This is a long lead-up, but it’s probably worthwhile. The combined topical drift and pedantry is also pretty indicative of what it’s like to live in my head.

So last week I lost my star on Jezebel. Jez is a Gawker Media website, and uses a tiered commenting system; commenters with stars by their names are always visible and post in black text, while commenters without stars are defaulted invisible and with grey text unless a starred commenter “promotes” the comment (the text turns black, but the commenter herself will remain unstarred). Last summer, when they put this sytem in place, I already had a star (the rules used to be 40 people following you or more earned a star), so I’ve been blissfully spouting off about disableism, autism, and other topics for close to a year, confident that my comments were always visible and always likely to be read. I have about 250 followers right now. In what ultimately was not a surprising move, I called out the editors on their ableist language again and got my star taken away as penalty (also, some delightful splainin via email!).

Since then, I’ve found that I’m less inclined to participate, because I don’t feel my contributions are automatically read or assumed to be intelligent. Funny how losing privilege–even silly internet privilege–reinforces the desire to not speak out at all. I posted a comment in the free-for-all section of Jez, groupthink, about this effect and ableism on Jez and it garnered a lot of interesting responses. One of the most interesting made reference to disability studies.

I think I knew, conceptually, that there was such a thing, but it had never really occured to me to think about it before. I’m seriously wondering if one can do a combined PhD/MD in disability studies rather than the more usual neurosicence or pharmacology or such.

This lovely commenter also gave me a link to Disability Studies Quarterly, since I had (of course) brought up autism (I’ve made no efforts to not be out, as it were, on Jez) and this quarter’s special topic is autism and neurodiversity. Please read any and all of the articles–I am, and they’re great. I can’t talk at length about them yet as I only got most of the way through “The Superior Half of Speaking”: An Introduction when I was struck with an astounding thought.

(This is not that thought, I’m getting there.) My brain works in a somewhat unusual way. I’m not quite sure if it’s autism, giftedness, or both, but I like it and would really hate to lose it. Like many people on the spectrum or with related conditions like OCD or ADD, I have difficulties with focus. I’m really awesome at focusing on one thing to the exclusion of everything else, which can look pretty obsessive, and I have a hard time changing the topic or subject of my focus. Changing tasks is difficult for me. I can marginally participate in a conversation and then revert right back to a previous topic, because that’s where my attention was the whole time. Multitasking and I are not friends. Conversely, unless I am interested and engaged in a topic (and sometimes even then), my attention wanders away from me to something more interesting (usually my own brain and products thereof). I cannot list how many times I have gone to do a simple task like put on my shoes or get my phone out of my bag and been waylayed for five, ten, fifteen minutes because I had a thought! and it was super interesting! and I forgot what I was supposed to be doing, and then when I get the feeling that I am meant to be doing something else I spend another few minutes trying to figure out what it was.

Meanwhile, as I’m busy focusing on one thing with the concious part of my brain, the rest of my brain is in a constant flurry of activity. As I take in information, it fits into what is my neuron-based cross-referencing system. My brain works like wikipedia: the more information I gather, the more connections I can make between facts and “articles”/topics, and it does it all without my really paying attention to it (though when I get distracted by my own brain, it’s like hitting the “random article” button on wikipedia, which, I think you’d agree, is way more interesting than a lot of other stuff).

Sometimes my brain makes really great connections–coherent thoughts so good they startle me out of whatever I’m doing. Have you seen House? It’s like that. And possibly just as obnoxious.

The topic of this blog post was one of those OMG I AM HAVING A THOUGHT moments.
So I was reading “The Superior Half of Speaking”: An Introduction, and I got to this sentence: “They understand, that is, how plenty of what is vexing about autism would not be so were society arranged differently.”

I studied International Relations for five and a half years of my life before crashing and burning. I have a BA and a GD in the subject, and while I found most of the theoretical stuff to be too abstract (or maybe just too abstract, too quickly–as Kit would surely point out, I can and do grasp philosophy when its presented patiently, repeatedly, and in terms I am familiar with), I really latched onto a single theoretical model and still like it a lot. I was a proud Constructivist, and the only one in either university, as far as I know.

“Constructivism” exists in a lot of disciplines, but I’m only super familiar with the political model. Basically, Constructivist thinking holds that the international political system is a self-perpetuating entity. The political systems we have are what they are because every time a nation makes a political move on the world stage, they reinforce their place in the picture. If you believe strongly as a political leader in open borders, or fair trade, or isolationism, or completely unobstructed free trade, you can’t wait for other countries to make the same emotional decision. By declaring your country to hold any given ideal, you inherently change the system of nations and your importance in that system. It’s fancy political speak, really, for “be the change you want to see” (I think Obama is a secret Constructivist, or at least his slogan-making people are). My Master’s dissertation, should it ever arise, was originally going to be on Constructivism and shared language leading to the perpetuation of shared political ideology. This is a topic I’ve read about, thought about, ruminated about extensively–information that my internal wikipedia can pull from without my even noticing.

So I read that line (again: “They understand, that is, how plenty of what is vexing about autism would not be so were society arranged differently.”) and suddenly I had A Thought:

Neurodiversity and the Social Disability Model appeal to me because they are Constructivist concepts.

The idea that disability is inherent in society, not the person, is meaningful to me emotionally (I don’t feel particularly disabled), but it also appeals to me intellectually. I am part of a broad spectrum of people, and my particular band of wavelengths is called autism (actually, I see the whole of neurodiversity as a 3-d Venn diagram, but I’m not sure how to translate that into words and haven’t found materials to create it visually yet). The idea that my group does not create the power structure because it is not dominant, so my group’s needs are seen as extraordinary or disabling, is an idea I can understand through my experience as a political Constructivist and translate into understanding in disability studies. Before, I was approaching disability studies as an unknown field, full of unknown ideas and language and concepts that (while I’d certainly get them eventually) were anxiety-provoking because they would be theoretical to me. Now I feel like I have an “in” and I guess I need to see if either Sydney or Melbourne offer a disability studies program, or would be willing to partner with another local university (I know LaTrobe has an autism research centre, so maybe they’d be a good place to look) to do a combined PhD/MD. Pursuing a combo–this specific combo–would make me be a better autism advocate and, I think, researcher. I think it would also make me more qualified to be a professor of the occasional class.

I didn’t really need to complicate this career/educational goal of a simple MD, but I think this might be even better.