Far Removed

I lost my disability case. The hearing is over, the decision is made, but the fight goes on. Now I have to sit down with my legal counsel and talk about the ruling. The court sent me the Decision Rationale.  In four two-sided pages this document explains the judge's finding of "not disabled."  Given among the reasons for this finding are the fact that I can play video games, that I am married, that I use social media, that I am able to eat in public with my wife, that I can feed my cats and myself, and that I have "been able to work through difficulties with social interaction as [I have] been able to push through this way through [sic] the situation when there was no alternative."  The document describes as "allegations" my reports of real experience, which I suppose isn't unusual but which makes me feel dehumanized nonetheless. My chronic insomnia, a well documented symptom of PTSD, is dismissed as an allegation that can't be corroborated. ...

Autism puts us behind walls.  Some we can move beyond.  Others form the permanent boundaries of our capability.  The territories of specifially allistic neurotypy, while they may not extend in the same directions, are larger than those of autistic people.  Autistic people face challenges that allistic people do not. There are many and diverse ways to be challenged.  I continually discover nuances to my disability.  I learn every day more about what I cannot do.  I search my boundaries to find the ones I can redraw.  I see from different perspectives that my boundaries are more fixed than an allistic person's are likely to be.  It's easy to become frustrated. But there are many in the autistic community who are displeased with descriptions of autism as a disability.  They focus on the places within their smaller territories which aren't accessible to most allistic people.  That is: they look at what they can do well that allis...

I am a lot like an android.  I wish that I were artificial.  Will and emotion are obstacles or burdens.  I am weary of them.  I want to want nothing and to watch the world around me without judging it.  Looking in the world for satisfaction is counterproductive and I would rather stop.  I am vexed in that I have much ado to know myself. The only experience available to me is physical experience.  My needs vis a vis my quality of life are all real, physical, limited.  And how disappointing that anything must be real.  Would that I could be in an unworld divorced from such ideas as value. Imagine an unreal reality. Imagine observing a world whose objectivity is fluid.  I want to be transient, if I must be at all; in the world but not of it, if I must be either.  This is the appeal of being a machine: I would have suites of purposes and nothing to judge or to do between tasks.  My intelligence would be a utility and nothing mo...