I recently realized that some of the people that follow my blog are
autistic. Well, this isn't surprising because a certain percentage of
the population (about 0.5%) are intelligent autistics, and many of them
are active on the internet because using the internet is one of those
activities that don't require face to face interaction with people.
Therefore, I think that I will provide some advice for
autistics, and for people in general, that can help them in daily life.
I'm doing this mostly for myself, however, in order not to forget about
these tips. I've been able to accumulate a few decades of life
experience already due to my age. One thing that I would recommend for
autistic people is to take a pause and relax your body when you're
around people and when you're feeling nervous. Autistic people are often
in a state of tension. Because of this, their bodies are in a condition
of tension, and they make rapid, jerky, or unusual movements that
normal (neurotypical) people find strange and even repulsive. I know
that being relaxed isn't something that comes easy for an autistic
(neurodivergent) person, but this helps to appear normal around people,
to make proper eye contact, to make decisions better, and to avoid
outbursts. Getting into a state of relaxation also helps an autistic
person to retain that much needed energy, which can be easily lost when
an autistic person is around people. Staying relaxed and keeping my body
relaxed is something that I forgot about for a while, but, fortunately,
I remembered about this recently. I don't mean that an autistic person
should always be relaxed, but being relaxed can often help in social
situations. Of course, there's another, much more simple, way to relieve
tension for an autistic person. This method is stimming with a
so-called stim toy. Using a stim toy is a much easier way of relaxing
than attempting to relax your body consciously. This is something that I
found out about very recently. But I decided to use a pen instead of a
stim toy. I bought a pen with a cap that opens and closes. I take this
pen everywhere with me now, and I stim by opening and closing the cap of
this pen, by turning the cap, or by simply holding this pen in one of
my hands. A pen is one of the most common things that a person can
carry, and one can even take it to a job interview. I think that if I
had used a pen or some stim toy to stim since my childhood, my life
would have been a lot better. When I use my pen to stim, I cease to be
nervous, I gain confidence, I can focus better, I can appear normal
around people, I can make better eye contact, and I cease to worry.
Another thing that helps me to get through a tough day is aspirin. For
some reason, aspirin helps me to feel better and more confident. If I'm
nervous, if I'm feeling down, or if I have a headache, I take one
aspirin tablet a day, but not more than one tablet a day. The stronger
the aspirin, the better the effect that it has. It's definitely not a
good thing to consume a lot of aspirin because, like any drug, it's not
really a good thing for a person's stomach and digestive system.
Therefore, I try not to consume aspirin every day. But, when I need to
feel better or when I'm in an important social situation, aspirin
definitely helps. Another thing that some autistic people do when they
go outside is wear sunglasses. They do this even when it's not sunny
outside. Sunglasses cover their eyes, thus making them less nervous and
less noticeable to the people around them. Wearing sunglasses is not
something that I'm in the habit of doing, but many autistics find this
to be very helpful. I already mentioned in one of my posts that I prefer
to sleep for at least 10 hours per day. This is probably one of the
things that keep me looking very young and healthy for my age. I also
don't smoke or drink alcohol. It's obvious that the more a person
sleeps, the better a person feels during the day. Some people say that
they like to sleep as little as possible in order to get more things
done, but I think that this is a mistake. I think that sleeping less
affects a person's health, well-being, and life expectancy. Therefore, I
try to get as much sleep as I can. Since I learned that I have autism
at the end of July of this year, I've been trying to find out as much
useful information as I can about this condition. I haven't been
obsessed with autism, and I learned pretty much everything that I needed
to know about it in the first 3 or 4 weeks after finding out about it,
but I recently came across more information that I found to be of some
use. One thing that I've been doing sometimes is watching videos by
autistic people on YouTube. I watch videos that are only by autistic
women because I don't really want to watch autistic men talk about their
experiences. Moreover, almost all of the videos that I've been able to
find about autism on YouTube are by autistic women. It seems that
autistic women are a lot more willing to talk about their experiences
than autistic men. This is a good thing because I find their videos to
be usually informative. Some researchers say that there are a lot more
autistic men than autistic women, but I think that this might not be the
case. Autistic women are better at hiding their autistic traits than
autistic men, and they spend more time and effort on fitting in. This is
why fewer of them get noticed or diagnosed. I try to avoid clickbait
videos because I find clickbait videos to be unpleasant and often
useless. Since monetization got introduced on YouTube some years ago,
YouTube has become even worse than American television, in some ways.
It's now a website that's filled with dumb and useless content because
many people try to make only clickbait videos in order to make as much
money as possible on YouTube. This is one of the reasons why I've been
using YouTube less in the last several years. It's not surprising that
there are clickbait videos about autism on YouTube because there are
millions of autistic people around the world that would like to know
more about their condition. Because of this, I've tried to watch videos
about autism that are obscure and that don't have many views. Therefore,
I try to avoid videos that are on channels that are dedicated to making
videos about autism. Why I do this is simple. Clickbait videos are
almost always a waste of time. Still, even with all of the negative
changes that have taken place in the last decade or so on YouTube,
YouTube remains the best website for watching videos. This is a downer,
but such is reality now. YouTube is certainly better than Rutube, for
example. In the last few years, the people running Rutube have deleted
hundreds of my videos because they don't like some of my blog posts.
Something that I noticed some time ago is that whenever I make a post
that can be perceived as being critical of the Russian Federation, a
dozen or more of my videos on Rutube get deleted at random. But there is
a pattern. Since the Russian Federation is a right-wing state where
real opposition figures, such as nationalists or socialists, have been
getting killed by the authorities since the early-1990s, the first
videos that got deleted on my channel were the few videos featuring such
opposition figures. I didn't realize this at first, but this is now
clear to me after I noticed that there's a pattern and after I read some
comments by people. After that happened, almost all of the videos that
have been getting deleted on my channel have been about sociology and
history. I don't watch or read Russian propaganda, but, as one of my
followers informed me, Russian propaganda does watch me closely. Another
thing that I've done recently is read two of Michael Fitzgerald's
books. These two books are titled 'Autism and Creativity: Is there a
link between autism in men and exceptional ability?' (2004) and 'The
Genesis of Artistic Creativity: Asperger's Syndrome and the Arts'
(2005). These books aren't easy to obtain, but they can be bought
online. I was able to buy them for a relatively low price in used
condition, though they still cost me over $50. They might also be
available in some libraries. I haven't finished reading these books yet,
but the information that they contain has been very useful to me
because Fitzgerald knows a lot about autism, specifically about Asperger
syndrome. In 'The Genesis of Artistic Creativity', he selected 21
famous people (Jonathan Swift, Hans Christian Andersen, Herman Melville,
Lewis Carroll, William Butler Yeats, Arthur Conan Doyle, George Orwell,
Bruce Chatwin, Baruch Spinoza, Immanuel Kant, Simone Weil, Alfred Jules
Ayer, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, Erik Satie, Bela
Bartok, Glenn Gould, Vincent van Gogh, Jack Butler Yeats, Laurence
Stephen Lowry, and Andy Warhol) and explained why they had autism. When
it comes to Carroll, Fitzgerald wrote, "He had 'a compulsive
orderliness' and was systematic in his approach to organizing his work
and activities. Undoubtedly a severe disciplinarian, he was 'a master of
regulating his life, and superhuman in today's terms, in controlling
his impulses during waking hours'." In his books, Fitzgerald states that
people with Asperger syndrome are very creative and that they've been
responsible for much of the progress that mankind has made. In one of
his interviews, he said, "Well, Asperger syndrome has massive impact on
all our lives. If we didn't have people with Asperger syndrome, we'd
still be in the cave. We would not have developed technology. We would
not have developed fire or the wheel. That's the first point. The second
point is that the large group of genes in my view that give you
Asperger syndrome also have a tendency to give you creativity of extreme
proportions. Other people have the same view. So, there's an overlap
between Asperger syndrome and creativity. And this has been known for
thousands of years, at least what has been known is the link between
genius akin to madness, for example. So, this kind of phenomenon has
been observed as long as written records are there. Asperger syndrome
was developed by a man in Austria. He worked on it throughout the 1930s,
and he published on it. The first publication was in 1938 and later in
1944. It's a condition characterized by autistic features. People with
Asperger syndrome have poor eye contact, they have problems reading
non-verbal behavior, they have problems reading faces, they have
problems with social know-how, they're naive and immature, they're
emotionally immature, they're loners, they have problems sharing, they
have problems turn-taking, they use repetitive language, and they have
narrow interests and repetitive behavior. It's not surprising then that
Asperger syndrome is associated with depression and anxiety. In later
life, psychosis isn't rare. The perfect example of that is Isaac Newton,
who is the greatest creator in the past thousand years. He developed a
psychotic episode in later life, and he had all the features of classic
Asperger syndrome. There's still a great deal of prejudice against
persons with Asperger syndrome in the world. They suffer enormously.
They suffer unnecessarily. They're often unfortunately bullied or
ostracized, mistreated, maybe put in prison. Their condition isn't
recognized." In 'Autism and Creativity', Fitzgerald wrote, "However, in
order for the scientist to innovate, he must 'break the grip on his
imagination that our powers of logical-seeming storytelling impose'.
Creative people with HFA/ASP are obsessed with fundamental, bedrock
discoveries. They have no interest in being merely replicative. Hence
they have little regard for their contemporaries and do not conform to
the values of society. They have a peculiar ability to become lost in
the present, in the here-and-now, which appears to be a sine qua non for
creativity of an HFA/ASP kind. Indeed, the HFA/ASP might facilitate
this disconnectedness from the world so that creativity of pure genius
can take place. High-functioning autism and Asperger's syndrome are
pervasive developmental disorders and therefore different from mental
disorders such as schizophrenia and manic-depressive psychosis. The
differentiation between high-functioning autism and Asperger's syndrome
has never been achieved scientifically, so I have retained the term
HFA/ASP. The term, while cumbersome, does describe the scientific
situation today. Indeed, Asperger's syndrome is often used as a synonym
for high-functioning autism. It is possible to speculate that humankind
would still be at the stage of development before the wheel was invented
had it not been for the type of creativity that people with HFA/ASP
developed. There is no doubt that HFA/ASP can also occur in females, and
therefore a similar type of creativity should be (and is) possible.
Nevertheless, to date there is no female equivalent of Newton, or no
female equivalent in the mathematical/physical science domain."
One
thing that I've noticed recently is that I like to often listen to
soothing music or sounds and see films that I find calming. No doubt I
do this because of my autism. Therefore, now I understand why The Ring
(2002) is one of my favorite films. I think that I enjoy watching it
even more than Jacob's Ladder (1990), A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream
Warriors (1987), Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988), The Hitcher (1986),
and Halloween (1978), which are among my favorites too. Although The
Ring is a supernatural horror film, it's not really that frightening,
and I find its music and tone to be soothing. I would also add that, in
my opinion, The Ring is one of the best films of the last two decades.
It’s certainly one of the best horror films. For me, it has replay
value. It also has an artistic touch, which is something that almost all
of the films that got made since 2000 lack. When it comes to albums
that are calming, I can mention some of the ones that I have in my
collection. They include 2010: The Year We Make Contact by David Shire,
Aja by Steely Dan, Avalon by Roxy Music, Beverly Hills Cop by Harold
Faltermeyer, Bloodsport by Paul Hertzog, Body Heat by John Barry, C'est
Chic by Chic, Creid by Yasunori Mitsuda, The Crow by Graeme Revell,
Disintegration by The Cure, Everything by Climie Fisher, Black Rain by
Hans Zimmer, Eye In The Sky by The Alan Parsons Project, Ghost In The
Shell by Kenji Kawai, Halloween II by John Carpenter, Hats by The Blue
Nile, The Hitcher by Mark Isham, Lethal Weapon by Michael Kamen, The
Mack by Willie Hutch, The Yakuza by Dave Grusin, When Marnie Was There
by Takatsugu Munamatsu, Three O’Clock High by Tangerine Dream, Thelma
& Louise by Hans Zimmer, Starman by Jack Nitzsche, Risque by Chic,
Return To Forever by Chick Corea, Rapture by Anita Baker, Rain Man by
Hans Zimmer, Princess Mononoke by Joe Hisaishi, Spirited Away by Joe
Hisaishi, Howl’s Moving Castle by Joe Hisaishi, Poltergeist II by Jerry
Goldsmith, and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service by John Barry. Moreover, I
can add that in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild I've found
another location where it's pleasing to stay, to look at the scenery,
and to listen to the sounds. This location is called Keya Pond, which
can be found in East Necluda. Since it hasn’t been easy for me to think
of a picture that should be included in this post, I will just include a
photograph of Seabreeze Walk and Beach Avenue in Downtown Vancouver.
This avenue is where I sometimes like to take walks. It’s one of my
favorite places in Vancouver. Another one of my favorite places in
Vancouver is the section of British Columbia Highway 1A between Jervis
Street and Bute Street.
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