Fitting in and Standing Out
I can feel their eyes on me. They’re all staring, judging.
I can feel their eyes on me. They’re all staring, judging.
Disability in Kidlit will be taking a brief two-week hiatus beginning today, but we’ll be back on January 10, 2014 with more excellent posts.
I have to accumulate all the data from these varying experiences and use them to define myself. Otherwise, others will do it for me.
It wasn’t until I was an adult that I could finally understand that from the time of my diagnosis, my education was not going to be “complete,” because I did not have the full access I needed. It was as if intensive speech therapy and itinerant teachers were more important than having a sign language interpreter in my classes.
When I received my diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome seven years ago, I thought of all the young people today who face the social challenges and bullying that I faced decades earlier. I wanted to create a character like me, but one who fights back against the way others treat her in a way that I never did.
After second grade, I stopped reading most books unless they were assigned for class. Even then, I often didn’t read them. The reason being, when I read a sentence, I often didn’t understand it. Somewhere between my eyes seeing the words and my brain, the phrase disappeared into the ether.
According to pop culture, mentally ill people are magically more creative, filled with a manic drive to create art that pushes them to the brink until they finally explode.
We’re wrapping up Autism on the Page, and announcing our next exciting event—a week of posts focusing on representation of mental illness.
I’ve talked a lot about the ways my disability has affected my body image, my sexuality, my confidence, and my social interactions, and all of those things are important to consider when writing a disabled character. Today, however, I want to focus on the ways my disability affects the logistics of my life.
The pain of being the butt of someone else’s joke comes back to me whenever I read fiction that depicts characters on the autism spectrum who repeatedly take idioms and other expressions literally, or fail to understand the double meaning of words in embarrassing ways.