Please remind me not to try posting on mumsnet from under a duvet after taking the emergency tablets and thank you for trying to help me. It helps more than you all know. I'm really not in a very good way at the moment, am I
I don't know why people want me to stay, really, because theres loads of people here and I'm only one of them.
Is it useful to say
Top tips for handling your visual anxiety-challenged aspie: (all optional and for advice and information only)
a) Keep it simple - say what you mean, but please please don't think the worst of me automatically please as I panic. Please just ask me if that's what I meant, so I have a chance to think oh hell no it isn't.
b) And please don't despair either, there's always a way to reason with me sooner or later. Or a way to learn something about an ASD.
c) So...if I make a mistake, I will panic but when I've stopped panicking I will always try to learn. But there's some things I can't learn, the same as wheelchair users can't just stand up and run, and people who are blind just can't learn to see by practising more.
d) I can't learn perfect Manners. I have size 99 feet (well, I didn't invent that expression but I like it) and I can and do blunder about in here making a right fool of myself in these social boards which is why I'm always using and saying sorry if I know I've fouled up.
e) I'm not an expert, I'm not a professional. I advise interested people who come to me about what it's like for me, because I'm a 'data hound' who's spent nearly 11 years finding out more about me and the people I know. Weirdly, people keep asking. And sometimes I just don't know what the right thing would be, and that's the honest answer.
f) I don't have LFA. If I'm working with a LFA situation I always ask for advice on it, always. With an expert, with the expert's guidance, or I ask an expert to help me and work with me so I don't get it wrong if I can posssibly help it. And I love hearing the advice of others with more direct experience of this. Sometimes there's four different experts saying four different things and I have no way to evaluate which one is right, so it all gets a bit tricky if one expert says "aha, it's X!" and the parent's only ever been told "Y" by another expert. I can't help more than that, other than to recall all the years I've worked with and alongside my friends with LFA.
I sometimes get shouted at by people at both ends of the autism spectrum. One or two people who are very high functioning who write to tell me they're outraged that I've 'let the side down' (er, which side, a side of what?) by saying we need any help or support (well I do). And one or two people caring for those at the lower end of the spectrum who write to tell me they're outraged about pretty much all of me and everthing I say and do . But lots of people from all bits of the spectrum who think some of it is useful. I'm always when I get the worst letters because I don't know what to do with them, so my lovely lady at Oxford helps me by opening them first and dealing with them on my behalf so I don't get the hate mail unless it's emailed to me (some has in the past, like when I was banned from a group for being on the autism spectrum and they wrote to tell me to *&^% off ). At least I don't seem to have fouled up quite that much here yet
And everyone in the advice bit and the places who ask for my comments know that I have a comms/processing disability that means there's every possibility that I'll put my foot in it or not realise the significance of not saying something to someone, or have a panic attack or a shutdown and try to run away from the fear. Why? Because I'm on the autism spectrum and that's what happens to some of us, and I can't help it.
I was asked to speak at a conference again this week and the guy was great - he didn't pressure me, just said I could decide when I got there and otherwise person X would do it, because he knows that I could panic or shut down.
So they check it all out before ever printing or doing anything with my work, which is really really wise advice and why I'd always felt ok with mumsnet because it already says that at the top of the page so people already know that this.
I just share data with people, and it makes me happy to do so because it feels like a friendship though it probably isn't, is it? I've never been able to tell what a friendship feels like to other people? What does it feel like for you if you have a friend?
I don't know what to do about all the ideas now, because it isn't something that only affects me and so I have to work out what will help everyone the most, including the people tearing their hair out that I talk too much and that I have the diplomatic skills of an elephant in a tea room. This I already know .
I will go on the disabled parents thingy, so thank you for showing me that. Maybe just a safe thread here until mumsnet have thought about whether anything else would work better, is that ok? Then I won't read anything else and everyone can post what they like and I can still cope.