Kamran Nazeer Comments on the “Trained? Cured?” Post
Today Kamran Nazeer replied to my September Trained? Cured? post. He concludes with some really good observations.
Having met people, including my former classmates, whose autism is so much more pronounced than mine, makes me hesitate then before using the tag for myself. It feels like I’m asking for special attention and yet I’m not the one who needs it - they are. It also tends to confuse people. If I am autistic and someone who can’t speak at all is autistic - then what on earth is autism? I want to engage in the enterprise of explaining autism better to people and sometimes I feel that focussing on my own autism, at the expense of that of other people, makes that enterprise more difficult.
What do you think?
Think? Sometimes I wonder if I still think.
I feel like I am very close to being exactly where he is. Of course, I have no former classmates, but like Kamran, I often think I’m not helping or clarifying things, online or elsewhere. My extended silence here is to a large part because I’m not at all sure what I think…
Kamran, thanks for stopping by and leaving a comment.
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December 2nd, 2006 at 8:23 pm
What a nice fella, taking the time to leave a comment on your blog
I have his book on order from the library.
Hon, you should take up washing dishes. When I’m trying to think (usually about 12 different things all in one go) I wash dishes. It helps
I bet your wife will like that suggestion, anyway lol…
I’m having the same problem with my own blogging…too many things to say, how to say them before I think them through? Can’t. Shouldn’t.
Just didn’t want you to feel all lonely on that particular issue
Cheers,
Mum is Thinking, and washing dishes
December 3rd, 2006 at 2:52 am
If you are autistic and someone who can’t speak is also autistic, then being autistic can involve speaking or not speaking (or any point in between, of which there are many) depending on the person and possibly also the time in their life. You might be interested in this interview I (a non-speaking person) did with an autistic person who had learned to speak well, about the idea of whether she was “recovered” or not. I don’t think it damages me any, or takes anything away from me, to be thought of as in the same category as her.
December 3rd, 2006 at 4:05 am
Ah the perils of googling on ones name, well I usually end up at the top of the google page so I must be famous.
Nazeers book has not turned up on the shelves at Birmingham yet inspite of my having ordered it so I can’t comment on the book. Nadesans social construction of Autism has and that is a not a very good book because it is an outsiders book not an insiders. That is why I am more interested in reading Nazeers book.
As to what he should think. Well I would suggest of course that he read more and become politicised and realise how he is both psychologically and culturally embedded in this phenomenon called autism, which is experienced largely through the media for most. The way you construct your own way of being is not independant of the media unless one happens to be one of Levi Strausses Nambikwara, or Malinovsky’s Trobriand Islanders and I am willing to bet they are much more sophisticated than they used to be in Marshall Mcluhans global village.
December 3rd, 2006 at 7:56 am
Perhaps someone like Oprah should not be considered part of a minority, lest she attract too much attention to herself to the detriment of the “real” members of the minority.
December 7th, 2006 at 12:58 pm
Spectrum, spectrum, spectrum.
Cheers