a pet peeve of mine

There's a pet peeve of mine that I think of from time to time, but an urge to vent about this has come to me.  I tweeted a few tweets about it on twitter, but the character limitation and format of twitter really limit my writing about this. Facebook is another option.  But I'm pretty pissed off at FB for deleting a couple of my posts and banning my blog, so not sure I'm ever going to post anything on there again.

For this reason, I've decided to write a blog post on the subject, though I've not been blogging as much in recent years as in the past.

I'm fed up with people giving me easy/pat suggestions for what I can do to help my disability.

The first two that I've heard the most frequently I've written about previously. For those who aren't inclined to read the whole post, I'll recap.

 1. Because you get fired, tell employers about your disability. I tried it once, didn't help, I got fired anyhow.  I'm retired now, highly improbable I'll ever work again, so perhaps it's moot now, but the annoyance of having to hear this repeatedly has not gone away.

2. Because you can't find a girlfriend, find an autistic girlfriend.  No place to find one and I sure don't want a female ND. and contrary to ND mythology, there is about a 4:1 ratio of male autistics to females.  So if the girls were interested the odds would be good for them, but they're not because the goods are odd. 

In the above-linked post, I wrote that I think autism may have given me the savant skill of prophecy because I can so easily predict what people will say in response to these issues.

There are others I've heard, but not with the same frequency.

3. Try therapy.  Had 18 years of it.  Been there, done that.

4. get social skills training to enable you to find a girlfriend.  Problem is more complex than that, too difficult to explain in this blog post.

5. Go to church.  One person has told me an autistic boy whose parents have taken him to her church is doing a lot better now.  No thanks, I went to church with some people one time, took communion and it would appear I drank to my own damnation. 

6. Take SSRI drugs.  I did.  Two different ones, Prozac and Lexipro, no help there. 

7. Take Elavil to relieve depression.  This was in the mid 80s before SSRI's became available.  I'm depressed because autism has made my life so difficult, not because I have an affective disorder.

8. Go to an autistic social club to meet autistic women (I guess because I have little chance with a normal woman or I'm ill-suited for her).  Meetup shows where groups like this are.  This is a subset of item number two in the two most common suggestions I've heard.  But this means I'd have to go to the Los Angeles chapters of GRASP or ASAN and meet female ND's.  No thanks.

9. How do I expect autistic (ND) girls to like me if I'm going to have these attitudes.  I don't expect ND women to like me and if they don't it's fine with me.

10.  If I weren't such a jerk and did not talk about disgusting things like autistics who smear feces, women would not hate me so much. (this was at least by far the most amusing of the lot)

11. Get a typing tutor program so you can learn how not to make careless errors in data entry.

There are probably a few others, but I can't think of them off the top of my head.  I also think anyone reading this would get the idea by now.

I've lived with this disability for more than 60 years now.  I know what the situation is better than the person looking in, believe me.  I really resent people who know nothing about my life giving me pat advice.  There's really not a whole lot I can do about these problems.  Nothing's going to change the hopelessness of my situation and likely other DD persons who have to live with their disability.

But I know that this won't be the last I ever hear suggestions.  I'm sure I'll continue to hear the same tired old ones.  Especially the first two.  I'll likely hear a few new ones down the line also.  Just something I guess I'm going to have to learn to live with.

Thanks blog readers for allowing me to vent.