The Alternate Lexicon
Currently viewing the tag: "work"
Well. Maybe a latte instead. I love you, Melbourne coffee.
Melbourne can’t work out if it’s beautiful or the dreariest, coldest fog bank this side of the Pacific. Both make my current job temping at a giant insurance agency somewhat unbearable, as it is either all sparkling sunlight from the roof of Southern Cross catching my attention and begging I go play, or the sort of chill that makes getting up at 6 in the morning intolerable. Despite my protests to myself that I’ve gotten up far earlier for work, it was in a job I enjoyed and valued. This job is sending rejection letters to people who just wanted some massages or glasses or anesthetic for their brain surgery and who, for a host of reasons from filling out the forms wrong to simply not being insured, I must cheerfully and politely deny. Previously, I thought my job in Staunton, working with mentally ill kids who needed hugs, not locked rooms, was the most evil job, but this might actually be worse because it’s dissociated from the pain I know I must be causing.
It turns out that what I thought would have been a good environment for me, a quiet office with cubicles, is utter torture. I have spent much time lamenting the noise levels of previous jobs, and how standing all day hurts my legs and feet, but sitting all day in one spot has me a fidgety, stimmy mess. It’s blissfully quiet, except for the other hundred people typing and sighing and making far more noise than seems reasonable. I could tune out others’ conversations in the bustle of work before, but now they are bright spots in otherwise uninterrupted tedium.
So I need a job on my feet, doing things with my hands, even the same boring thing over and over. Soon, please. It’s getting hard to pass off the stimmy stuff.
A memo to all of my coworkers, who will not, of course, read this, because if I told you what my website was I’d have to self-censor more and I’m super uninterested in doing that:
Yep, you heard me correctly, I’m autistic. See, autism is a vague group of behaviours and ways of processing the world we all share, and no two people on the spectrum are identical any more than any two people who are NT are identical.
You’ve seen me stimming, but apparently without knowing about autism you’d just thought I was fidgety. Ha! Trick’s on you: stimming IS just being fidgety for people on the spectrum. We stim for the same reasons any other person might tap their feet or shake their legs in a meeting: it provides sensory stimulation that helps us regulate our behaviour and emotions.
The thing about autism is that it makes me really awesome at some stuff, and really not awesome at other stuff. My particular, unique brand of autism makes me really good at learning scripts (“Please let me put this thermometer back under your tongue along the gumline.”) and repetitive actions like taking a blood sample. It also makes me really bad at some stuff I have to do at work, like multitasking and listening to multiple things at the same time. I’m sorry you were speaking to me and I walked away–I was busy hearing the faint harmony line in this song on the piped-in radio station.
Autism also makes me prone to these things that I’ve called a few different names in the past: panic attacks, tantrums, meltdowns. They happen when I’m feeling overwhelmed and without any control (and usually when I’m tired and/or hungry). I know my limits and my strengths, and ask that they be respected like any other person’s–even if they seem like they’re weird.
When you start requiring me to do multiple things I’m really bad at (like listening to two imputs and multitasking at the same time), there is a very strong chance I’m going to have to go cry somewhere and might scare off donors.
Can we please not make that happen? And can we please not laugh at me when I ask?
Thanks.
Like Hez, I don’t believe in resolutions. I think you can set goals and have dreams, but timelines are invariably off and there are always surprises that change who you thought you were.
I’ve been thinking about how this blog has moved away from blogging my thoughts on autism and feminism and become more of a journal. Neither are really what I imagined when I started writing in this space, and I’m not sure either is what I want to be doing here.
So I don’t believe in resolutions, and I don’t know what I’m doing with this space.
I want to change my life so that it’s designed to make me happy, not to make me feel rotten. I’m starting a new job next week. I’m getting my new name in my passport soon. I’m getting Prosper’s import certs and making plans. I’m making plans. And I think I can learn how to be happy in a way that can be measured beyond moments.
Lots of thoughts, not a lot of brains.
Two important things have happened, however.
1. I will be done with my current job on December 17th. No, I do not have another job lined up (though I’m applying and interviewing). I am surprisingly not too anxious–yet.
2. I cut off all of my hair.
[Picture of the author, who has short, red hair and is doing their best Lesbians Who Look Like Justin Bieber impression]
I loathe person-centered language.
Part of my job at work is supervising residents in their work setting (if you want more information, feel free to scroll down to the locked post). They do a variety of jobs, and one of those is making the training binders for new employee orientation. This is a new task for my team, so it’s impossible for me to judge how independently they’ll be able to do it with time and practice, but this first lot of 15 needed to be done by yesterday and it ended up being mostly staff doing the work. Since I greatly enjoy doing this sort of menial paperwork–sorting, organizing, labelling, filing–I was very good and found it more enjoyable than most of my job.
The binders are a drastically better collection of information than I had at my previous job. There are sections about developmental disabilities, cultural diversity, and appropriate teaching strategies for adults. There are a few standout ideas in there, like an article about the differences in language use between the people who live in the group homes and staff, and how it is intensely othering.
There’s also a big section on using person-centered language, and having stared at it for days and days while doing these binders and then having a little nudge from the internet, I feel like I now have a simple explanation for why person-centered language unequivocally sucks.
Person-centered or people-first language is this idea that we should phrase things with the person placed before the disability:
Person with autism, not autistic person
Person with intellectual disability, not intellectually disabled person
Person with hearing loss, not D/deaf person
Person with vision loss, not blind person
Some disabilities lend themselves more to one construct or another–person with CP sounds pretty tolerable to my ears, while CP person or cerebral palsied person sounds weird (Kit, I welcome your thoughts on this specifically). I don’t like any of the adjective forms of Asperger’s that have been constructed (though it’s sort of moot since I think autistic is a better descriptor for the whole spectrum anyway).
At first glance, this idea doesn’t really bother me. I’ve felt pretty neutrally about it for a long time–I couldn’t see how it was harming anyone to use unnecessarily long constructs when the shorter ones were just fine and inoffensive, but whatever. If someone wanted to “put the person before the disabilty” and that led them to treating disabled people as equals, then fine.
But my work is inherently about how we (society-general we) can’t treat people with disabilities as equals. Every person I work with has a documented intellectual disability, and most of them have multiple disabilities. Because of this, they have been deemed unable to be their own guardians, their own caretakers, their own adult people. It’s not that I think needing assistance–any level, from mild to total–makes one less of an independent adult, but few have actively chosen of their own right to live with us. They are there because they have been “placed”–deemed too unable to learn, adapt, care for themselves that they must have caretakers whether they want it or not–rather than because they decided that they want help.
I think person-centered language actively harms them, and me, and all of the disability community.
Person-centered language claims to be about people first, but why would we need to make awkward linguistic constructs if disability was a neutral concept? Saying that we put people first means that you think disability is shameful, in need of being hidden or removed, that you are unable to think of people who are openly disabled as people. Saying I am a person with autism rather than an autistic person denies that autism is a value-neutral descriptor for the way I think and experience the world around me. It tries to make autism into something separate from the “real” me (and that leads to dangerous curbie mythologies and “treatments”), into something that is bad. Saying we are people with disabilities rather than disabled people shows that “disability” is a dirty word, something bad and to be avoided, rather than a word that describes our interactions with the community because of our atypical strengths and weaknesses. Saying we are people with disabilities rather than disabled people removes the burden from society to make adaptations and accomodations and places it upon us.
Using person-centered language ends up devaluing the person because it attempts to remove a central part of who they are and make it negative.
Unfortunately, I would probably be fired if I made some key edits to the binders, so they’ll remain as-is. For now.
I go in tomorrow morning to fill out paperwork for HR to begin my new job. I’m waiting for Stina and Dylan to do some reference letters and send them along, but I’ll get them when they come–no major concern.
My major concern is falling into a pattern of presumed incompetence. It was coincidental that I found this blog post today about the least harmful assumption (presuming competence even when others do not) as almost all of the people I will be working with have been diagnosed with intellectual disability (and many of them with autism). I need to work and remember that their diagnoses may not be correct and that any communication is welcome. I hope I’m up to the task.
