multiples and autism

[danielmultiple.livejournal.com]

We are fairly new to this community, though we do talk to one of the members online in private e-mails . . .

Currently, we are working on a book about Asperger's Syndrome in which we want to address the concept of multiplicity and autism - in short, we have found that quite a few people with AS report something like multiplicity so we are thinking that this may be part of AS . . .

We are very interested in any of your thoughts about this, especially if you are autistic too - we are collecting quotes to include in this chapter of the book . . .

As for us personally, there are three and a half of us - there is a central processor (that is the half) that presents to the real world most of the time, then there is me, Daniel, who is dominant most of the time - I am the most autistic of the bunch and have really almost no emotions - except for fear, and I have a terrible temper . . .
Then there is Gabriel who keeps all of our emotions - he is very young - maybe 15 or so . . . I really dislike him . . .
Then there is Nathan - Nathan is probably the closest to what you think of as an autistic - he is very creative and loves to do things like sew and also loves animals and toys - but he couldn't function on his own - he is unconcerned with the outside world unless it effects him directly - he really lives in a world made up of sensation and gets distracted easily - he is almost never dominant by himeself . . .

I am almost always dominant but usually through the central processor - unless I get angry . . . I don't want to give the impression that we are excessively mean - we are vegans, actually - I just yell a lot when I get mad . . .

Comments

[sethrenn.livejournal.com]

how many of us are puzzled by or oblivious to the whole concept of "race".

Heh, that's kind of alien to our experience, because we've always been, if anything, too aware of race and appearance. Then again, we're also rabidly competitive, and there are a lot of people who don't think autistics can understand the idea of competition, so I guess it just goes to show the extent of diversity between different autistics as well.

[ksol1460.livejournal.com]

Same here. The beauty of different races has always intrigued us. We had a copy of Leontyne Price's recording of Aida (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B0000041RW/102-2036410-1102553?v=glance) in the house, and we were very aware that our little black friends at dancing school were "Negroes like Leontyne Price". Some flowers are red, some are white, some people are white, and we, being Indian, were red.

Being Indian is part of our who-we-are in the earth world. We were always intensely aware of it, even though Indians had minimal visibility in 1950s Illinois. We won't disparage Indians as team mascots as long as they're portrayed with distinction and respect, because we grew up with the Fighting Illini (http://www.coasttocoasttickets.com/images/ncaab_illinoisfightingillini.jpg) and there was an Indian on the test pattern on TV (http://www.moderntv.com/modtvweb/special/freegif-bw1.htm) and we were proud -- that was our visibility*, even though we knew the actual Illini weren't really like that.

So yeah, race wasn't puzzling to us. Fighting between the races was, though.

--
*Well, that and Tonto being smarter than the Lone Ranger. Heh.

[sethrenn.livejournal.com]

Same here. The beauty of different races has always intrigued us. We had a copy of Leontyne Price's recording of Aida in the house, and we were very aware that our little black friends at dancing school were "Negroes like Leontyne Price".

Heh. I remember our black friend from swim lessons very clearly (she was the only black person in the group). We thought that maybe if we spent enough time lying in the sun, our skin would turn as dark as hers and then we wouldn't have to worry about putting suntan lotion on any more... well, we were five at the time.

So yeah, race wasn't puzzling to us. Fighting between the races was, though.

We've got kind of a weird dual perception in that regard, which is difficult to explain: at the same time that we perceive people as individual human beings, we've always got a filter on background which is constantly aware of how society's prejudices would interpret the behaviour of those around us. It's like we have a 'prejudice recording' and it's difficult to turn off, although it doesn't (I hope) come through in how we treat other people.

Then again, I've often wondered if this may perhaps be a very common thing, but no one wants to talk about it because nobody wants to admit that they might possibly have any kind of hidden prejudice; everyone wants to see themselves as a paragon of tolerance and openmindedness. The best we can do with it seems to be to acknowledge it's there, that it's not something intrinsic to us but an artifact of a biased society, and just keep trying to view people on an individual basis.

[ksol1460.livejournal.com]

That background filter doesn't sound too different from the usual what-will-people-think filters that anyone who is different (autistic, multiple, or whatever) might have. Like being aware of what society thinks is "too crazy or out there". We try to think of that as sort of a protective inhibition. I suppose it serves its purpose, but what I object to are the people who with your best intentions (oh, always) in mind, tell you that you must keep being aware of "what society thinks is crazy" even in the privacy of your own home. Like hell I do.

As far as lying in the sun, we did that too... the darker the better, we thought, and still do.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

"we've always got a filter on background which is constantly aware of how society's prejudices would interpret the behaviour of those around us."

I've got one of those, but it's mostly cued in to voices, speech patterns, phrasing, accents - all the auditory components of a person's presence, and not much of the visual. Probably I don't really look much at people I don't know, and less than "average" even at my nearest and dearest, but I listen - and yeah, the 'recording' is quite prejudiced about what constitutes acceptable speech.

I presume the 'recording' is my mother, teachers, and other critical adult women of my childhood - their fault-finding imprinted on my wee little neuro-circuits before I'd learned enough language to defend myself. Kind of tedious to have to carry their provincial linguistic value-judgements with me all my days, but mostly I just let it pass by.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Okies, let me ask you this, if it's not too rude or nosy a question: when you say you're red, do you mean "red" like someone else would call the color red, or do you mean it the way coffee-with-cream-color people say they're black?

The reason I ask; I've known a fair number of Native folk (including our Morchalad, who's half Alaskan Indian) and I've never seen any of them as "red" except when they've been out in the hot sun or something. For that matter, if I went out in the hot sun for a couple of hours (assuming I was somewhere that had hot sun in April) I would come back true flaming scarlet, far redder than I've ever seen any darker-skinned person get. Yet people wouldn't then call me "red-skinned", just sunburned. So what's up with that?

Morchal's skin doesn't really have any notably red tones in it at all, this time of year - he's not as pale as me, of course, but he's pretty pale, and his underlying skin-tone is sort of gold - yet he'd still be called "red", yes? LOL, actually I find it pretty funny, that a Scandahoovian like myself can be both darker than a 'black' person and redder than a 'redskin'. I don't see how anyone ever keeps the whole concept straight in their minds.

*grins* Tonto was smarter and cuter than the Lone Ranger. Kato was smarter and cuter than the Green Hornet too - I didn't find out till I was grown up, that he'd been played by Bruce Lee; then it was, like, "well, no wonder!"

[ksol1460.livejournal.com]

We personally are more like the coffee-with-cream-color people saying they're black. We tan very red without burning, often appearing to be sunburnt when we're not, and we always thought that our heritage was part of it.

But yeah, the actual skin color often has little to do with what a person of a particular race is called. The one that puzzled us was when Asian people were called yellow, since we never saw them that way. Most of our Asian friends are Chinese, and when we can tell any difference at all in their skin color they look like -- well, shades of gold, like you said, from darker to lighter depending where they are from, but they never impressed us as being yellow.

We knew a girl of German ancestry who spent most of her time outdoors in sunsuits rather than the long-sleeved shirts and jeans that we wore most of the time (partly due to farm work). Her hair was bleached white-blonde but her skin was darker than ours, so we can picture the contrast you talk about with your friend.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

I'm quite competitive about certain things too, and I know a bunch of other ACs who are competitive - sheesh, the gamer-geek community is a veritable hotbed of rabid competitiveness - so it seems odd that there should be this idea that ACs don't *get* competition. But I never have gotten the idea of 'race' - it seems so preposterously illogical on the face of it that I don't see how anyone can possibly care about such a thing.

I mean, really, skin color? Why not hair color, or eye color, or fingernail shape? Actually, if people really wanted to get serious about hating each other for inconsequential genetic traits, they ought to make skull configuration the Big Hairy Deal. "Long-heads rule! Round-heads suck!" - not only would it be an entirely new shuffle, mix all the currently-existing 'sides' around, but because bone endures where skin does not, it would enable people to discriminate against others who'd been centuries dead! Wouldn't that be advantageous?

I guess it's autie literality that really makes the whole concept untenable for me... because nobody's 'black', nobody's 'white'. If you took a piece of white paper and a bottle of black ink and compared them to the color of every person on the planet, you wouldn't find a single true match. Nope nope - everybody's more-or-less pinkish-brown or brownish-pink; everybody's skin color varies with the climate and season, and it just seems like WAY too much work to try to keep track of which particular shade fits in which particular category.

I gave up on the whole thing when I was 16, at summer camp in Maine. My ancestry's Danish, so I'm very pale in winter, but after all summer in the Maine sun, I was pretty dark brownish-pink, while my hair had gone straw-white. Meanwhile, my friend Angie, who was "black" (actually coffee-with-cream color) had sun allergies, so she'd spent the whole summer in long sleeves and a big straw hat. Well, so, we were arm-wrestling in my cabin one evening - I looked down and noticed that my arm was a good few shades darker than hers.

That did it. If 'white' people could be darker than 'black' people, as was obviously the case, then clearly there just wasn't any sense in the category-system at all. I still think that, and can't understand how other people do find any sense in it; it seems an utterly useless notion to me.

I guess there's such a thing as "racial competition", but I don't really *get* how that's supposed to work either - because, after all, all the competitors are going with what they were born with. They didn't choose it or earn it, and they can't change it, so... what's the point? Competition's supposed to be a contest, right? but you can't have a real contest unless both sides have a fair chance.

*rueful grin* It's possible that my autie-ness (or some other factor) keeps me from seeing the point. I do understand it intellectually, sort of, but emotionally? Not a clue.

[sethrenn.livejournal.com]

I mean, really, skin color? Why not hair color, or eye color, or fingernail shape? Actually, if people really wanted to get serious about hating each other for inconsequential genetic traits, they ought to make skull configuration the Big Hairy Deal. "Long-heads rule! Round-heads suck!"

Heh, the basic consensus of most reputable scientists nowadays is that 'race' doesn't really even exist as a discrete biological category-- you could just as easily classify people into separate races on the basis of, say, the prevalence of the sickle-cell anemia gene, which would put Mediterreanean and sub-Saharan African people into the same racial group.

(http://www.antiracistaction.ca/race3.html is entertaining, on this issue.)

I've got sort of a thing going on where I know intellectually that there's nothing to stereotypes, but my awareness of them makes me uncomfortable and, in some cases, I worry that they might be true, even if there's no mitigating evidence-- like if we get stuck on a math problem, I'll start to worry that it might be because 'girls can't do math.' x_X Not to any disabling extent, but... it's there, yeah, the social programming. (OTOH, we seem to have avoided a lot of the social programming in regards to what women's priorities should be, and how they should aspire to look.)

I don't know what to make sometimes of the fact that there are several people in our system who aren't 'white,' though I probably overanalyze it. If they were all filling gratuitous stereotypes (which I have unfortunately seen before with multiples), that would be cause for legitimate concern, but I see the ones who share my headspace as being simply people, before they're a specific race or gender. What frustrates me is that I can't always be colorblind in 'non-head' interactions. Hm.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Ah, excellent link; thanks! It'd been my understanding that "race" was discredited as a scientific concept before I was born... and in America especially, it's not even reasonable to talk about "sub-species", because people here have come from all over the world.

"I don't know what to make sometimes of the fact that there are several people in our system who aren't 'white'"

Hmmm... I never thought of that before. Kír wasn't born in this body, and he's northern Asian... Crist-Erui was born in this body, but if he's Kír's twin from the time-before, does that make him northern Asian too, and therefore "not-white"?

*wry grin* Kír says the question is moot; that he came to us as a ghost, and his brother is not bound by the conventions of ordinary men, so these questions of physical distinction have no meaning for them. Fair enough. Where Kír and I sometimes have conflict isn't about 'race', but about culture - we've worked it out over the years to a great extent, but every so often we run into problems because despite his efforts, he still thinks by the 'rules' of a culture drastically different from this one.

I seem to have avoided a lot of the cultural programming about "how women are supposed to relate to people", but I got a major dose of "how women are supposed to relate to objects". This causes me difficulties about housekeeping (I cycle endlessly between two modes, "perfection" and "squalor"), car maintenance, clothing, shopping... because there're ten thousand things I have to deal with, and they're each supposed to be dealt with in a particular way, and it's just too much.

This is one reason I love camping: I only have to cope with the things I brought along, and that's not so many.