Related to your last post, no matter how much you like dogs, it is not okay to touch someone’s service dog without permission and if they say no, one needs to accept that. Also, not every person with a service dog wants to stop and chat about their dog with you.
Touching someone’s wheelchair, or other mobility equipment, is a really big deal. You shouldn’t ever do this without permission.
Part of the reason this is a big deal is that most mobility equipment users experience their mobility device as part of their body. It’s invasive and bad to touch people without their permission.
But it’s actually even more wrong to touch mobility equipment without permission than it is to touch someone without permission generally.
Messing up someone’s mobility equipment means they can’t get around. It can also sometimes cause immediate injury. It can also lead to injury by making the equipment less safe to use (for instance, if you screw up someone’s cushion and they can’t afford to get it fixed right away, that could cause a pressure sore.)
Touching mobility equipment without permission is a threat to use dangerous force and hurt someone or leave them stranded. Even if you don’t mean to be threatening. Even if you think you’re helping the person. Even if you think you’d never hurt anyone. It’s never ok to make another person that vulnerable without their permission (unless someone else is physically attacking you and you are in danger to the point that violent self-defense is justified.).
It’s sort of like… you don’t touch people without their permission. And you *especially* don’t grab someone without permission. And you *especially espeically* don’t put your hand on someone’s throat without permission.
Moving someone’s mobility equipment without permission is like attacking someone with handcuffs. (Or worse).
Don’t do it.
“I have a good friend in the East, who comes to my shows and says, you sing a lot about the past, you can’t live in the past, you know. I say to him, I can go outside and pick up a rock that’s older than the oldest song you know,
and bring it back in here and drop it on your foot. Now the past didn’t go anywhere, did it? It’s right here, right now.
I always thought that anybody who told me I couldn’t live in the past was trying to get me to forget something that if I remembered it it would get them serious trouble.Utah Phillips, “The Past Didn’t Go Anywhere”
Just about everyone who has been the victim of abuse, or has lived through something horrible, has been told that they need to stop living in the past. That they need to get over it and move on already, because things are different now.
But the past didn’t go anywhere. It’s still right here, right now. Everything that happened to you, everything they did to you – it all stays happened. And it never stops mattering. Because going through trauma changes things permanently. (and so does every other type of experience, for that matter. But not in the same way).
The past doesn’t have to stop mattering, and you don’t have to pretend that it doesn’t matter anymore. You can build a life, and make good things happen for yourself, even though the past didn’t go anywhere and it never stops mattering.
Even if sometimes you wake up terrified, even if you bear scars, even if you’ve lost a lot of abilities you once treasured, even if you’ve lost your community and everyone you once thought you could count on.
Life is still worth living, and good things are still possible. Even though the past didn’t go anywhere. And acknowledging that the past is still there and that it still matters makes it more possible to rebuild, not less.
Just like you can’t live in a physical abstraction and accepting the reality of your physical body and its limits makes life better, you can’t live in an abstraction of an imaginary theoretical mind that you might have had without the trauma. You have to live as the person you are, and build from there.
And your live is worthwhile, and important, even if some things never heal. The past didn’t go anywhere, but you can keep going.
Some people who can usually use language to communicate lose a lot of their words if they get too hungry.
When you’re hungry, you don’t have as many cognitive resources available, and some of what is available gets taken up by dealing with hunger. For some people, this can mean that the resources needed for language simply aren’t there.
If you’re finding that you often can’t speak well in the middle of the day, it’s possible that you are forgetting to eat. This might be the case even if you don’t feel hungry.
If you get used to not eating properly, it can be hard to notice hunger. If you’re too hungry for too long, sometimes you get used to automatically ignoring the sensations of hunger, which can make them hard to identify.
If you’re experiencing sudden cognitive or communication impairment, and you haven’t eaten recently, it might be a side effect of hunger. Sometimes, if you get too accustomed to the sensations of hunger, you don’t notice feeling hungry until it stops you from thinking well.
If you used to be able to use language reliably but are experiencing seriously diminished ability, it might mean that you haven’t been eating properly for a long time.
Hunger isn’t the only reason some people have intermittent language problems, and it’s not the only reason people lose language skills in a longer-term way. But it’s very common for people with communication disabilities to have dramatically worse communication problems when they are chronically hungry.
If you’re having communication problems that seem to be more severe than you expect, it’s worth checking to see if you’re also having trouble eating enough. And if you are, it’s worth making fixing that a priority.
A reader asked:
Can non autistics stim too or is that a term/thing reserved for autistics?
Yes, it’s common for other kinds of people too.
It’s not only autistic people who do it. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with a nonautistic person moving in ways that are common for autistic people.
It’s just that stimming tends to be really important to autistic people (and folks with some other disabilities), in a way that it usually isn’t for people without disabilities.
And here’s a thing about that:
It’s important to keep this in mind, and to understand that stimming is really, really important for some people.
If you’re not disabled, and these kinds of motions aren’t particularly important for you, it’s probably better to call them fidgeting.
These things are different:
These get conflated all over the place, in part because they both lead to breaking certain social expectations. But they’re actually fundamentally different (although it’s possible for someone to have both problems)
Both of these things get called social awkwardness. This causes a lot of problems, in particular:
People who don’t care about other people’s boundaries often actually have exceptionally *good* abilities to read social cues, for instance:
So, if you want to create spaces that are safe for good people who have trouble reading social cues:
Sometimes, you hurt someone in a way that is dealbreaking. I think most people will probably do this at some point during the course of their life. Not to the same degree, and not with the same culpability, but it’s something that everyone is capable of doing.
If you do that, it’s important not to put pressure on the person you hurt to forgive you.
If they’ve asked you not to contact them, respect that. Even if you think that you understand what the problem was and you’ve now solved it. Even if you think you’re trustworthy now. Even if what you really want is a chance to apologize.
People you’ve hurt don’t owe you their attention, and they don’t owe it to you to help you learn to be a better person. They don’t owe you help getting atonement.
When you’re in a hole, stop digging. Don’t keep hurting the person with constant invasive attempts to apologize or fix things.
Sometimes you can’t make things right. Some things can’t be undone; some damage can’t be fixed.
What you can do is move on, and learn from the experience. You can learn what you did wrong, and figure out how to never do it again. And you can build a life in which you are good to others, while respecting that the person you hurt is no longer part of it.
Sometimes, someone hurts you in a way that’s permanently and forver dealbreaking.
Some people will tell you that you have to forgive the person who hurt you in order to move on. Sometimes, they will put lots of pressure on you and tell you that if you’re still suffering, it’s your own fault for bearing a grudge.
But… you don’t have to forgive someone to get distance. You can do that by creating a boundary. Sometimes that means you limit contact with them to areas in which they’re safe for you. Sometimes that means you break off contact entirely. In any case, it’s something you can do unilaterally.
You can break away and build a life that has nothing to do with them. They don’t have to loom large in your life forever.
And you don’t have to get closure or resolution or anything like that in order to move on. What you have to do is move on and do other things.
It takes time and it doesn’t fix everything (neither does forgiveness, despite cultural tropes). But it allows you to build space for yourself, without that person’s hurt taking over everything. And you don’t have to forgive them or do anything at all regarding them to get that space.
Your life is about you, not the person who hurt you.
If you want to try therapy (OT/PT/psych/CBT/whatever):
Friendships require two consenting people. Someone can’t be your friend unless you also want to be their friend. Friendship is a relationship and it has to be mutual.
Some people do not understand this. Some people want to think of themselves as your friends, and don’t care what you want.
In effect, people who do this are treating you as an imaginary friend. They don’t want *you*. They want an imaginary different person who wants to be their close friend. (And, they probably want a number of other differences, too.)
If they wanted you, if they were interested in friendship with the person you actually are, they’d respect it when you said no.
You can’t usually stop someone from perceiving you as an imaginary friend, but you don’t owe them your cooperation, either. It’s ok to ignore them. It’s ok to refuse to listen to lectures on why you’re being a bad friend. You don’t have to give them a chance and you don’t have to convince them that you’re right to distance yourself. You don’t owe it to anyone to help them pretend you’re their friend.
You can’t stop them from thinking whatever they want to think about you. If they send you lots of email. Or letters. Just don’t read them. Because they’re interacting with an imaginary person. Not you. And the real you doesn’t have to play along.