Communication as Access & Inclusion

Clear Communication is Access & Inclusion

Clear and direct information is the autistic person’s access to the human world. Neuronormative communication is confusing and extremely anxiety inducing. Questions go unanswered, conversations are left suspended in mid-air, semantic meaning is vague and the autistic is supposed to be the one with the communication impairment?

Communication is respect. Clear communication is like a well-built ramp for a wheelchair user to access spaces that are otherwise inaccessible. Without clear and timely communication, the autistic person is made to crawl around the floor with no idea where the entrances and exits are, crawl up the stairs and still not have any confirmation of exact location.

Communication is access and inclusion too, in case people forget. What is important is not always visible or physical. People who work in disability focused fields need to remember this. It’s not always about wheelchairs.

A Thin Fine Line

This is a musing about invasion of privacy and the thin fine line between funny and sinister.

When one has been accorded much care, consideration and respectful support from a great number of people, one may become not only quite overwhelmed, but also lulled into a feeling of security, such that when this sense of ‘safeness’ is challenged, one becomes suddenly unsure how to react. One incident was highlighted in my previous post, “Confronting the Invisible.”

Recently, I have been encountering a series of little events, each one so minute in isolation that only the very observant or meticulously private person would react to, let alone notice at all. I have tried hard, in deference to the more prevalent “hey, relax!” laissez-faire social perception of the majority, to downplay in my own mind, each of these events which nevertheless irked me greatly. However, now that I am faced with an escalating rate of recurrence of these ‘small things,’ and the accumulation of which are forming a disturbing but as yet nebulous denouement with an accompanying mixture of utter weariness and foreboding, I am finding harder and harder to brush them all off. Continue reading