myself with a decongestant and hot tea. The cold resolved in a few days. We do that all the time, under a certain set of circumstances: The illness isn't serious; it doesn't require a doctor's visit to cure; and we know enough about it to recognize it when we see it. And if you're wrong about having a cold--say, you actually have allergies--then the symptoms aren't so severe that they actually pose a danger to you.

A cold is easy to self-diagnose, but it wouldn't be so advisable with liver cancer. If you had signs of liver cancer, even if you were absolutely sure it was liver cancer and not something else, you'd have to say, "Hmm, this seems serious. I should go see someone who knows more about this than me, who has been trained to treat it." And while autism is not an illness and cannot kill you, diagnosis of mental conditions follows along the same lines of logic as physical ones.

Bottom line with self-diagnosis is, I think, is I'd only recommend it under a narrow set of circumstances, all of which should be true if you're considering actually doing the research and coming to a conclusion on your own:

1. Whatever problems that led you to consider autism are not severe and don't cause major impairment. For example, if you tend to get exhausted at the end of a day of socializing and have to relax, that's not a major problem; but if after twenty minutes you shut down, melt down, and spend the rest of the day rocking, that's a major problem.

2. You're capable of understanding the concept of diagnosis, including differential diagnosis, have a good background in psychology, have enough insight about yourself that you can take a relatively unbiased viewpoint, are able to study a subject on your own until you master it. If you can't do this, there's a great danger you'll mis-diagnose, and that leads to trouble.

3. You want to self-diagnose so that you personally can solve problems in your life that have been popping up because you are different from other people; or you want it so you can understand yourself better. You don't need accommodations at work, at school, or anywhere else; nor do you need outside assistance.

If it's not causing major problems, you don't need outside help, and you've got the knowledge to do it, then sure, self-diagnose. If you're right, you'll gain self-understanding; if you're wrong, then whatever you do have, or if you don't have anything at all, it isn't serious and can be dealt with on your own.

But if you have major problems, or you aren't sure about how to determine whether you should self-diagnose, or you are trying to get assistance with anything, then you need to go to a professional. I know it isn't always possible to do so; anyone too old to still be in school and with poor or no health insurance may have serious difficulty finding a professional; and in some cases, even though there are severe problems, there has been so much mistreatment that seeing a psychologist can only trigger flashbacks and mistrust. In these cases, sometimes there's no choice but to make the best guess and do what you can with the resources you have. It still isn't ideal, though. Ideally, if there are severe problems for which you need outside assistance or accommodation, you should be going to a professional.

Of course, once you go to find your professional and get his opinion, you have to make sure he's someone who is qualified to diagnose autism and to tell it apart from all the other things that can mimic it--and in an adult, not a child--and then actually to treat you with respect and suggest reasonable solutions to the problem of being autistic in a non-autistic world--but that's a whole different subject.

Odd how little things make it seem like you have suddenly become less autistic...

Getting my driver's license last January really seems to increase my "functioning level" to the casual observer. And it makes me look even less disabled that I have been working for five weeks now, with accommodations and a job pretty much tailor-made for me... five weeks is shorter than the burnout time of the better jobs I've had before but I might not burn out this time. If the summer ends before I go nuts, I can call it a success!

I think there's another dimension here, though; sometimes when you put out a lot of effort, you can do more than you normally would, at the expense of extreme stress levels. The problem with that is that you can't keep it up forever. You end up simply unable to do one more day, possibly depressed, possibly physically ill, possibly shut down or even unable to properly care for yourself. That's just what you can do in an emergency; it's not your long-term capacity. Problem is, a lot of us are being forced into emergency mode long-term, anyway, by people who saw us manage things like that short-term and assume that means that if we aren't doing it, we are merely lazy... sometimes, those people are ourselves, which makes it even worse...

For example, I imagine many of us can handle twenty minutes at a party, but would burn out if forced to go four hours; or could handle a shift at a fast-food restaurant, but not a week or a month. NTs seem to assume that if you can do it for a little while, you can do it forever, but that's kind of like assuming that if you can run a block, you can run a marathon.

Apparently, it is "amazing" that someone who a year ago was unable to drive or hold down a steady job has now suddenly become capable of driving (on familiar roads, with a map nearby) and working (with accommodations)... The superficial improvements in my skill levels seem to bump me immediately from moderate to mild disability; but really, I don't think I have changed very much at all--simply found ways to do those things that were easier for me than the NT ways!

Kinda scary, though; it makes me worried that people will think I am doing so well, so I don't need help; and consequently they will remove the things that let me do well in the first place. I've heard of it happening to kids in school all the time, and I really don't want it to happen to me. And I really hope I am not going into emergency mode here, because if I do, it means I can't keep it up, and I would dearly love to.

You hear the stories all the time, don't you?: All his life, this autistic guy has been thought to be mentally retarded. And then, suddenly, he figures out language for the first time... and they give him an IQ test... and it turns out he's "actually gifted". Suddenly, people look at him differently. He jumps from the object of the sentence to the subject. He suddenly becomes capable of making choices and participating in life.

But why? It's still the same guy.

Or, let's say you've got an Aspie kid in school. He's had speech all his life, but he's got "behavior problems"--let's say, he freaks out towards the end of the day because the noise and the lights and the other kids are just getting to him. (I call that a stress problem, but whatever.) So he goes in for neuropsych testing. And one little number can change everything. Let's say he scores an 85 on his IQ test--low normal, still enough for Asperger's, but enough to make people assume he'll never amount to much. He gets stuck in a special ed class. His teachers know his IQ; they don't try to challenge him all that much; maybe they spend a lot of time trying to extinguish his "behaviors" instead of teaching him. But let's say he scores wildly high--150, maybe. Now they've got a whole new persepctive on him. He must be bored, because he's gifted. Suddenly he gets all these choices--enrichment programs, gifted/talented, maybe even a skipped grade.

Why? What is so important about IQ? And does IQ really predict outcomes, or is it that IQ predicts how you're treated, and how you're treated predicts outcomes?

You have to remember that IQ is often times quite meaningless for autistic people. I'm "only" Asperger's, and I still have such a large gap between my highest and lowest subscores that my overall IQ doesn't say much about me at all. The only reason people know I am not mentally retarded is that I have a big vocabulary and I'm good at school. If those two factors were taken out, they'd assume mild MR immediately. (And that, in fact, is where I function in daily life--with exceptions for strengths).

If you have a high IQ, you're assumed to be functioning at that level in every area.
If you have a low one, you're assumed to be functioning at that level in every area.
Huge fallacy. Huge problem, especially for autistic people.

I had my IQ tested last year. As a direct result, I was allowed a chance at college. If I'd tested lower, I might have been given a job coach and a McDonald's uniform--regardless of the fact that McDonald's (and many other entry level jobs, excluding a few that involve sorting and organization) would be one of the worst possible positions for me and my skill set, however you measured the IQ.

I wonder how many other people, who could have gone to college and specialized in what they were good at, have been pigeonholed because they're not good at IQ tests? I got lucky. I "proved" that I was capable. What if you can't "prove" it to the people who insist that IQ defines what you can do?

You just cannot deal with an autistic person based on their IQ alone, primarily, or even as an important factor. IQ doesn't say much about us. It's often hard to measure, and it reflects our abilities even less than it does for the average person because most autistic people have really jagged skill profiles. It's not uncommon to be able to do math three grades above level and reading three grades below, or be able to write a book but not cook a meal, or be able to ace a physics class but not hold a job as a cashier.

And yet they still categorize us by IQ. Do we threaten them, with our unwillingness to fit into categories?

Have a high IQ? You're fine. You're just not being given the opportunity to express it. You're a genius, really. What you have to say is worth listening to. If you're non-verbal with a high IQ, that's even better--let's make a TV documentary on it! Suddenly, with a high IQ, you're a person.

With a low IQ, you're a problem. You need to have your behaviors extinguished. You need to be medicated and watched over and have your choices curtailed "for your own good". You're a burden to your family. You'll probably "NEVER LIVE A NORMAL LIFE".

(What, pray, is so attractive about a normal life anyway?)

It's even leaking into the autism community. People are either trying to say that all autistic people "really" have high IQs. Or they're trying to say that people with low IQs are "not really autistic", or else that people with high IQs aren't really autistic, but Asperger's, and thus completely different from "those mentally retarded people over there". Or they try to divorce autism from mental retardation, as though people with both had two different brains. Worst of all, there's people who are so glad they're "high-functioning" that they attempt to disassociate themselves from anyone who isn't--especially evident in statements like, "Well, I don't need a cure, because autism makes me intelligent and talented; but that non-verbal guy over there hasn't got any really good skills like I've got. We should try to figure out how we can turn him into an Aspie." They talk about diapers and self-injury and aides like it's self-evident that if you have those things, your life must be horrible.

I hate that kind of bigotry. People's brains are not supposed to be messed with against their will. Period. People are supposed to be treated with respect. People should not be written off. And people do not deserve to be stuffed into categories based on their IQ scores.

The scattered skills, where you can't predict someone's ability in one area by looking at his average, are common with autism--and some of those skills are not even measurable on most or all IQ tests. One low skill can mask a lot of other high skills--suddenly, when you accommodate for that, the other high skills start showing up. You see a version of the same thing when you test kids with learning disability, short-term memory problems, etc. Somebody could be getting failing grades in school because he has dyslexia--which doesn't impair his ability to learn science or history, but prevents him from getting the information on science and history into his head in the first place. Accommodate for the dyslexia--some version of auditory teaching plus extra reading lessons--and suddenly he's showing his true skills in the other areas.

If you treat somebody with a low IQ as "somebody with a low IQ", you're probably not going to let him use the talents he's got. Either that, or you'll call him a savant as a way of saying the talents are meaningless. (True savants are rare; and from what I can tell, the accusation that they're uncreative is quite far off the mark anyway.)

You may be able to say that some non-verbal people "really" have high IQs, but I bet those IQs are even more meaningless to them than mine is to me. Assuming that an autistic with a high IQ can function as well as a neurotypical person with that IQ is a great way to say, "Hey, you're just being lazy. Stop it. You don't need any help." I don't know how many times I've heard, "If you're so smart, why don't you just do X?" where X is some skill that falls into my very low range...

If you've got a high IQ, there's rather a danger of not getting the help you need, because of the assumption that all your skills fall near that level, like a neurotypical person's would. And if you've got a low one, there's a great danger of being underestimated, having your talents ignored, so that you never get the opportunity to develop them.

If non-verbal people are like the average autistic person (admittedly, "average autistic" is somewhat of an oxymoron), then they'll have similar skill profiles--scattered all over the place, undefinable by an overall IQ even if it could be properly measured. The only thing I could safely say about someone who doesn't use language is that he's bad at using, or at least producing, language. The rest is all still up in the air.

You can't make assumptions about autistic people, and you can't categorize them by their IQ scores and still have the categories mean anything more than how good those people are at taking IQ tests. You have to take them on a case by case basis. If you're a professional, you have to find out what they're good at, what they're bad at, and what you can do to help them free up the strengths. I get extra time on tests because I have inefficient working memory, slow processing speed, and impaired concentration. I also get lessons in how to improve organization, to create external order so that I'll be able to work with what I've got. Otherwise, those things would hold me back and not let me show off my skills on other areas. A lot of the teaching you do with autistic people is to grab hold of what they're good at doing, whatever it is, and use it.

Some autistic people are less independent than others. Some need more help. I'm not denying that. I'm just really leery of assuming that you could put autistic people in boxes at all, even if you could somehow measure their "true" IQ.

It's your right to want a cure... just like it's your right to want to win the lottery. But unlike lotteries, there aren't millions of tickets out there; just a few hundred scientists, most of whom are working towards a genetic test and not a cure. Just like me and the many others who wouldn't want a cure for autism if it could be invented, you're living with autism, and you can't change that.

Why is autism so hard to change? Well, it's hard-wired in; both in the genetics and in how your brain works. We would need about the same sort of technology to cure autism as we would need to create designer babies (autism is genetically complex and it is not a matter of changing one gene, but multiple ones and different ones) and to change, damage-free, the human brain into any configuration of cognition and personality (to change the already-present neurological wiring). Anything less is not a complete cure.

(I must be sure not to confuse "cure" with "improvement", as the first is impossible and the second almost inevitable. Autistic people learn, as any human does; and learning can mean learning to get along in the world--in some cases, usually with mild Asperger's, to the point that you have found viable solutions for all of the drawbacks, and your autism is diagnosable only by history. Physical health can also be improved, which makes life easier for anyone, especially the ultra-sensitive autistic. But none of these things are cures.)

What I'm talking about--a complete cure--is something that won't be possible for decades, certainly... probably a few hundred years, realistically, for the sort of control over the changes made that might actually leave your personality mostly intact.

When people buy lottery tickets, they're essentially buying hope.... the hope that they might one day become rich and get everything they want, rather than living an average life of often menial work. But every dollar they spend on the lottery is a dollar they could have spent on some of the things they want.

The problem I see with wanting a cure is that it seems to obscure everything else--you pin all your hopes on that one thing, and you forget that there's a life to be lived, with autism, and that this life isn't empty or worthless even though it may have its drawbacks. You start to see everything bad in your life as there because of your autism; and everything good that you want as something you could get if only you weren't autistic.

But... there is no cure. There won't be one for a long time--possibly never. People have lived good, happy, fulfilling, purposeful lives with all the problems that autism can bring, and more. And people without any sort of disability at all have had unhappy, empty, miserable lives.

Lottery tickets are all well and good. Maybe it's fun to think of what you might do with a million or more. But if you spend your money on ticket after ticket, hoping, there comes a point at which all that money spent on lottery tickets could have been used to make your life better, as it is, without having to win anything at all. A dollar every day spent on tickets is $365 a year, enough to give somebody a really good Christmas. Save for five years, and you can go on vacation. Some people spend more than a dollar every day. One ticket is OK; a few might be fun; but buy enough, and you're pinning your money on what is probably empty hope when you could spend it to make your life a little better right now.

While parents pin their hopes on cures, their children live lives where medicine and therapy push out childish fun and real learning. While teen and adult autistics hope for cures, they ignore the good parts of life that they can have right now, with or without autism. I could be harsh and say "You are autistic, you will always be autistic; now learn to work with it," but if you think about it, that isn't such a harsh statement at all. Accepting yourself for who you are instead of thinking yourself unacceptable is about the most satisfying feeling in the world; and when you do that, you can learn to work with what you have--even if it isn't a lot; even if you're severely disabled; even if you face a lot of prejudice--and end up with a decent life, autism or no autism.

Maybe, magically, someone might invent a procedure that would turn autistic people into non-autistic people, damage-free, with most of the personality intact; but until then, you've got a life to live; it's not doomed to be an unhappy life; and wishing for a cure won't make anybody invent one sooner. It's the only life you've got; make it count.

Or you could just keep buying lottery tickets, wasting your money... wasting your time... and hoping for the big win...

Wanting or not wanting a cure has much more to do with how you handle your autism than anything else. You could say, "I'll take a cure if one comes along, but for now I'm going to live my life," or you could put your life on hold hoping for a cure that never materializes... Too many autistic people and their parents are choosing that second option, and missing out on life because of it.

I can't force you to say, as I do, that you don't want a cure; but at the very least, realize that right now you can't change the fact that you are autistic, which means that just like me you are living with autism; that it's not impossible to have a good life with autism, as there are many people who have done it (and most of them didn't have any Einstein-like skills); that "disabled" does not mean "worthless"; and that autism does not prevent learning and personal growth.

I've blogged about this before, but let me re-cap.

My current life involves a great deal of stress thanks to bad transportation arrangements (which I am lucky to have at all). I spend a total of two hours on the bus every day to go to and from a college that's 15 miles away. I spend another eight hours in a public, often noisy, often overwhelming environment. By the time I get home, I'm exhausted and somewhere from seven to nine on a ten-scale approaching "no brain function left". And then I have something like five and a half hours to clean the house, make dinner, and relax before I have to go to bed and start the next day. (Five hours might seem like a lot; but trust me, it isn't. Not when everything seems to take forever in a state of overload.) So by the time morning rolls around, a significant part of that stress hasn't dissipated yet, and I carry that into the next day.

Once I got used to school, the first few weeks were OK. I had enough time on the weekends to get into my special interests, relax, and get back to zero on the stress meter. I didn't have enough concentration left to do schoolwork, either in the evenings or on the weekends; but it was enough to survive. Eventually, though, without enough down time, it just kept on building up.

Week five, I skipped a day of class. It wasn't enough. On week 6, I attended classes on Monday, then nearly had a meltdown; by the time I was on the bus going home, I was crying and thumping my head against the side of the bus. (Not head-banging. There's a difference. This sort doesn't leave bruises.) I skipped school completely on Tuesday. On Wednesday I tried to attend school again, but it was raining and everyone's shoes were squeaking, and by 7:30 in the morning I had nothing left for the rest of the day. I even found myself growling at some random guy with wet, squeaky shoes... I sure hope he thought I was clearing my throat or something. I haven't actually hit anybody since I last tangled with my sister (who can give as good as she gets, trust me); so that was a bit of a wake-up call. I got a cab home.

I also skipped Thursday and Friday. I tried to do schoolwork on those days, at home; but I found I hadn't any concentration left. Today, Sunday, I finally have some of it back, and I've gotten a good solid hour of studying in already. I'll probably be ready to go back tomorrow--in fact, will have to, considering I have a test. (And missed all the review sessions, and a week of study time. And was behind to begin with, thanks to starting school a week late because I had to rework my schedule to fit in between those transportation times!)

So... the dilemma mentioned in the title of the post? Well, what do I tell my professors? Is it ethical to say that I was sick? Or do I have to explain the whole thing?

After all, if most people were to skip four days of class to do little more than eat, sleep, read novels, and play games, they would be considered slackers, and probably rightly so. Asperger's does give me a reason for what I did; but is it enough of a reason, or is it just an excuse? And is "extremely stressed out" even a legitimate synonym for "sick"?

First practical use of axioms learned in statistics class:

Autism: 1 in 150
Antisocial PD: 2.1 in 100

Therefore, with a normal rate of each of the three conditions in each of the three populations (independent probability):

Autism AND APD: 2.1 in 15,000

That means that there should be, in any small town, about two autistics who also have antisocial PD. Or, in the entire United States, population 300 million, there should be 42,000 who fit that description.

That one or two will be in the news eventually is obvious.

And yet... when an autistic person commits a willful, hurtful crime... they blame it on autism.

The sheer odds--and the fact that autistics are no more moral than anybody else--suggest that once in a while, a criminal will be autistic. It's silly to deny that this is so.

It's also silly to insist that the criminal activity is due to autism.

I see this as just one more way to dehumanize the autistic person... not by insisting we are all criminals, but by saying that somehow having autism forces us to be criminals, that we're not really choosing to do things that are evil and wrong; that if only we had gotten better early intervention services, we wouldn't have committed the crime.

That's a fallacy.

If a neurotypical person commits a crime, he is presumed to have made a bad choice.

If an autistic person commits a crime (again, I'm counting only things done willfully and not just because he is naive and easily manipulated), he is presumed to have committed it because he is autistic.

This sort of reasoning implies that, unlike the "real" people, we are unable to choose--forever infants. It's the worst sort of prejudice. Oddly enough, I would much rather have it said that an autistic person who deliberately hurt someone did it because he made an immoral choice, than to have it said that he couldn't help it.

We choose freely, as anyone does. Sometimes we choose wrongly; but we do, as any human, have free will.

Reply to "Perfection Loops".

I call myself a "perfectionist"; but it isn't anxiety-oriented, as perfectionism is for most people. I simply don't know where to stop between "not done" and "done perfectly". I don't know where the "acceptable" level is; it's different for every task, vague, and even if perfectly described, would still result in my not knowing how exactly I should replicate the "acceptable" standard!

I've managed to compensate somewhat. I've learned to stop at "done"--that is, don't proofread, edit, or do ANYTHING more than once. Deliberately allow mistakes. That is only possible in academic work, and only because I am academically gifted and typically do things right the first time on low-level classes. It isn't possible when I clean, which can take double the amount of time and has been known to take ten times as long. In academic work, it's only possible for low-level classes. If I do this with an art appreciation class, the "get it done" method (no checking, proofreading, editing, or ever looking back over the work after having done it) allows a low "A". If I did it with calculus, I would fail. So calculus still takes twice or more as long as it takes most students; and so does non-academic work, especially the kind that involves planning things as you go along.

Second method: Routines. When I do something the same, standardized way every time, I eventually get faster at it. With a plan already in place, I don't get stuck trying to figure out what to do next. The first time I practice a routine, it takes a long time; the hundredth, it's easy and quick. (Not all autistic people have the advantage of getting faster with practice and usually keeping the skills they learn. I think it's part of what allows me to live on my own; the other big part is probably the ability to plan, though not to plan on the fly.) Routines only work for tasks that have to be done repeatedly and fairly often. Working out a routine for opening a bank account wouldn't help; designing one for buying groceries is extremely helpful.

Last resort? Practice. In a situation where I can't design a routine and can't do the bare minimum, I start out with very low speed and very high quality. As time goes on and I do the job more and more often, my speed begins to increase, eventually (at a slower rate than most people, and slower than if I were using a routine) reaching average or a little above.

The problem with this is that some people are not satisfied with my slow "learning curve" (perhaps double as long as most people's), and ignore the quality of my work. The speed problem will eventually resolve itself. The neurotypical pattern seems to be average speed with slowly increasing accuracy. Someone who has worked only with neurotypical people could easily expect my speed to stay the same, rather than increasing, as it does.

There's lots of arguing about whether Bill Gates, Thomas Jefferson, Einstein, etc., were/are autistic... Some people are trying to prove they were; some, that they weren't. This isn't exactly about that, but about what we read into the idea that famous and/or successful people are autistic.

There's this fallacy that keeps on popping up: "Einstein was autistic; so that means because I'm autistic too, my autism shouldn't be a setback and I should accomplish great things." Not so fast! You can't transfer every characteristic of one member of a group to every other member; that's poor logic. It's like saying, "My cat is black; therefore every cat is black." Einstein's autism, or lack thereof, says nothing about your autism, or your other talents.

Einstein was probably autistic; but he was also highly intelligent, creative, and had a great amount of persistence. Most people don't have that degree of mental agility, or the willpower to use it to the degree that Einstein did. He might still have made those contributions to physics if he were NT; we don't know. He might have done it a different way--gathered a group of like minds and bounced the ideas around until they made sense, maybe. Or he might have used those talents in a different way.

But you can't swing to the opposite, either: "Some autistic people never accomplish anything; so that means I won't either." Some NTs don't accomplish anything, either. Some NTs become world leaders and CEOs, but not every NT should expect to become one of those. And what's your definition of "accomplish anything", anyway? Do you have to have a Nobel Prize to have had a worthwhile life? Do you have to have a Ph.D.? Even a steady job? Not really. Not everyone.

Then some people say that people like Einstein and Thomas Jefferson aren't autistic... it always seems to smell of the implied reasoning that "These famous people weren't/aren't autistic, therefore autistic people aren't capable of the things that they did". They may or may not have been autistic (though I think they probably were/are); but even if you were to prove they are not autistic, that still wouldn't say anything about autistic people in general.

The chances of an autistic person achieving something are less than an NT achieving the same thing just because the NTs greatly outnumber us. Most autistic people will never be Bill Gates or Einstein. Neither will most NTs. Of course, that doesn't mean a few of us won't accomplish great things; it's just that neurology doesn't predict that we will or won't. (There's something to be said for the tendency of neurodiverse people to have original ideas; but original ideas are not enough without the ability to put them into practice.)

Autism plus high intelligence, good pattern-matching, or creativity can often mean you compensate a great deal for the autistic traits; or else you mentally brute-force things that NTs do by instinct and learn them that way. (Did anybody else memorize an idiom dictionary as a kid? Worked for me.) So in the cases where people are capable of being the best in some field, their autistic traits might simply not be as obvious--especially if they're trying to hide them!

I should mention, for the record, that you can't officially diagnose somebody long-distance like people have done with Jefferson or Einstein. You can only make an educated guess. If you can interview family members and read the diary of the person in question, your guess might have a pretty small margin of error; but it'll never be as small a margin as if you had conducted a proper interview with the person himself. So I guess questions like "Was Einstein autistic?" can never have certain answers, though I'm just about as certain about him as you can be about any historical figure.

We're just human. Just like NTs are different from each other (no, really, they are), autistics are different--very different--from each other. What any given autistic person accomplishes says nothing about what you will accomplish. We don't make the argument that "Many world leaders are NT; so that means every NT is cut out to be a world leader," do we? Most NTs would go nuts trying to run a country! Neither should an autistic person try to become Einstein. Don't be a stereotype, even if it's a positive stereotype; be yourself.

It seems like I see a lot of people with a diagnosis blaming everything that's bad about their lives on that diagnosis--why people treat them badly, why they don't have a romantic relationship, why their parents want them to be different, why aren't happy. This might seem OK at first, because that means you don't have to blame yourself; but it also means you feel more and more pity and helplessness--not good things to get trapped in. (And beware when parents blame everything on their child's autism. Therefrom come biomed addicts.)

But blaming either yourself or autism gets you nowhere. The only reason you should be looking at the cause of a problem is to get the information that leads you to the solution. Otherwise, asking "why" is wasted time.

The idea that 'autism is bad' can really ruin your life. It means you start to think, "I'm trapped; I can't help this; I don't know how to do this," and the only way out is the cultural idea, "Overcome your disability". There's no middle road left--either you "overcome" or it's a tragedy. But happiness and autism aren't mutually exclusive--in fact, I am quite certain that, were you to do a survey on the subject, it would turn out that we are happy at the same rate as NTs.

When you have a problem, don't blame it on autism and assume you have to solve your autism or the problem will never go away. Look at the problem on its own terms, from all angles. Get creative. Get help, if you need it. You might even learn that some autistic trait or other is actually the solution to the problem.

You don't need to be neurotypical to be happy. You don't have to be "high-functioning", nor have some special skill that you only have because you're autistic. Autism doesn't even have to give you any advantage at all. You don't have to justify your existence to the world: "Yeah, I'm autistic, but look at what I can do!" No. Much as certain autism "charities" would like you to think so, the value of your life is not based on whether you'll ever have a highly-paid job, a girlfriend, or the ability to speak. Nor is it based on how little you "cost" society. Forget all that. Forget what you're "supposed" to be and focus on who you are.

"So, what's it like being autistic?"

Autism is so different from person to person that I could only tell you what it's like for me, and even then I can't compare it with being NT because I've never been NT.

Autism, for me, means details. I see little things. Something changes, I notice it. I see the small elements that make up the big picture--pixels first, then the image. I'm hypersensitive to everything--sight, sound, smell, touch... I can tell what kind of fabric something is made of just by touching it. You might see me in the Goodwill store shopping for clothes by passing my fingers across the racks, looking for something that feels right. It's not that my senses are any better, but that my brain doesn't have a very strong 'filter'. Most people stop noticing their clothes about five minutes after they put them on. Not me--I notice them all day. Same with the other senses.

Autism also means intense focus on one thing. When I get interested in something, it's to the exclusion of all else. When I want to know something, I become an expert. I understood relativity before I could do algebra, because I became so interested in it in the sixth grade. Now, with an interest in psychology and pediatric medicine, I can follow the medical journals despite having no official education on the subject. When I play a game, I learn everything about its mechanics. I can still tell you about the uses of every item in ADOM--including artifacts. These obsessions bring me joy... they are almost like falling in love.

Autism also means a lot of little annoyances. I'm not too good at planning and executing things while I'm doing them, so that without a plan in mind beforehand, things can take double or even ten times as long as they should. When I'm not interested in something, I lose focus. My senses intrude on my thinking way too often. I seem to have the ability to either focus intensely, or not at all. I'm not good at communication that doesn't involve words, so I use a huge vocabulary to make up for it and consequently sound smarter than I am. I'm unemployed because I can't do a lot of the simple little things that "everyone" can; and that annoys me because I have a lot of intelligence that I could really use if only I could get around the little obstacles.

Social isolation is my own choice. I admit I wouldn't know how to de-isolate myself easily; but I'm pretty happy with no friends and frankly thankful that my family lives several states away. I think in terms of facts, not people; and my empathy is a logical sort of altruism that would have me doing anything for anyone without really feeling much of what they feel. People in general are interesting; but people in particular rather bore me--I'm much more interested in the ideas that their heads hold, and if I hang out with someone, it's because they have interesting things to say.

All in all, autism is a different way of thinking and living. It does cause problems, but I would have problems if I were typical, too. And if I were typical, I wouldn't be able to see the beautiful little patterns in all the details of life; I wouldn't be able to fall in love with a subject; I wouldn't be the person I am. Me-without-autism is not me at all.

When it comes to nonverbal communication, NTs are wonderful at "mind reading" by picking up on a lot of little cues from the person they're watching and listening to. A nonverbal communication deficiency is a big part of an autism diagnosis.

"Autistics can't understand other people's minds." True? Or is a general statement better: "People have a hard time understanding minds unlike their own."?

That would make NTs just as impaired as autistics are--when interacting with autistics.

If you're NT, you'll be good at understanding other NTs, not so good at understanding autistics. You might easily make the assumption, "Autistics can't understand other people's minds." I don't think you can really be blamed for that. It's just the effect of being in the majority, and the way people's minds are made to form systems of ideas. You encounter certain combinations of things repeatedly, and out of those you form a general schema that you apply to other similar things afterwards.

If the people you meet have similar minds to yours, you form a schema that starts with your own mind and branches easily out to other minds. As a result you can "read" them very well. So you assume that you can read everyone's mind, because most of your experiences confirm that idea. When you meet an autistic person, you start out by misreading them as though they were typical; then after a little more interaction you start adjusting your schema to include a different variety of human. The problem is that you've had a huge amount of practice with NT minds, but only one experience with an autistic mind; so you are relatively inefficient at this task. To add to the complications, the autistic cannot easily read your mind because he isn't nearly as good at forming schemas as you are, and because his own mind doesn't give him a good example of NT to work from, as yours does.

That "majority effect" is big! The minority naturally has trouble both being understood and understanding, and as a result, the statment, "Autistic people have trouble understanding other people's minds" is true for 149 out of 150 "other people"! It's pretty easy for an NT to form a schema based on that, and it'll be true most of the time. But there's the failing of general schemas: The assumption that "other people" means all other people, rather than most other people, is crucial. It means you attribute the communication error entirely to the autistic, rather than realizing that part of the effect is due to the differences between him and most others.

This is a communication gap that forms when a large majority interacts with isolated members of a small minority.

But there is some truth to the idea that autistic people are worse at mind-reading even between autistics, when the neurology barrier isn't as much in play. Autistic people, on average, focus on detail. That means less schema-formation, and though autistic people do seem to understand each other better than they understand NTs, most (?) of us don't tend to generalize as much as NTs do. So we see individual autistics, and the diversity of the Spectrum, rather than a general "other autistic person". On top of that is the very real diversity of the spectrum--it's harder to generalize from autistic to autistic than from NT to NT, even if you want to do it. And autistic people generally have more experiences with NTs than with other autistic people; so they have their own minds to draw from, but not as many other minds to apply the template to. So you have a person who doesn't generalize too much, doesn't have many similar people to generalize to, and those he does have tend to be more diverse than the ones an NT would have.

Individual autistics may vary. As always.

And of course there are pitfalls to this sort of mind-reading--the dangers of applying a general template to a specific individual are obvious. Too general, and you will misinterpret your subject. You might do so even if your schema isn't very general, if your subject is far enough down the autistic Bell curve. And at the extremes of generalization, you might form a stereotype that could even run to prejudice. So be careful--understanding other autistics better than you understand NTs doesn't mean you understand them perfectly, nor that you can assume that you know what they are feeling or thinking. No one can ever understand another person's mind; he can only understand his own, then extrapolate from that based on new information from the person himself. The more you study your subject, the better you will learn him.

Still, the mind-reading between autistic people is rather striking--not as strong as NT mind-reading, but definitely there.

Sometimes I wish my Asperger's didn't cause all these hang-ups. Sometimes I meet autistic people who desperately want to be normal. I used to think that being normal, being "one of the girls", was important. Sometimes I still get annoyed that my life seems so uncertain, and that so much of this uncertainty is  tied in with autistic traits that make me such a mismatch for the rest of the world.
There are whole communities of autistic people who don't mind being autistic or even prefer it; a majority of the parents of autistic children would say that their kids are loved and their childhoods are decently happy, despite their autism. And not all of those autistic people are high-functioning, either. Autism's caused me trouble; but it's part of my life, part of my personality. Why not be proud of who I am? Why not, at the very least, accept it and work my life around it, rather than banging my head against it?

Yeah, there are times when the thought pops into my head: Life would be better if I were NT. When I get passed over as a job because I couldn't impress the interviewer; when I get stuck in the middle of the room trying to figure out what I was trying to do; when I can't memorize formulas; when I can't recognize my friends... But it seems like, the second after I think, "I wish I didn't have Asperger's," my mind comes back with, "But this is who you are; you wouldn't be yourself without it." And, of course, if I were NT, I'd still have problems; just different ones. Life involves problems for everybody, whether they're due to a bad romance, a stressful job, or a neurological condition.

It's possible to be happy and autistic. All those people show it's possible. And it's also possible to be unhappy and neurotypical. The grass is always greener, they say... It's a metaphor that means that what you don't have always seems better to you than what you do have; and the point is that it's better to learn to appreciate what your life is now, rather than to try to get something that it isn't--especially if that something is impossible or not, in the long run, worth it.

You're not settling for second-best if you accept yourself as autistic. Take it from somebody who knows both what it's like to hate yourself and then to finally accept yourself... No matter how impaired you are, no matter how many people are prejudiced against you, you make it worse when you are prejudiced against yourself, and it gets better when you decide to accept yourself--impairments and all--as a worthwhile person with a worthwhile life.

If there's one thing I could tell the non-autistic world and have them take to heart, it would be this:

Don't pity us.

We're just as capable of happiness, though it might take different forms.
We have emotions, though sometimes we don't express them properly.
We can love and hate and everything in between--even if we don't show it.
We communicate--even the most low-functioning of us. We just do it differently.
Autism doesn't cover up who we are. It's part of who we are.
We can do most things NTs can do; we can even do some things NTs can't do.
Autism doesn't keep us from being useful members of society.
We may not naturally know how to do some things, but we can learn what we don't know.
Autism isn't some sort of horrible cancer. It doesn't make us unhappy.
We'd still have problems if we were completely non-autistic. They'd just be different problems.
We take joy in knowing that someone loves us.
Autism isn't something that steals a person away--we're still there, just not communicating efficiently.
We enjoy learning, doing, creating, and interacting with the world, just like anyone.
We have hobbies that give us great enjoyment.
We miss out on a lot of those problems that come with being ultra-social.
We have a style of our own, a way of thinking and interacting that can benefit the mostly-NT world.
We're not tragedies or statistics--we're human beings.

All in all, being autistic isn't all that bad. It's just a different way of being--not any worse.

So don't pity us.

There's a big gap between Aspie and NT; and there have arisen two different cultures which naturally seem to oppose each other.

In the past, NTs have seen people on the autism spectrum as inferior, retarded, or weird: At best, we're eccentric geniuses; at worst, we're almost nonhuman. As a result, the low-functioning have been subjected to unneccessary drugs, restraints, and behavior "therapy" little better than dog-training for humans; while the high-functioning have "only" been bullied, abused, and ridiculed by their peers and even those in authority--especially during childhood. And, in the future, those of us found to be autistic before birth may simply be aborted.

Our communication difficulties don't account for even half of the problems we have with communicating with NTs. We also have to deal with prejudice (theirs and, sadly, our own), fear, and the expectations that we must think exactly like every other (NT) person out there; and if we don't, we're frightening enigmas who must somehow be mentally deficient. When we are accepted, we're often accepted only for our skills, or accepted by people who want to "fix" us: We become people's projects, befriended out of pity.

As the autism spectrum comes together in an Internet subculture, an interesting phenomenon is taking place. Anyone who can type, including those who are nonverbal, can join this community. And, strangely enough for people whose brains are not strongly wired to communicate or to connect with others, autistic people are beginning to feel that they are part of a group--a very diverse group, to be sure; but a group, nonetheless.

And with this group identity comes a sense of "us versus them"--and, inevitably for imperfect people, reverse prejudice.

To put it simply, many people on the autism spectrum, especially those who have been subject to abuse of one sort or another, are prejudiced against neurotypical people.

Why is that?

While we have met a lot of NTs, most NTs have met only one or two people with high-functioning autism, and likely none at all with low-functioning autism. What's more, most don't know the first thing about AS/autism. They have these stereotypes of someone "stuck in their own little world", rocking and staring into space and doing amazing feats of memorization and mental math. For an NT, that stereotype seems to be enough: Autism isn't a big part of his life. But for those Aspies with whom he comes in contact, it's a big problem.

NTs don't usually connect AS/HFA with the shy, greasy-haired girl who's obsessed with cats, or the loud, obnoxious kid who doesn't know when to shut up about nuclear power plants, or the guy who can do anything with a computer but still doesn't know you're not "supposed" to carry around scientific calculators in your shirt pocket. They just classify those people as "nerdy" or "weird" or "retarded"; and once those people are in those categories they, at best, ignore them. And yet, this is what AS/HFA is.

Befriending someone who is different--especially in a distasteful way--means risking a lot. Social reputation can diminish. Embarrassment may result. Other relationships may be endangered.

Yes, growing up Aspie is hard. We all know that. But being an NT isn't all that great, either: If, as an NT, you befriend someone who is "weird" and unpopular, you risk a lot of trouble from others.

The biggest problem is that, often, the most ruthless and unprincipled NTs rise to the top. Every time I look at these people, they're gossiping about each other and clawing their way past other people to get up the social ladder, and they're stabbing each other in the back for no particular reason other than the other person is a social impediment... Half the time, their own social plots get so convoluted that they don't know who their real friends are; and they end up marrying people they don't even like just because of their hormones! Not to mention they're so society-driven that they'll get caught up in crime and drugs and who knows what else just to "look good".

Those NTs who escape these problems are called extraordinary simply because they are willing to risk themselves to reach out to others, to put others first. And those extraordinary people are the ones who can change the world.

That's because there's a good side to being an NT, too. To know what others are thinking, to be a part of something larger than yourself, to be able to work together to accomplish more than you could do on your own: These are NT strengths.

What's needed here is to educate the NTs. We already know lots about them; and the only thing we really have to work past is that tendency towards reverse prejudice that keeps us from trying to communicate. The problem is that they don't know much at all about us. Once they know what to expect, and can replace those stereotypes with "Oh, s/he's just an Aspie"... then the fear of the unknown, the revulsion they feel when they meet with the unpredictable, can be greatly reduced.

My friends--few, but extraordinary--did this exact thing for me: They saw me, said, "Oh, she's just weird", and accepted me that way--no strings attached, no expectations of change, no pity. I like to think that both I and my friends have been enriched by this bridge across the neurological gap. I know that this is so for me.

To educate NTs about autism--the true autism, not the stereotype--would do a great deal towards communication. NTs are often afraid of what they don't understand; and they don't understand Aspies. So, to tell themselves that they do understand, and thus to eliminate the insecurity, they have these labels. Almost all the terms used are derogatory; and many of them ("nerd", for example) denote a position on the fringes of society. To protect themselves, NTs eject any who are different (and thus incomprehensible) from their social network.

Aspies have labels, too--my use of the word "neurotypical" proves that. We must take care that the label does not become derogatory, that it does not lump every NT into a stereotypical definition that contains only some of their diverse features, or, even worse, a prejudicial definition that contains only their worst attributes.

What must be done now is to educate the general public, to make autism comprehensible.

Look at Down Syndrome. Almost everyone knows about that. Sure, there's still prejudice; but the mental picture most people have of someone with Down Syndrome is pretty decent--somebody who's slow and doesn't get it sometimes, but still someone who is basically human and a lot like any other human--feelings and dreams just like anyone. People are just barely beginning to accept people with Down Syndrome into society, because they're starting to realize there's nothing very frightening about them. That comes about because now, they understand the differences; and those differences have settled into a predictable definition that their NT minds can work with. There's a long way to go there, a lot of stereotype still to break down (for example, the idea that these people are "always happy"); but it's beginning.

If that can be done with autism... if NTs can be given a true, non-derogatory mental definition of someone on the spectrum... Well, once they know what to expect, they may be able to categorize us in the right "box". And once they know what to expect, a lot of the anger, fear, and outright hostility may start to fade.

We Aspies must be careful to remain open to such a connection, to reach out to it when it is extended to us. And that means getting rid of prejudice against NTs. No matter how many times you have been hurt by a member of that group, you cannot judge the rest of the group to be like him, especially when it is a group as diverse as NTs are.

Aspies, by themselves, are generally experts in their small fields; but it takes NTs to tie all those little fields together. If either side is prejudiced, the system suffers.

Aspies are meant to be here; God means us to be here; we are not mistakes. The world needs us--our sharp focus, our logical minds. And the world needs the connections and interdependence NTs create.

If Aspie and NT worked together, they could do incredible things.

Beware prejudice.

POP Report 8 December 14, 2006 Didn't do much today, only some mending. I did get up 8 hours after I went to sleep, which was a good thing, except I went to sleep at 5 a.m. I'm hoping to get to sleep at 2:30 today. Didn't use the day planner at all, mostly because I spent the day doing just two different things--mending and playing a computer game. I'm done with the mending now, though. I need more "weekly tasks" and "daily tasks". Doing things regularly helps to create order. Tomorrow I shall incorporate exercise into my schedule--dog-walking, if Mercy, her owner, and the weather allow. Devotions, which I've become frighteningly lax about, are next.