#yeah autism is a much newer thing than most people expect

[mightydragoon]

*cracks knuckles like this hasn’t been my dissertation* 

I really reccomend Bonnie Evans: The Metamorphosis of Autism in Britain and Steve Silverman’s Neurotribes book (specifically the later chapters).

Also shhhh don’t tell anyone I got Evans entire book here.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK436841/

Prepare to hear me ramble for a tiny bit. I wish I can go on but no one wants to see that. I should write my own post on this one day.  

The modern understanding of what we still recognise as autism (as in i.e as a spectrum) is probably at most around forty years old.

Warning period typical language to describe autistic people below.

The way Leo Kanner diangosed autism originally in the 1940s was also incredibly narrow and specific as well. So one would only get the most “extreme” cases leaving others to be ignored or diagnosed with something else. And even then they were probably diagnosed under “subnormal”, “pyschotic”, etc anyway.  That’s not even accounting half the shit they did with ECT and LSD to try and treat autistic kids. I digress.  It wasn’t until the 1960s & 1970s he started to retract his theories once the rest of his patinets grew up. Because not all turned out like Donald Trippett.

The joys of mental institutions and subnormal hospitals.  You can guess what happens next. It wasn’t pleasant.

Let’s look at Britian real quick because suprisngly a good amount of work there helped advance our understanding of autism.

They were only moving past the whole “childhood schziophrenia” thing in the 60s and in Britian it took the works of the then National Society for Autistic Children (National Autistic Society now) founded in 1962 by groups of parents with autistic kids who were essentially fed up with the lack of support from the government.   Also because autistic kids during this period were often deemed “subnormal” and “uneducable” (The mental health Act 1959 had still excluded autistics until 1970)  and the parents from those groups fought for the right for their kids to have an education and understand more about autism itself. And plus you know they didn’t want their kids in institutions. Even building specialist schools (*see Sybil Elgar) and later in the 1970s residential homes like Somerset Court.

*See Michael Edge story here: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2011/nov/13/autism-first-child-growing-up

 The fact the word “autism” itself was used compared to childhood sczhiophrenia, mental retardation or pyschotic was also more specifc and neutral term and was a more attractive word that didn’t have the baggage the other words had.

Also fun fact. Would you also believe it was a fucking Tory (Willaim Compton Carr) who first brought up autism in the 1960 in Parliament?  

https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1960/may/18/mentally-handicapped-children

Plus passing laws in the 1970s which targeted disabled people in general but was a step foward in granting provisions and resources for autistic people. Panaroma even did a bit on highlighting autism to the public and the troubles these specialist schools had with lack of resources and fears about the future for many autistic kids who would probably end up in instituions rendering their work with them obselete. 

 Panorama - 1974 - Autism Provision  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRSs_WDmsV0&t=1620s

This along with tireless work from pyscholgists like Mildred Creak , Michael Rutter, Victor Lotter, Beate Hermelin, Neil O’Conner, Uta Frith, Lorna and John Wing.  And so much more who were often involved with autistic schools and the like.

*Note Uta Frith is also still alive.

There was also up and during the 1960s still a belief of “refrigerator mothers” too, that it was mothers cold parenting that caused their child to be distant. Like holy shit the stuff Kanner and Bruno Bettleheim said. Bettleheim fucking compared autism to being like a prisoner in a concentration camp. For additionaly points Bettlehim was also a Holocaust Survivor. Take that as you will.

Enter Lorna Wing who was a mother of an autistic child and along with her husband John who knew German and translated Hans Asperger’s work. Lorna basically helped formed the modern understanding of autism with the idea of an autistic spectrum during the late 1970 and 80s.

THE FUCKING 80S!

Concidentally a certain film involving a Rain Man was also made in 1988. There is also a scene where the nurse doesn’t know what autism is. Rain Man has its own problems but it did present autism to the best of their ability of the standard of its time. Raymond Babbit himself whose character inspirated came from savant Kim Peek  and Bill Sackter (a close friend of Barry Morrow) didn’t originate from autism. That was an additional thing worked into the film.

 But what is also important is how signficant that fucking film was in sheading light on something not many people had heard of until then for better or now. but it also unfortunatly set the standard and image of what Autism was in Hollywood even decades after its release.

LOOKING AT YOU SIA’S MUSIC!

Either way that paired with the conept of a spectrum and growing concepts of neurodiversity and people like Temple Grandin (also still very much alive) who are finally being able to tell their stories personally, you start to get increased numbers of people getting diagnosed especially during the 1990s.

And that’s not even getting into the whole Andrew Wakefield (sadly also still alive) shenaginery. Hbomberguy already said enough that speaks volumes on the man.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BIcAZxFfrc

[arrivalation]

2020: An Account

This year has been a nonstop, off-the-rails bullet train ride into what looked at first like chaos, but ultimately was a tearing down and reconstruction of my entire being. Because I know myself and I know I won’t remember much of this later, I’m recording it here. It’s hard to put some of this information out, but the universe regularly urges me to be more open. So here I go.

January

I got married.

It was, without contest, the absolute best day of my life. I’ve known since I was real little that I wanted to be married, that I wanted to be loved the way M loves me and to love someone just as much. I don’t know how to explain the feeling of having achieved that, and being able to share that with my entire circle. @abyssalsun​ made it down!! (my only regret is that @ladyoriza​ couldn’t make it, but I’m still so glad we got to make it to theirs). As often as I can, I revisit the memory of going to @chromecutie​’s house afterward, thinking it’d just be the four of us there, and opening the door to find a whole impromptu surprise party happening. Everyone cheered for us when we came in. I played CAH with Mordred, my brother and his wife, and several friends from out of town. By all accounts, these people would never have been in the same room together, but they were, and it was transcendent. It’s been almost a year, and I still haven’t recovered from all the planning and stress; but now that I’m past it, I can say with relief that it was 100% worth it.

February

We bought a house.

Up until this point, I’d been planning a wedding, participating in house-buying stuff as best I could, interviewing for a job I ended up not taking, and dealing with life-long mental illness that was festering and reaching critical mass. But then stuff started wrapping up. The wedding happened. The house was ours. We moved in. I could finally fucking breathe. LMAO bitch you thought.

March

The pandemic reached us.

I guess by this point it had probably already been in the US for a couple months, idr. But it wasn’t until March that things really started happening. People started dying in droves. New cases spread like wildfire. I remember thinking that this would be the zombie apocalypse, because at this point, I don’t think the CDC knew much about the virus. In my anxious mind, that was a completely reasonable assumption. My boss had us all start working from home. We all thought it’d be just a couple weeks.

April

I settled into working from home.

It didn’t take me long to get used to it, maybe a week. I hadn’t yet gotten used to my new hour-long commute from the new house to work, and so working from home quickly became my new normal. But I didn’t know yet why working from home was so good for me. All I knew was that I now had the brain-space to process things. I had the energy to do yoga and cook and do hobbies, and the time to appreciate and care for the home I lived in. I could think more clearly because there was no one else around to distract me. There was sunlight I could bask in. I felt human for once, and that became vitally important and infinitely valuable to me. Despite that, I still struggled with extreme anxiety, panic attacks, and some of the worst depression I’ve suffered through since I was a teenager. Outside my house, everything was a fucking mess and no one had their shit together.

May

I went back to the office for a few weeks.

There was a lull in pandemic activity. My boss had us all start coming back to the office again. At this point, I couldn’t make heads or tails of reality anymore. Everything was changing, nothing was stable. I desperately needed to stay working from home, because that was the one thing that felt Good and Right, but I had no real argument other than, 'I just need to.' So imagine me, at this point a soggy, run-over sloppy joe, attempting to return to normal. As you might think, it was... bad. I cried and hurt all the time. I think I really freaked out my boss with the way I reacted to coming back to the office. But then the second wave hit, and we all went back to working from home again.

June

Uncle Mike died on the first day of the month.

My uncle had been sick for a while, but no one was expecting him to die so suddenly. None of us were ready for it.

I also died that day.

It might sound dramatic, but I mean it quite literally and honestly. Over the years, I had gained suspicion that I was on the autism spectrum. M graciously found me a psychiatrist that took my insurance (and happened to be right next door). I wasn’t even going in for that - I was seeking treatment for my anxiety and depression. But I had amassed a (very long) list of my symptoms, and I brought it with me and read it to my doctor. I wasn’t even a quarter of the way through the list when he stopped me. I’m paraphrasing here, but in effect, he said, “No, yeah, you’re definitely autistic.”

I remember the way my body felt. Like someone had detonated a bundle of TNT in my chest, and I was burning from the inside out. At the time, I didn’t realize this emotional immolation was purposeful and executed by the universe to get rid of this old structure and build a newer, better, stronger one. For about fifteen seconds after he said that, I was relieved that it had been that easy, that there was an explanation for everything that my ADHD didn’t explain. It made a ton of sense why my environment was so important to me. And then I felt something unnameable. It was obvious to my doctor that I was autistic. Had it been obvious to everyone else? Why hadn’t it been obvious to me? I read the rest of my symptoms to him in a daze. I don’t remember how the rest of the appointment went.

And then I burned quietly and ungracefully until I was a pile of ashes. I didn’t know this at the time, but apparently it’s common for newly-diagnosed autistic people to have such dramatic and painful reactions, especially if they weren’t well-informed on the condition. Which I wasn’t.

I started therapy.

I also started learning about my “flavor” of autism. It was arduous, embarrassing, isolating, and ugly. I became aware that I had been masking my whole life, and I was astounded by just how often I did so. What really crushed me was knowing that I’d always have to mask to protect myself. I also became hyper-aware of the things that made me Feel Bad. Inexplicably, I stopped being able to react to those things the way I used to. Previously, if something made a loud and unexpected sound, I would suppress my reaction, because it’s not cool to get mad about it. But I found I couldn’t do that anymore. I had no choice but to react the way I needed to react. I realize now that this was to make me aware of what things make me feel a certain way so I can either avoid them or learn better tools to deal with them.

The therapist I saw wasn’t specialized in autism, and she wasn’t any help in that area, but she did teach me some important things. Like, “Is it reasonable for me to feel ____?”

July

Black hole.

I don’t remember a whole lot from this month, except sifting my own ashes through my fingers and crying. Every day brought a new revelation, a new thing that clicked. All of it was helpful and very painful. My psychiatrist recommended medication, but I’d had a bad and long-lasting experience with medication as a teenager, so I suffered through the pain on my own.

I shouldn’t have. I got so low I didn’t want to be alive anymore. But I think it took reaching the bottom and feeling that much pain for me to get over my fear of pharmaceuticals. 

I got into astrology.

I had been interested in it for most of my life, but it wasn’t until this point that I started studying it in depth. I discovered it was a language that I could use to translate so many things about my own life that I didn’t understand. It was a rulebook in a time when I desperately needed rules - but one just flexible enough that it taught me how to stop thinking in binary.

August

I got medicated.

There was a big adjustment period, of course. It didn’t cure me. But it did start to make things easier. And it helped to know that, even if I didn’t believe it at the time, I deserved to rest. I deserved not to feel so much emotional pain all the time.

I turned 30.

It was easily the second best day of my life. I learned a lot of important things, like that it’s important to be present, that I’m seen and loved (just the way I am!!), and that I deserve good things. M planned a whole day of surprises:

I woke up at my leisure and we had coffee on the couch. He got me a cute card with one of our inside jokes inside - I still have it.

We went to our favorite combination lunch place and bakery, which I believe was our first real outing since the pandemic started.

We stopped by a tattoo place. I almost got a tattoo.

He set me loose in Texas Art Supply.

We got dim sum for dinner.

We had a lovely virtual cocktail hour with @chromecutie.

He bought me an ipad!!

I became Spiritual™.

I had been agnostic for the past decade or so, slowly and subtly slipping into nihilism, without realizing how detrimental those ideas were to me. I’m not sure what I thought spirituality was before, but I wasn’t into it. I had always rolled my eyes at people who talked about “a higher power”, auras, and spirit guides, until I became that person.

My psychiatrist introduced some powerful ideas to me, ones that meshed well with my previously-existing idea of how the universe worked. I won’t get into details here. That’s a whole other post. Ask me though - I’d love to talk about it.

Anyway, I started (intermittently) meditating. I learned some exceptionally powerful stuff. I felt my scaffolding being erected.

September

I started learning who I am and why I am this way.

I started seeing a new therapist. She thinks like me. She follows my erratic, forking trains of thought. She sees me and offers real, actionable feedback and solutions. Working with her, I’ve gained the ability to see my life from a 30,000-foot view. I can see now why I’ve felt so lonely my whole life. I understand how my family’s dysfunction has shaped me. I know now that I have the opposite of a victim complex - by default, I believe I am so awful that I feel sorry for everyone who has to deal with me. Because that’s what I was taught to believe. Learning that I deserve to take up space, set boundaries, say no, and be wrong sometimes is still a hard lesson for me. But most days, I believe it now. It takes other people believing it and convincing me. I still need that reassurance often.

My parents sold my childhood home.

Mentally, emotionally, I still lived there. I was still the inverted victim, still beholden to my stepdad’s whims and my mom’s complete cognitive dissonance. This was a blinking neon sign from the universe that it was time to move out. My mom told me when the closing date was so I’d have time to drive down and look at the house one last time. I didn’t go, and I still don’t regret it.

I started learning my boundaries.

After my spiritual move-out, I learned I don’t have to jump when my stepdad holds out the little circus hoop. When he otherwise shows zero interest in my life but still baits me with passive-aggressive texts, I don’t have to answer!! What a concept! I don’t have to feel guilty for not talking to my mom more than I do. We have very little in common, and I still have a lot of things to work through regarding her.

I learned how not to be so reactive.

Or rather, I’m still learning. Something else I learned in therapy is that over the course of my life, I’ve developed a desperate need to defend myself and to justify every action or thought I have, even to myself. It’d been especially troubling at work. My RSD led me to felt stupid, incompetent, and unseen daily; if my boss complimented someone, I believed it also meant he thought I was stupid and bad and wrong, otherwise he would have complimented me too. If my boss said something that even remotely sounded like I’d done something wrong, I’d race to build an impenetrable defense: “This is the reason I did that. Here’s my line of thinking. Do you understand? Can you please understand?”

Now I know that so little of what everything everyone says or does at work is about me. I can appreciate a coworker’s accomplishment and also realize it doesn’t take away anything from me. I’m not stupid or incompetent, and I’m a valuable part of the team. A lot of times, my boss and I are on two different wavelengths - that’s because I think a lot faster, which can be frustrating for him sometimes. He doesn’t fully understand me, but that doesn’t mean I’m doing anything wrong.

October

I let go of an old friend.

This was especially hard, because I had known this person for years. We’d gone through a lot together, and we’d shared some really important and emotional story plots and characters. I had agonized over whether I was truly important to her or not. It didn’t matter how much I loved her as a friend, or how badly I wanted us to be close again and remain close. I had learned to read the universe’s signs, and it was clear it was time to move on.

November

The election happened.

I was expecting things to turn out badly, but I still hoped for something good. And then something good did happen. I cried watching Harris’ speech. I felt a tenuous hope that things might finally start looking up, societally. I still haven’t really let myself fully embrace that hope, but every time I see a court shoot down another lawsuit, or hear about trump’s own conservative republican supporters tell him, “Okay, buddy, it’s time to step down,” I feel a little better. 

M and I went non-monogamous.

There’s so much I want to say about this, but it’s for another post. Suffice it to say that like every other experience this year, it has been unexpectedly challenging and ultimately a catalyst for  priceless growth. I’m unfathomably grateful that we’re doing this together, for the things we’ve learned so far, and for how much closer this experience has made us, even when I didn’t think we could get any closer. 

Turns out I’m not gray-ace.

I had identified as such for a couple years, which was why we wanted to try non-monogamy in the first place. On the surface, it perfectly explained my sexual personality. But every time I told someone my identity, I felt inexplicably sad. When I read about others having “normal” sex drives and “normal” relations with their spouses, I felt jealous.

Turns out I’m just traumatized, lol. Walking along this non-mono path has unearthed a lot of things, including this gem.

December

This was our first married christmas in our new house.

One of the handful of good things the pandemic has done for me was allowing me to back up my boundaries with hard evidence. It’s been difficult dealing with my stepdad bullying me about not coming over for thanksgiving, and having my mom subtly guilt me into making plans for next year already. But what I needed this year was a quiet holiday, instead of the usual weeks-long chaos, and I got it. And it was fucking delightful. I’ve dreamed of days exactly like that one - spending a tranquil morning with my spouse, sipping coffee and listening to music and eating treats. Deciding exactly how we want our holidays to be, because we deserve to.

I’m scared of what’s to come in the new year. I’m still an anxious mess, and some days I’m not strong enough to pull myself out of the spirals I throw myself into. I’ve gotten used to the pandemic holding my hand, allowing me to shelter in my home, helping me enforce my boundaries, teaching me who I am. When it’s over, I don’t know what will happen or how I’ll react or what I’ll learn next. I’m not finished rebuilding, but I don’t think that’s the point. I’ll never be fully rebuilt. But at least I’m figuring out the new layout.

[downinfront]

“Power Rangers” and the glorious death of your childhood

Power Rangers comes not to kill your childhood. Well, it kind of does. But in a good way! Or rather, not in the way you might expect. Think of it less as a killing than a reinterpretation. This alone will likely cause the truest believers of the chintzy ‘90s institution (which memorably combined recycled Japanese tokusatsu footage for its monster fights and freshly-shot footage with American actors for its on-the-ground stuff) to cry heresy and run screaming from the theater to the safety of their Nick At Nite programming blocks.

Call that an unavoidable cost of doing business, especially for the reboot business and especially for the reboot business of the almighty 1990s. The kids of that decade have grown into those pesky, proprietary millennials, and the general consensus among them seems to be that anyone looking to update the shows that got them through the Clinton years can only do so much, which is why recent remakes mostly amount to a rearranging of the (occasionally enchanted) furniture. 

Of course, this negates the idea that the property being remade could, in the right hands, likely mean something very different to a newer generation of kids for whom the world is, indeed, very different. One cannot build a movie -- or a franchise -- on “remember when” alone, and if this the crew behind this sleek new Power Rangers hasn’t entirely done away with the sacred text, they’ve made it a point to give it a translation fit for the 2010s.

In other words, the basic premise remains the same -- five teenagers stumble upon an alien stronghold in their dead-end town and become intergalactic space ninjas -- but the focus has changed. The show dubbed the Rangers as “teenagers with attitude” and was content to focus on the first half of that moniker, but this movie, directed by Project Almanac’s Dean Israelite, turns its focus towards the latter. Our five heroes are now a band of misfits and weirdos that John Hughes would throw in detention in a heartbeat, and, in fact, that’s where we meet them.

The setting would seem like a cheap ploy to make the kids seem like outcasts, but the script does the extra bit of work to make sure they earn the distinction. Jason (Dacre Montgomery) is a washout football star under house arrest; Kimberly (Naomi Scott) is a cheerleader who’s embroiled in, of all things, a nude photo scandal; and Billy (RJ Cyler, far and away the best thing about this movie) is a bomb-making nerd on the autism spectrum. The punkish delinquent Zack (Ludi Lin) and the introverted, you-may-have-heard-she’s-gay-now Trini (Becky G.) show up a little later, and the quintet are quickly blowing shit up and running from the cops in a stolen van. 

This, needless to say, is a decidedly different take on the Power Rangers, one that doesn’t venture far enough to be labeled “gritty,” but one that’s definitely grimy at the very least. It also, admirably, isn’t afraid to show the slow, arduous process by which the Rangers form their bonds. They start as tenuous allies at best and aren't even that nuts about each other (“Are we friends or are we Power Rangers?” one character asks), but by the end of the movie, when they have their big moment, it feels genuinely earned. (That’s a testament to the acting, by the way, which is far, far better than you’d expect or need it to be.)

The story, amazingly, even goes so far as to muddy the halo around the Rangers’ boss, Zordon. A floating head in the original, he’s embodied here by Bryan Cranston’s giant face, looking like one of those bed-of-nails toys you used to make a handprint on ('90s kids will understand). He’s given a new backstory in the script by John Gatins and an ulterior motive that the movie deploys in a well-played reveal at the halfway point. It’s a surprisingly solid performance by Cranston, whose reputation as the ultimate good sport will only increase once everyone gets a load of him in the one-take prologue that seems, of all things, to be inspired by Adi Shankar’s bonkers Power/Rangers short from a couple years ago.

Fear not, though, there is hope for those who prefer their youth amber-preserved. Minus a slightly updated story of her own, much as you remember her is Rita Repulsa, the cackling hag played in this version by Elizabeth Banks,  who’s doing some kind of magical blend of Linda Blair, the Wicked Witch of the West and Sunset Boulevard. If there is one drawback to this Power Rangers, it’s that it takes itself just a mite too seriously. She’s clearly in it for the fun -- and, yeah, maybe the paycheck as well, but girl’s gotta eat. (Also enjoying himself is Bill Hader, who voices Zordon’s lackey Alpha 5. Yes, he says, “ai yi yi.” Too many times, I think, but he says it.)

Of course, all this Breakfast Clubbin’ has to lead to the friggin’ dinosaurs, and the movie knows that this, more than anything, is that for which you have come. Accordingly, it kicks into a frenetic and kinda sloppy finale that does, indeed, break out the legendary Zords, the legendary theme song, and a Krispy Kreme product placement that’s so ridiculously funny it will soon assume legendary status as well. It’s a little too schizophrenically put together (think less the careful beats of Captain America: Civil War’s airport fight and more the constant kaboomery of a Transformers finish) to really work in the way the movie wants it to, but it’ll be diverting for newcomers and fans will likely recognize the spirit of the original in all this harmless chaos, if not exactly the letter of it. (That said: My one beef as a devotee? The new Megazord. No, no, no. Bring back that blocky masterpiece and leave my monster be.)

Admittedly, the movie goes down better while you're watching it than it does afterwards. It’s not perfect. But the effort is there, and Israelite tries, more so than most remake directors, to make the characters mean something they might not have before. Much like the ‘90s themselves, the original Rangers met the bare minimum for inclusion, if ofttimes in a backhanded manner (the team featured a black and Asian character, but they were the Black and Yellow Rangers, respectively -- it hasn’t aged well as a look). It was enough, I guess, to let people know they were worthy of consideration. But seeing this Zack converse in subtitled Mandarin with his mother, or Billy’s painful neuroses, or Trini’s genuinely affecting monologue about not knowing how to tell her parents about the true self she’s discovering is something that will resonate a lot more with kids for whom these issues are becoming more and more a facet of daily life. (‘00s kids will understand.)

So, where does that leave the ‘90s kids, who are the reason we’re getting this movie at all? Well, consider this: If you are a ‘90s kid, see it for the memory trip. (I grinned when they hit the theme song.) And if you’re a ‘90s kid with a ‘00s kid? See it for the memories they’ll make. In fact, there’s one wrinkle that turns out to be very meta when it comes to the remake game: In order for the Rangers to assume their power, Zordon must sacrifice his own. The metaphor is as apt as it is weirdly profound, and if Power Rangers doesn’t openly advocate for putting away childish things, it definitely tips its hand in favor of passing them along. In fact, those inheritors will probably be in the theater with you. Treat them kindly if they are. Your childhood is in their hands now.