My friend Stephanie has a soft spot for damaged or stray dogs. She's a skilled alpha female who didn't hesitate to wrestle one of her new dogs to the floor and establish, very unambiguously, that she is the alpha, and there will be no question about that, now or ever.
Stephanie once had a dog who, as she put it, "didn't know how to dog." The animal had been rejected by its mother, separated from its litter, and hand-fed by the owner, and by the time Stephanie got it, the dog had no idea what it was.
And I thought housebreaking was a burden!
This month Stephanie got a new dog, a would-be show dog that doesn't meet conformance requirements, and it's one of the working breeds--the dogs that know their purpose in life is to retrieve game, herd livestock, and in general help people manage critters. The dog, "Piper," was pulled out of training and left in a house, but wasn't crate-trained or otherwise adapted to house living. As a year-old dog, Piper is just now learning how to go on walks.
"She cannot brain," said Stephanie, blowing foam off her frappacino. "She just doesn't know who she is."
While Stephanie ran through stories of what to do with a dog robbed of its purpose in a world it doesn't control but must live in, I kept thinking how social animals work. And I thought about the thread in which the autistic-allistic division was reduced, I thought, to a position that "We're all human, we all have differences." As if the things that cause members to come here, and comfort each other here, weren't a measure of how we individually get made a person. As if it were a matter of simple individualism to be struggling with communications and interpretations and our own minds in a network that makes assumptions that, day after day, we do not, because we cannot see the sense of them.
EDIT: As if it were wrong, even, to notice the tilt in the playing field, and to blame those aspies who do notice for remarking on it. /EDIT
It's very healthy to insist that we are not our diagnoses. However, I think we swing very wide of the mark to conclude that since we're all different, those differences do not matter. Those around us say they do matter: it matters when being "difficult" or "hypersensitive" is neither a choice nor a measure of character, but of an invisible infrastructure not designed to meet invisible, assumed, and largely undefined, expectations.
Dogs live in packs, including packs of one dog: your family is a pack, am I right, dog owners? A dog is a dog through its pack. A dog's breeding fits it toward lines of work that it's built to do, physically and mentally.
When that dog can't live its identity, we get a Piper: a dog that doesn't know what it cares about, and is at the mercy of any random stimulus, however small, that will give a purpose to being alive in this moment.
It's ridiculous to suggest the differences don't matter for a group of people with so high a percentage of self-harmers and suicide attemptors. And it's heartless to do so.
Like Piper, we are people because other people have a significant say in how we're identified. We can't just claim to be "individuals." We are social, without being identical; we're social animals, not social insects.
The particulars of Asperger's that any one of us exhibits may be particular to us, but its pain is no less acute for being nearly singular. Rather the other way: it is a miracle that so many of us can actually look at each other's posts, and click the icon bar, thinking, "Been there. Done that."
View attachment 17934
Updated: As I wrote in a reflection on what I write here, and why, I recall remarking that we are all Dante, looking for Virgil. We can all troop down to hell, and we can all troop out again. The fact that those trips are different for each traveler doesn't remove the shared fact of the journey--or that we make it more often, and more often alone, and often more deeply, than our neurotypical kin, who manage to troop through hard times in groups.
Stephanie once had a dog who, as she put it, "didn't know how to dog." The animal had been rejected by its mother, separated from its litter, and hand-fed by the owner, and by the time Stephanie got it, the dog had no idea what it was.
And I thought housebreaking was a burden!
This month Stephanie got a new dog, a would-be show dog that doesn't meet conformance requirements, and it's one of the working breeds--the dogs that know their purpose in life is to retrieve game, herd livestock, and in general help people manage critters. The dog, "Piper," was pulled out of training and left in a house, but wasn't crate-trained or otherwise adapted to house living. As a year-old dog, Piper is just now learning how to go on walks.
"She cannot brain," said Stephanie, blowing foam off her frappacino. "She just doesn't know who she is."
While Stephanie ran through stories of what to do with a dog robbed of its purpose in a world it doesn't control but must live in, I kept thinking how social animals work. And I thought about the thread in which the autistic-allistic division was reduced, I thought, to a position that "We're all human, we all have differences." As if the things that cause members to come here, and comfort each other here, weren't a measure of how we individually get made a person. As if it were a matter of simple individualism to be struggling with communications and interpretations and our own minds in a network that makes assumptions that, day after day, we do not, because we cannot see the sense of them.
EDIT: As if it were wrong, even, to notice the tilt in the playing field, and to blame those aspies who do notice for remarking on it. /EDIT
It's very healthy to insist that we are not our diagnoses. However, I think we swing very wide of the mark to conclude that since we're all different, those differences do not matter. Those around us say they do matter: it matters when being "difficult" or "hypersensitive" is neither a choice nor a measure of character, but of an invisible infrastructure not designed to meet invisible, assumed, and largely undefined, expectations.
Dogs live in packs, including packs of one dog: your family is a pack, am I right, dog owners? A dog is a dog through its pack. A dog's breeding fits it toward lines of work that it's built to do, physically and mentally.
When that dog can't live its identity, we get a Piper: a dog that doesn't know what it cares about, and is at the mercy of any random stimulus, however small, that will give a purpose to being alive in this moment.
It's ridiculous to suggest the differences don't matter for a group of people with so high a percentage of self-harmers and suicide attemptors. And it's heartless to do so.
Like Piper, we are people because other people have a significant say in how we're identified. We can't just claim to be "individuals." We are social, without being identical; we're social animals, not social insects.
The particulars of Asperger's that any one of us exhibits may be particular to us, but its pain is no less acute for being nearly singular. Rather the other way: it is a miracle that so many of us can actually look at each other's posts, and click the icon bar, thinking, "Been there. Done that."
View attachment 17934
Updated: As I wrote in a reflection on what I write here, and why, I recall remarking that we are all Dante, looking for Virgil. We can all troop down to hell, and we can all troop out again. The fact that those trips are different for each traveler doesn't remove the shared fact of the journey--or that we make it more often, and more often alone, and often more deeply, than our neurotypical kin, who manage to troop through hard times in groups.
