Excuse Me, Mr Refrigerator

Do you speak to inanimate objects as if they are alive? 

I say "thank you" to the vending machine when it produces my selection.  If I accidentally slam the car door too hard I say sorry and rub the door a little. If I walk into the door jamb while going through a door I scowl at it and tell it to stop bumping into me. 

I've heard that some experts claim that autists get confused about objects, and that is why we do this. 

I'm not confused. 

I know a refrigerator is technically just a hunk if metal. Nonetheless, it feels like everything is alive, and by extension, it feels like everything is worthy of respect.  

Is that really so bad? 

I go through life conscious of how my actions might affect others. If those others happen to be inanimate and have no consciousness of my interaction, well then no harm, no foul. So what's the big deal?

I wonder how many people think that what I am doing is wrong? 

How many of those same people talk to their car, on a freezing cold morning? "Come on baby!" while pressing the gas, trying to encourage the car to start. 

How many of those same people yell at the TV set when watching the news, or watching sports ball? 

I notice that autistic behaviors are often criticized unfairly, while regular people engage in the same behavior, just at different times. 

Live and let live. 

 

Autism Simulation

Here's another one of those simulations to give you an idea of what it is like to be autistic. It's quite short but  I think it does a pretty good job of illustrating the disorder.

The Real Autism Experts

Salon.com posted a story about new research that is taking a different approach to the way researchers look at autistics. Rather than viewing autistics as deficient because they don't like to be in crowded places, for example, researchers are now looking at the aversion to crowds as a symptom, not a deficit of something else. Information overload, for example.

The piece was well written and the information brought up in the article sounds a lot like the Intense World Theory.

The comments is what got me. It's always the comments, isn't it?

One lady who didn't seem to like the paper felt that researchers should start talking to the Real Autism Experts™, the parents.

Not the autistics, the people who live it, but the parents who "deal with Autism 24/7/365."

The other message also rubs me the wrong way. On the one hand I understand the poster had good intentions when the whole "autistics are people too" angle. But don't you see, if you have to work that hard to prove that I'm a person, you have much bigger problems then sentence construction.


Salon article:
We might have autism backwards: What “broken mirror” and “broken mentalizing” theories could have wrong