social conundrum | Dawn-joy Leong

When interacting with an autistic person, it is best to speak with clarity, and be honest. Blunt honesty is valued in our autistic social system. We prize the truth, and we admire those with the courage to speak it and stand by it. Cards on table, nothing hidden.

If you think Gas Lighting is insidious, wait till you are caught in the midst of ‘Asian-style’ subterfuge. You’d be made to doubt your own name after awhile, and discredited using your autism diagnosis, with its plethora of ‘deficits,’ against you.

There is an old Cantonese saying that aptly describes the kind of spurious babbling that usually follows when petty trickery is uncovered and the truth is laid bare as a baby’s bottom on a damp monsoon day:

“Fallen flat on your face and still trying to claim you were just collecting sand.”

Autistic people get that ‘sand box’ sophism all the time from the neuronormative, and we are expected – demanded – to accept it. Or be damned. But that is just the lower-level type of social gyrating, the kind that people with big hearts and large vision may choose to just laugh off.

Pardon me, please? Could you please kindly say that again?

Bitte wiederholen Sie?

Ah, mais non. There is a higher-order that is far more treacherous, the exquisitely Machiavellian type reserved for the Grand Masters of Perfidy.

臥虎藏龍 – The Crouching Tigers and Hidden Dragons are the highest order of complex social-political manoeuvrings that utterly confound Autistic Honesty. Next to these, we are well and truly “socially impaired”.

What should the Exhausted Autistic Entity do in such situations? There may be many suggestions and tactics advised by wiser souls than I. For me, it is time to just walk away – redirect and go along my way with my soul still intact. Leave the Magnificent Ostentatious Stage of Good Deeding. My old friends Artaud and Wagner are no match for these Maestros. We shall attend to lesser matters of Autistic Joy and Autistic Beauty.

Clement Space awaits, and there is Lucy, silently watching and anticipating with her eyes of pulchritude.

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 →