Spiders!

(This is my first attempt at uploading images to this blog. Hope it works... if it doesn't, i'll probably delete the post and try again later...)

One of the things that there were absolutely loads of at Climate Camp were spiders, of many species ranging from tiny to reasonably spectacular (like the first one pictured here). Quite a few small ones took up residence in my tent (not entirely sure why, there can't have been much chance of catching any insects in there). Anyway, i got to practice my close-up photography on some of the bigger ones...

(I'm not sure what species either of these are - possibly Andrea can identify them?)

This one was found by a friend in her tent - being somewhat arachnophobic, she asked me to remove it for her. In the photo it's in a white plastic bowl. It was really a quite spectacular specimen, among the larger spiders i've seen (outside of a tropical vivarium) and unlike any other spider i've seen in the UK (as we were only a mile from Heathrow Airport, i'm thinking perhaps it might have stowed away on a plane or something...) If anything, its colours looked brighter in real life than they do in the photo. As you can see, a couple of its legs look like they have been lost and partially regrown. Its head/body length was about 20-25mm...

This one was an orb-web spider a lot more like the common British garden spider, but a different colour. It had spun a web on the wooden frame of the men's straw bale urinals, presumably hoping to catch flies attracted by the smell... size probably about 10-12mm...

I'm really pleased with these photos especially considering i only have a very cheap, bog-standard (Kodak EasyShare C433 to be exact) digital compact camera. Probably more wildlife and landscape pics to come...

Feminism, misogyny, Climate Camp and Chris Morris

One interesting workshop that I went to at Climate Camp was one on "Feminism and Climate Change". It was kind of a retread of a workshop from the previous year, and the issues covered were much the same, but during the workshop we split into two groups, one mixed group (which, obviously, I was in) which discussed more theoretical stuff, and one all-female group which discussed experiences of sexism and misogyny within the environmental movement,

One woman from my neighbourhood (henceforth referred to as R) came back after the groups rejoined visibly upset but feeling relieved by the solidarity she had got from the other women present after describing an incident that had happened within our neighbourhood, which later that day she told me about, because a discussion about sexism involving me, R and R's (male) partner developed during cooking dinner after the workshop: basically, while putting a marquee up, a man in the neighbourhood (I'll call him A) proposed a "game" consisting of each person in turn describing a "humourous" way in which ze would sexually assault a woman. R objected to this and was met with derisive replies such as "lighten up, it's only a game" from other men and women present.

The next day, during a small gap of time in which R and I happened to be sat next to each other in a site-wide meeting, I said to her that, as someone who does not think misogyny should be tolerated under any circumstances, and especially not within a radical social movement, with her permission I would propose at that day's neighbourhood meeting that A should be removed from Climate Camp. R's reaction was surprised, maybe even shocked, and saying that if I felt I should propose that I could, but she didn't feel like she had or ought to have the power to have someone removed from the camp. She obviously had not expected anyone to take such a strong stance "on her behalf".

I was and still am very conflicted about this. Should I have said what I said to R, or not? Was I being sexist, as a man (or at least someone who appears to be a man, which in this context IMO is the same thing), to act or propose acting "on behalf" of a woman? Or would it have been empowering for me to support her in something about which she didn't feel empowered to speak up herself? If the latter, would my gender have made a difference? I suppose this feeds into the general question, one I have never really fully worked out the answer to, of what exactly is (or should be) the role of anti-sexist men in fighting against sexism? Can there even be such a role, or is this women's fight which men should stay out of (much as I would argue, for example, that the fight against disablism is disabled people's fight which "carers" should stay out of)? A doctrine which seems to make sense is that men should only act in this context at a woman's request but, still, that isn't 100% clear - does "at a woman's request" mean only if the woman brings it up, or can/should a man bring up the subject and then ask the woman for a yes/no on his proposed action?

Before asking R if I had her permission to bring the issue up at the neighbourhood meeting, I had a short speech prepared in my head, culminating in "I have too many friends who have survived rape, and some who did not survive rape. I do not want to be in the same affinity group, the same neighbourhood, or frankly the same Climate Camp, as someone who finds rape funny". Leaving aside the potential dodginess of the "not in my name" style of "I-centred" rhetoric, which didn't cross my mind at the time, I couldn't answer the question of would this have been "appropriate" (not that what is "appropriate", in normal-human-social terms, IMO anywhere near equates to what is right, but talking in terms of stuff like divisiveness, intolerance, etc)?

In the end I didn't bring the issue up (and felt and still feel guilt over my own possible cowardice in that), not because of my uncertainty over whether it was what R wanted (although both that and the fact that A is/was a close friend of several outspokenly feminist women in the neighbourhood were both nagging presences contributing to my uncertainty), but because, while rehearsing the last line in my head, I remembered my appreciation of the works of Chris Morris, and most particularly the paedophile episode of Brass Eye and the two rape sketches in Jam, and the hypocrisy that his would have made me guilty of...

Watching and re-watching Jam, I still can't decide what I think about these sketches - whether they are part of the same whole dark, twisted, fucked-up vibe that it was Morris's intent to create in the whole series, or something that goes beyond a line from "acceptable" humour (is there even such a thing?) and offensiveness (the open question of whether Jam even is humourous, or even "comedy", makes it even more difficult...) A woman forgiving her cheating partner because he was raping rather than seducing the other woman he was seen with, and a woman being aroused by the injuries caused to her male partner by a homosexual gang rape - can such things be funny? but then again, is a plumber "fixing" a dead baby or a man slowly committing suicide by throwing himself off a first-floor balcony 40 times "funny"? Is "funny" even part of Morris's intent? I kind of want Morris to be on the other side of an arbitrary "good/bad" line to the unambiguously sexist, racist, disablist (etc) likes of Bernard Manning or Jim Davidson, but can he justifiably be placed there?

All too often I encounter what seems to be a complete contradiction between my passionately-held moral beliefs about what things should never be tolerated, and the "normal" social protocols of accepting, forgiving and remaining friends with people, and I lapse into a terrible uncertainty, in which it feels like to speak out against something would only mark me out as someone outside the bounds of "reasonableness", or even sanity, or someone who "just doesn't get" basic social concepts. Incidents of misogyny and/or sexual exploitation seem to be a particularly common context for this - particularly when I, despite being male, am the only person to see something as oppressive or offensive when none of the women present do...

Is this the sort of thing that is meant when autistic people get accused by neurotypical people of overly "black and white" thinking? Radical feminists get accused of "black and white" thinking too, and about many of the same things, so I often feel aligned with a (sometimes possibly stereotyped or "straw man") radical feminist position - but then that leads me to what I feel are (or at least may be) intolerant positions incompatible with my libertarian and "sex-positive" beliefs...

Lots of questions, no answers (though I'd like some). Is this the sort of thing anyone else feels guilt or conflict over?

Disability and the Climate Camp

One of the things on my mind throughout the Climate Camp was its relationship with my disability activism. There are ways in which I think they are deeply and inextricably connected, and other ways in which I think there is an almost total gulf between them. Certainly, in the face of the apocalyptic visions of the future presented by some fairly incontrovertible (despite the efforts of government- and business-funded "scientists) climate science, concerns like disability rights (or gender equality, or ethnicity, or any kind of human rights/liberties/equalities activism) arguably seem almost irrelevant; what does it matter if crips, or transgender people, or any other group, are worse off than the rest of humanity, if the whole of humanity is doomed to extinction within (what would be) the "natural" lifespan of most people alive today anyway?

Luckily the impression that I got of utter hopelessness after the first climate science I went to was somewhat countered by the following debates, which left me with a bit more hope. But what is the relationship between environmental activism and disability activism? Ideas of austerity, the need for stripping back society to much lower levels of technology and energy consumption, local self-sufficiency, and similar survival-oriented conceptions - inherent in which is often the evolutionary idea that only those who are "fittest" for their environment will survive - can be in opposition to the liberation of disabled people through assistive technology and the demand for economic and technological fulfilment of impairment-related needs. The concept of biodiversity, in my view, is (at least one) key concept that can connect disability rights with ecological preservation - but the question of what to do if unsustainable technologies are needed to preserve that biodiversity (whether it's IVF for pandas or feeding tubes and respirators for humans) remains unresolved...

Nevertheless, I was massively inspired by the fact that there seem to be at least a few other people (in addition to the couple of disability rights activists I already know who are also ecological activists, of course) who make a positive connection between the issues - there were at least 5 people with very visible impairments at the camp, 2 of whom I managed to have conversations with about disability activism, one of whom already knew people in DAN and the other who wants to get involved in it... sadly I didn't find a pretext to talk to the others, since just going up to them and starting a conversation about disability rights (especially since my own impairment isn't obvious) didn't seem quite right... but still, the fact that they were there is testament enough to a genuine desire for inclusion and accessibility within (at least the radical end of) the ecological movement...

The accessibility of the site itself was also pretty impressive, with an accessible compost toilet (tech that is both disability-friendly and eco-friendly is extra, extra cool), wooden boards for walkways to make them more wheelchair accessible, interpretation available for BSL users (I think there was only one there, who also uses speech, but it's the fact that it was thought of), and a general vibe of acceptance of difference and willingness to do everything necessary to ensure inclusivity. Some other common issues to do with access simply didn't come up - eg. no lift/stairs issues, because no buildings above ground level...

I did have some really mixed/ambiguous feelings in the small immigration detention centre action at the end, with one individual who appeared to have some type of mental impairment (possibly something on the autistic spectrum, possibly something else) - he was continually talking, at normal conversational volume, but apparently to himself rather than anyone else, repeating and improvising slogans and statements in a way that was a bit suggestive of echolalia, and was swearing a lot (in the "using "fucking" as punctuation in most sentences" way that I find completely unoffensive and harmless, but which was an excuse for police attention and threats of arrest) - on the one hand I felt, or wanted to feel, solidarity with him, but on the other there was also something cringing, something embarrassing, that made me want to disassociate myself from him, then left me feeling guilty about that... this, I think, has at least something to do with me not being as "out" as a mentally impaired person as I would like to be, and something to do with that blurred zone in popular perception between having a mental impairment and being an unpleasant or irrational person, but is something I think I need to explore and analyse more in order to get some coherent thoughts on...

While helping to "tat down" at the end, it struck me that it felt almost laughable to think of myself as "disabled" in the context of life as it was lived at the Climate Camp: it truly felt like this was a "world" in which my differences from the "normal" human neurological model were almost completely irrelevant. Is this what it would feel like to live in a world without disablism? I don't know; certainly, for people with other types of impairments than mine (mobility and/or visual impairments, most obviously) a camp in a field is a lot less accessible than the "mainstream" built environment. The design principles of low-impact living and those of universal accessibility may not always match each other - but a genuine spirit of fairness and inclusivity, and most importantly the belief that disabled people are people, and thus deserve their needs met as much as anyone else - it particularly inspires me when this is "automatic", as it so often isn't, but at Climate Camp (in most cases) was - can get round many a lack of technology, even if not actually substitute for it...

I don't know. This is a really, really ongoing contradiction/tension in my life - I don't know if I'll ever be able to reconcile "crip stuff" and "environment stuff" fully. But the experience of Climate Camp suggests to me that a society which is ecologically sustainable could also (especially if, as I believe is necessary for sustainability to be achieved, capitalist paradigms of work and employment are rejected, and a "mutual aid" ideology adopted - more on this in further posts) be a society in which human physical and mental differences would be more accepted, understood and accommodated - and this gives me some hope...

Camp for Climate Action: a (hopefully) somewhat more coherent post

OK, so i've come down from the poetics a bit ;)

The Camp for Climate Action 2007 (or just Climate Camp) was an awesome experience. Over 1000 people coming together, through a leaderless, decentralised and locality-based autonomous process of organisation, for a week of low-impact DIY living, high-quality climate science discussion, workshops both theoretical and practical, and high-impact direct action.

I'm going to write a few more posts about specific events and issues that arose from the Camp, including disability issues, sexism/gender issues, and particular aspects of science/technology debates. Also possibly a few pics, but i only have a few and they're mostly not of the "standard" views of the camp etc (i was working on the presumption that there would be plenty of those on Indymedia and elsewhere, and also a lot of people involved, including myself, weren't particularly keen on being in many photos), but of little things that were of specific interest to me...

It was a huge emotional rollercoaster for me, involving moments of utter hopelessness for both personal and scientific reasons, but overwhelmingly one of the strongest feelings i have ever had of genuine community and being a part of something that has some hope. There were workshops and discussions on all aspects of climate science (possibly somewhat reassuringly, there was not absolute agreement between all scientists involved), and other things as diverse as feminism and practical off-grid electricity.

The camp was organised on a decentralised "neighbourhood" basis, with each area of the country having its own neighbourhood with consensus-based meetings and its own area on site with a kitchen and meeting/chilling space (this was pioneered at the anti-G8 convergence at Stirling in 2005, but, possibly because of the smaller scale, worked a lot better at Climate Camp). This meant that no one group was "the organisers", but everyone could be involved not just in the camp itself, but in the (equally if not far more important) work of building active groups in their own localities...

As well as seriousness there was a real party spirit, with music, comedy, a bar and all kinds of social networking going on (i even managed to meet some other disability activists). The awesome pedal-powered Rinky Dink sound system was a highlight, although its music policy was a little incomprehensible, consisting of heavy dub and jungle, crusty folky-punky stuff, and then... Disney movie theme songs (???)

On Sunday and Monday there was a day of mass direct action involving an all-night blockade of the British Aviation Authority's offices. Police were incredibly heavy handed (not surprisingly for anyone with experience of UK or European activism, but i think this may have been an awereness watershed for the UK media) - I among many others got some rather spectacular bruises to show for it - and the complete contrast between the attitudes to life of the state and the people was shown as overwhelmingly obviously as that betweenm life and death.

Indymedia's report on the Climate Camp is here, there are loads of pics including some awesome art drawings, photos of the big day of action including these, these, these, these and these, photos of the camp itself, and some of the other actions (including daft puddings, red herrings and many more)...

(links now unbroken)

Camp for Climate Action 2007

unordered thoughts, getting them down while i can... probably about 10 "proper" posts to come about it... also, i seem to have somewhat channelled the spirit of Larry Arnold for this post, as i did that of Dave Hingsburger for the last one... i think this may be a form of echolalia, but apologies to both for what might seem like unintentional plagiarism...

The Battle of the Beanfield, mark II. Baton blows like brutal lightning. Bruises like magnificent thunderstorms. NVDA meets BDSM. Oh my God - I am human. So weak and so strong. So broken and so whole. So monstrous and so beautiful. Confrontation, so different from humiliation - the very opposite of trauma. Pain can heal.

We are Hydra, they are Leviathan. If they are a big tree, we are a small axe - or better yet, if they are one big blunt axe, we are a million tiny trees. Nevertheless, the old proverb bears repeating that when the axe came into the forest, some of the trees said "the handle is one of us". Will the social tipping point be reached before the atmospheric tipping point?

A tantalising glimpse, just for a week, of what reality can be - feeling more like a real living being than in normal circumstances i would even think it possible to feel, yet almost instantly vanishing as if it was no more than a dream.

The rollercoaster of at least two completely different kinds of despair, and blazing, angry, defiant, unstoppable hope.

This is how it feels to be alive.

"Not capable"

Today, in the park:

I am waiting to meet a fellow disability activist in the car park of the Midlands Art Centre. I have with me some leaflets about the Coalition of Disabled People, and as usual I put one under the windscreen wipers of each of the cars with blue badges parked in the disabled parking bays.

I see two young disabled women, about my own age, sitting on the grass nearby, with two (somewhat older, female) carers. One is sitting in a wheelchair (the type which has all very small wheels, meaning that it can't actually be propelled by the person in it, and needs to be pushed by someone else) and rocking back and forth. The other is sitting on the grass, wearing a helmet and playing with a string of beads. The carers are sitting on the grass next to them, having a conversation between themselves. I recognise the two young women as some of the many disabled people I have seen before in this park with different carers, probably on a trip out from some sort of institution (care home, day centre). Although if I see a disabled person in the street I usually give them a CDP leaflet, I don't usually bother with groups from institutions, because I know what kind of attitude the carers have. However, I decide to try giving leaflets to these two women. I walk up to them where they are sitting on the grass.

Me: Hi, you might be interested in this (offering a leaflet to first young disabled woman).

She reaches for the leaflet, but draws her hand back uncertainly before taking it. The carer sitting next to her takes the leaflet. I try to give one to the other disabled woman; the same carer takes that one too.

Me (to carer): Are you disabled?

Carer: No, we're carers. We work for them.

Me: This is not about carers, this is about disabled people. We are an organisation of disabled people who are campaigning and organising for ourselves.

Carer: These (indicating the two young women either side of her, neither of whom speaks) aren't capable of organising for themselves.

Me (getting pissed off): Well, I'm a disabled person, I am a person with a learning disability, and I believe that disabled people are capable of organising for ourselves.

Carer (smiling patronisingly): I'll read it. Thank you.

Too frustrated to try to argue further, I walk off. A few minutes later, the comrade I have been waiting to meet and another member of the Coalition arrive. He waits in his car for a parking space to become free. The two carers, pushing and leading by the hand respectively the disabled women they brought (whether or not willingly) with them, return to the vehicle they came in, get in, and drive off, looking with what seems like a mixture of condescension and anger at us as we wait for my friend to take their parking space. I don't bother to attempt to leaflet the other 3 groups of young disabled people and carers who I see in the park.

There seems to be an almost insurmountable gulf between those disabled people, like myself and the other disability rights activists I know, who (even if we need assistance with some things) are determined to be in charge of our own lives, and those who live or spend their days in institutions and are so totally disempowered that they seem to be little more than the possessions of the carers who speak for them - breathtakingly flatly and blatantly calling them "not capable" while sitting right next to them, speaking as if they are not even there - and seemingly take charge of every aspect of their lives for them - as if they were not people but some sort of products. I don't know how to bridge it, how to reach out to these people - my people.

DAN campaigned to "Free Our People". Now it seems that many of "our people" have, at least superficially, been "freed" (at least in the sense of being accorded, at least grudgingly, the status of people competent to make decisions about our own lives, even if only in an alienated producer/consumer relationship), but certain categories of the "most severely impaired" disabled people (particularly, from my observations, non-verbal neurodiverse people, or those with both neurological and physical impairments) are still institutionalised in the same ways that all disabled people once were. Because only these few are still institutionalised in such a blatant way, it is assumed - even by many other disabled people - that these particular people must really need to be "cared for" in this way - that, to paraphrase Thatcher on another part of the same shitstem, "there is no alternative", that the rhetoric of disability liberation, however true it is for, for example, the physically impaired university graduate, just doesn't apply to "these people".

Well, for me disability liberation simply isn't disability liberation if it isn't the liberation of all disabled people - even those for whom "independence" in the (very limited) "common sense" way that many understand that word isn't, according to that "common sense", possible (You could also say that, frankly, I'm not interested in "common sense". I'm interested in truth). How, if ever, this can be got through to the "carers" for whom it is a simple, uncontroversial "fact" that the disabled people they work for are "not capable" of organising for their own rights, I don't know...

Holidays: not for me, thanks

When i read that the theme of the next Disability Blog Carnival (hosted at Andrea's Buzzing About) was "On Holiday", my first thought was that there probably wasn't much i could write on that topic, because... well, the concept of "holiday" doesn't really mean much to me. Then i realised that i could, in fact, write about why it doesn't mean much to me...

The word "holiday", at least in the UK, has 2 main meanings (well, OK, there's also the "religious festival" sense of the word, and bank holidays, but frankly i think that would just complicate things unnecessarily): "going on holiday", as in going away somewhere as a tourist or to relax, and "the holidays", as in the time(s) of year when schools, universities, Parliament, etc close and (some) employed people get (more or less) time off work.

The first type of holiday is something that doesn't really have much relevance to me in my life situation at the moment. Holidays of the traditional British type (a week or two in a caravan, cottage or cheap hotel somewhere near a beach) are incredibly geared towards either couples or nuclear families with kids, neither of which i am in. My memories of childhood holidays mainly consist of long, nauseous car journeys, uncomfortable and unfamiliar beds (usually sharing a room with my brother, which resulted in severe sleep deprivation because of my absolute, at the time, inability to sleep while in the same room as another person), crowded and unpleasant beaches, sunburn, banal and boring "tourist attractions", and my parents being ashamed of me for "showing them up" by not behaving as a child my age could be "reasonably" expected to behave.

OK, there were some pleasant and interesting things too: walks along cliffs or in woods, wildlife, scenery, sunshine - things that i have rediscovered the enjoyment of in the last few years. But, for the most part, going on holiday always felt for me more like something i had to do because it was "the done thing", rather than something i wanted to do, and in the 9 years since i moved out of my parents' house at the age of 16, while i have been on a few things that were arguably sort of like holidays, i haven't gone or particularly wanted to go "on holiday" in the sense that most British people understand it. (As i write this, i'm a couple of days away from going to the Camp for Climate Action, which, i suppose, has some things in common with a holiday, as, probably, would other things i've gone to, like music festivals or certain volunteer projects - none of those things is a week in a B&B in Yorkshire or Cornwall, tho...)

There are things i'd like to do that would fit the bill of a holiday-in-that sense - i'd love, for instance, to spend a week or so in summer hiking and staying in youth hostels in the mountains of Scotland (after having seen them, if only from a distance, when i went to the G8 protests at Gleneagles in 2005) - but it would feel utterly pointless to do it on my own (and, even if i had the money, i would never justify spending it to myself), and, as it's not really something any of my close friends would be into, and biological family would be right out of the question, i don't really have anyone to go with... still, if i ever do find a partner, going on (a non-traditionally-touristy) holiday with her is one of my fantasies...

As for "holiday" in the second sense, both at school and at uni it was, at best, an annoyance and, at worst, a serious impairment to learning, for me... for most kids, the school holidays were a longed-for escape from the boredom of school, and a chance to spend the whole time being sociable with their friends. As an undiagnosed Aspie kid, with (at primary school) no friends or desire to have friends, and (at secondary school) one real friend, my relationship with whom my parents didn't approve of, the holidays were a welcome escape from bullying and from having to wear school uniform, but, primarily, they were a featureless, structureless period of boredom. The long summer holiday was particularly bad as, because the previous school year had ended, there wasn't even any reading or homework; it was a whole 6 weeks of absolutely nothing. Of course, i spent most of it reading my way through the local library, and my (much better then than it is now) memory meant that my learning wasn't too severely affected - but, for kids whose neurodiversity isn't quite so fortunate, i'm convinced that having such a total discontinuity in learning can't be a good thing...

At university the situation was even more extreme, with holidays taking up nearly half of the whole year, and the summer holiday being a full 12 weeks. This really, really wasn't suited to my needs. While most students went away every holiday to go "home" to their families, i had lived on my own for 3 years before starting uni and didn't have anywhere to go to. In the summer between my first and second year, i had intended to get temp work, but couldn't find any, and spent almost the entire 3-month period completely on my own, doing nothing but going from my house to the campus computer centre to spend most of my waking time on the internet. This seriously screwed with my head and my memory - there were periods of over a week in which i don't think i spoke to a single human being, but i'm not entirely certain because the monotony, and the insomnia which made me become virtually nocturnal due to having nothing to get up for, made it hard for me to tell whether something had happened a week ago or an hour ago. I think that at one point i literally questioned my own existence (I know how Descartes must have felt)...

The most frustrating thing of all was that those 3 months during which i had absolutely nothing to do were the months in which, if i had had something to study, my intellectual abilities would have been at their highest, because of my complete inability to cope with winter (a combination of SAD, a complete lack of body fat and Aspie sensory sensitivities, in my case experiencing constant and extreme pain in cold weather). It certainly didn't do me any good, and in all probability contributed to me dropping out of uni in my second year, that in the 3 months when i was, and am every year, at my peak (not just intellectually, but emotionally, and in terms of all types of living skills), i was in a state of enforced idleness, whereas in the middle of the study year, when i needed to work, there was inevitably a period of at least 3 months in which i was incapable of doing almost anything at all...

I don't really know what could solve that problem for other students in my situation - a reorganisation of the uni year to have the long holiday in winter instead of summer would have worked for me, but would be just as bad for anyone with the opposite sensory issues. Having the year more evenly divided into study and non-study periods would be an improvement, but to be honest my ideal (which, of course, would be so unpopular no one would ever implement it) would be to abolish "holiday" altogether, and have continuous study all year round... this would, of course, mean rearranging and reorganising things in a whole lot of other ways, including getting rid of the awful halls of residence system, in which most first year students are only allowed to live at uni during "term time" (unless, of course, they choose to live off campus, but the culture is such that very few do)...

On the plus side, it looks like most postgraduate courses are actually all year round, and organised much, much closer to the way i would like all higher education to me, so if i do manage to get onto the postgrad course i want to do, i'm hoping i won't have to face these problems again...

Of course, i think all this is symptomatic of much deeper issues which permeate the whole of modern Western culture - most notably, the faulty work/leisure dichotomy. However, that's an absolutely huge subject, and probably the one of (many) future posts...

Invisibility

I just found the post Autistic Superpowers: Invisibility by Bev at Asperger Square 8 (which i've just added to my blogroll)... and all i can say is, wow, someone other than me experiences this... and it appears that variants of it are actually a fairly common experience among people on the autistic spectrum...

Invisibility is a phenomenon that i first started observing myself in my teens, and still do. For a long, long time it seriously freaked me out, because it just seemed to be something unexplainable, supernatural, impossible - something that no one would ever believe if i tried to explain it to them...

Ironically, when i was a child i desperately wanted not to be noticed, wanted to be ignored by everyone - would have loved to be, literally, invisible - in fact often fantasised about it - but somehow couldn't help being constantly noticed, watched, paid attention to in all kinds of unwanted ways by absolutely everyone (incredibly, incredibly frustrating when the lengths i went to to avoid being noticed by other people, and the meltdowns i ended up having from constant unwanted attention, got branded by parents and teachers as "attention seeking"). Then, at puberty, i started wanting to talk to, interact with, form meaningful relationships with other people... and almost as soon as i started wanting that, i started being not noticed by people, to the point of sometimes seemingly being quite literally, physically invisible (and even inaudible)...

I remember, for example, multiple occasions in the sixth form common room, at parties, or in any other social situations, when people i was in the room with embarked on the kind of "private" conversations that they would normally only have had if no one else was there. On one occasion i butted into the conversation and was met with a reaction of shock that i was actually present, then asked to leave the room - not angrily, but in a tone of disbelief and confusion that my presence had not been noticed. On others i had been a part of a multi-person conversation only minutes previously, but then after a short pause would find my existence apparently no longer acknowledged by a single other person there (even those who minutes ago had been listening to me and appreciating what i had been saying). This continued all the way through university, even happening in meetings of campaigning societies i was actively involved in.

Many times this phenomenon brought me to the edge of total breakdown, convinced that i was either insane or living in a world of complete irrationality, even feeling suicidal, due to the apparently total lack of any reason or explanation for it: if it was a paranormal "power", it was one over which i had absolutely no control. When i found out about the existence of AS and started seriously considering seeking diagnosis, although i hadn't read anything specific about this phenomenon, it seemed somehow to "fit in"; to be one of the many previously-unexplained things about my life that the autism hypothesis seemed capable of explaining...

I have something of a better idea about how this "invisibility" works now (Bev's post confirms some of my ideas), tho there are still things i can't explain about it (like why it happens in one situation, and then in another situation with apparently identical circumstances it doesn't). I believe it's not so much that people literally don't see me, but that there are "markers" which neurotypical people can percieve and autistic people can't, which "mark" an individual as a "real person". Rather than seeing everyone and everything in a room, as i do, i think NT people somehow scan for "people" first, and don't notice anyone who these "markers" don't mark as a "person". I think this difference in perception can sometimes be overridden by things which unambiguously, by force of reason, mark someone out to "have to" be a person (directly speaking to someone, for instance), but i think that, sometimes (and why it's sometimes, not always, is the thing i can't, but really want to, work out) i'm in the position of not being noticed as a person unless i do something unambiguously "person-like", such as speak, whereas an NT person would be automatically noticed as a person...

Something that IMO makes a very good analogue to it is the keys that the Doctor and Martha wore round their necks to avoid being detected in the second-to-last episode of the most recent series of Doctor Who, which had been treated with a perception filter (which is also similar to the Somebody Else's Problem field in Douglas Adams's Hitch Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy books)...

Sometimes this invisibility/perception-filtering has been useful to me: for example, i've not been noticed by the police at demos, or got away with not paying for a ticket on trains because the inspectors have walked past me without even noticing me (there have been times when i've been the only person on a fairly crowded train not asked for my ticket, and no other passenger has apparently noticed this). However, it has also caused things like cars very nearly running me over at zebra crossings because the drivers apparently didn't see me...

It does strike me that such a "power" could be incredibly useful if it were possible to control it - however, this doesn't seem possible... Also (rather like the Master in that episode of Doctor Who), there are people that it doesn't seem to "work" on - who can see and notice me even when i'm "invisible" to everyone else. Interestingly, i've never, to my knowledge, been invisible to a disabled person (on one surreal occasion i was invisible to everyone in a university society meeting, except for one visually impaired person)... it puts a different spin, however, on the phrase "invisible disabilities"... ;)

Anyway, it's kind of good to see that i'm not the only person who experiences this...

4 years in college... just to "prepare" for life in an institution?

Article in today's Guardian

Now, obviously i think the money being paid out is a good thing, and hope that this sets a precedent for the thousands more disabled people in similar situations (although of course it should be the disabled person him/herself who gets the money to pay for his/her own care needs, not the family to "care for them", which this article doesn't exactly make clear)...

But the really disturbing thing for me in the article is this sentence:

"Ms Wright, 25, cannot speak, has epilepsy and limited mobility and needs support in most aspects of daily life. For four years until August 2005, she attended a special needs college where she was prepared for long-term adult residential care."

So the sole function of her 4 years in college is to "prepare" her for a lifetime of imprisonment in an institution? Presumably they have "special" lessons in how disabled people must accept others choosing for them what and when they eat, when they can go to the toilet, when they can get up and go to bed, etc... No consideration of even the *possibility* that Ms Wright could have her own home and employ her own personal assistants to give her the same basic human rights to autonomy over spheres of her own life that every non-disabled person takes for granted?

And they are so confident that the general public will unquestioningly accept this totalitarian human rights abuse that they don't even mind a "left-leaning" national broadsheet mentioning it openly and blatantly...

Why do people who generally "get it" about human rights abuses in other contexts have such a blind spot when it comes to disability? (I see this among activists in other social causes, many of whom work in "caring" positions that are actually systematically oppressing disabled people, without even seeing anything wrong in that... this will be the subject of future posts) Does a person being disabled somehow act as a blanket denial of their human subjectivity or something?

This kind of thing really does my head in...