Friends and Buddies

Posted on by Astrid

This week’s topic for Throwback Thursday is friendship. I was never really good at making friends. I still don’t have any real friends other than my husband. I mean, of course I could consider some of my fellow clients “friends”, but our relationship isn’t as deep as that of normal adult friendships.

In early childhood, I did have one friend. Her name was Kim and we used to make mud castles together. Or anything out of sand and water really. Kim’s last name translates to “peat” and my father used to jokingly call her “Kim Mud” rather than “Kim Peat”.

When I went to the special school for the visually impaired at the age of five, I started in a first grade class despite being of Kindergarten age. All girls in my class were at least a year older than me and they enjoyed “babysitting” me. In exchange, for the next three years, I’d help them with their schoolwork.

By the age of nine, I transferred to a different school for the blind. Though I did have a friend there, I was also an outcast and got heavily bullied.

My best time socially was my one year at the special ed secondary school for the blind. I had one good friend there, but also got along pretty well with everyone else in my class and most kids in my school in general.

All that changed when I entered mainstream high school at the age of thirteen. Within a month, everyone had formed cliques except for me. A few months later, my favorite clique took me under their wing and pretended to be my friends, only to drop me again when they’d had enough of me. I was friendless for the remainder of the six-year program. I didn’t really care. Or maybe I did, but I was determined to show my parents and teachers that I could earn a mainstream high level high school diploma. And I did. Not that I use it for anything now, but oh well.

Another topic mentioned in the Throwback Thursday post title at least is buddies. This reminds me of the autistic student buddy program I was part of during my two months of attending university. This program assigned a psychology student volunteer buddy to an autistic student to help the autistic with planning their coursework or other activities related to their studies. It worked in theory, but the catch was that these buddies were volunteers helping only with certain things for one or two hours a week at most. At the time, you couldn’t get paid support workers for assistance related to college or university studies, as the reasoning was that if you could be a student in college or uni, you should be able to do the planning and related tasks yourself. Needless to say my buddy got overwhelmed within a week. I feel intensely sorry for her.

The reason I mention this, besides it being in the post title, is the fact that I realize I struggle to maintain a distinction between social and professional relationships and, with the buddy, things got even muddier. I mean, friendships are supposed to be reciprocal, while professional relationships are not. For this reason, I am allowed to unload my shit to a professional without needing to listen to theirs. Professionals, however, get paid, while friends don’t. With the buddy, the situation got complicated, in that my fellow students called on my buddy to calm me when I was in a meltdown. That clearly wasn’t her role.

This thing about lack of reciprocity, however, also probably killed off that mainstream high school friendship I pretended to have. I don’t blame myself entirely though: my so-called “friends” also felt obligated to hang out with me out of pity, and that’s never a good reason to be someone’s friend.

Socially Awkward #SoCS

Posted on by Astrid

I am socially awkward. Before I was diagnosed with autism, this was how I saw myself. I even had an E-mail group on Yahoo! Groups titled socially_awkward. This was for adults and teens with social issues of any kind.

Indeed, the main symptom of autism is still seen as social communicative difficulties. I do have them, mind you, but I don’t see them as my main symptom of autism. My main symptom is overload, both cognitive and sensory.

Then again, like I said, I do have issues with social interaction. I haven’t had a friend other than my husband since special education junior high in 1999. I tended often to be too clingy. In this sense, I guess I exhibited the “acctive but odd” style of social interaction that is often exhibited by males on the autism spectrum and is seen as the least impaired style, common in those diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome. Yet I do experience severe impairments in other areas.

When I was older, I tended to exhibit a more passive interaction style. Then again, when at meetings, I can still be dominating. This is probably why the people in the Dutch DID group decided I wasn’t safe. They kicked me out, officially because they believed I didn’t have DID or had imagined it, but they cited as reasons for this that I talked bookish about my issues. Well duh, that’s typical of autistic active-but-odd interaction.

But back to how mild or severe my autism is in terms of social interaction or other symptoms. I was diagnosed as ASD level 1 under DSM-5, so the mildest severity level. The reason is probably that I can hold down relatively normal-sounding conversations in structured settings and with people of my intelligence level. At least if they’re focused on me, which diagnostic interviews usually are. I cannot keep up a conversation about someone else for long. This may be why some people, including my parents, used to see me as selfish. I tend to want to dominate or talk about myself. That is, I don’t really want to, but it is the most natural.

In the second symptom category of autism, which is restricted and repetitive behaviors, I was also diagnosed as level 1. I disagree, particularly because sensory issues have been added to the criteria and I’m severely impaired with regard to that. I stim all the freakin’ time, for example. I feel I should definitely be level 2 on this symptom category.

This post is part of #SoCS, for which the prompt this week is “social”.

An Eighth Grade Memory

Posted on by Astrid

I’ve been meaning to write a lot, but I can’t. I am having a lot of memories. That’s what they’re supposed to be. I already survived and am now safe and an adult, age 32, living with my husband. I don’t care, this pretty freakin’ hurts. One of my inner teens, Karin, hurts the most.

On November 17, 2000, I hid under a coat rack during recess. I don’t even know why. I mean, yes, I was feeling miserable and lonely. Kids in my class were bullying me and I had no friends. I was mainstreamed at the time, being the only blind student in my school.

My French teacher found me and called for the coordinator. My tutor had just gone on sick leave the day before and never returned to our school. The coordinator would act as my tutor from that point on. He sat across from me in the room where I’d been hiding under the coat rack. He held my hands and said: “Is something wrong?” I couldn’t communiicate. Not speak, not move, nothing. I was completely frozen.

Several months later, by the time my now tutor had become aware that I was feeling left out and lonely and being bullied by my classmates, he organized a class conference. Without me there. My classmates were allowed to say what they didn’t like about me. Then I was supposed to change those things. I was supposed to take better care of my personal hygiene and develop better social skills, so that I’d be less curt.

My tutor died in 2016. He cannot read this now, but my old tutor, the one who went on sick leave just before the coat rack thing, can. She found my Dutch website last year. Granted, it has my real name in the URL and this one doesn’t, but still. Maybe I shouldn’t write this, or publish this. But I want to. I want to get this off my chest.

I want to show that it’s not okay to blame a bullying victim for being bullied, even if the victim “elicits” it by acting weird. It’s good to teach a child about social skills and personal hygiene. I won’t deny that. It’s quite another thing to link that to bullying and say “You bring it onto yourself”. That’s what many people around me did say. That’s victim-blaming and it’s not okay.

Another thing I want to say is, if you wouldn’t subject a non-disabled student to something, chances are you shouldn’t subject your disabled students to it. Another boy in my class was being bullied too. My classmates asked for a class conference similar to the one held about me. The boy didn’t want it and this was respected. I was never even asked whether I wanted a class conference, because apparently, being blind, I was so special that I shouldn’t have a say. For clarity’s sake: I think class conferences like thsi one are an example of victim-blaming whether the bullied student agrees to them or not.