Dear friends, I hope you are all doing well. My thoughts today are related to a lecture that I just wrote for a neurodivergent advocacy conference that is happening this week on-line (The Nurture Programme). The conference theme is “radical acceptance” of those of us whose minds function in a different way than the majority.  My topic was about how easy it is for those who have limited verbal language skills to be overlooked or ignored in our society, effectively making us invisible or anonymous. I love the term, “radical acceptance.”  My understanding of the word “radical” is something that is dramatically different from the norm. How cool would it…

Hi everybody. Today I have been thinking about how I felt when I was young and going to public school and I wanted to write a post about it. I remember being in a line at lunch one time when some of the other kids in line were making jokes about those of us in the special needs class. The teacher who was with us quickly shut it down and we got our lunch and headed back to our classroom to eat instead of with everyone else in the cafeteria. I thought that was the wrong choice, just like I think contained classrooms are the wrong choice in most situations.…

Hello everyone, Today is the Motormorphosis conference in Herndon, Virginia. For those who aren’t familiar, it is the flagship conference of the International Association for Spelling as Communication (i-asc.org). This is a wonderful organization that help people with limited verbal language communicate by spelling.  I was supposed to be at the conference but got sick with Covid this week so we had to stay home. But my older brother Ben and my sister-in-law Becky are there on my behalf. They showed me what it was all about over a FaceTime call. It was fun for me to see other people with autism like me who are using their talents to…

Hello friends, It has been a while since I have written a new blog post. I guess I’ve had a bit of writer’s block and couldn’t think of anything that I thought would be of interest to others. But someone asked me a question on Facebook, and it has given me some new ideas. So, thank you to that person who reached out to me. She wanted to know how I learned to spell before I knew how to express myself with typing. I didn’t start typing until I was around fifteen years old, but my relationship with letters goes back to almost the beginning. I was between two and…

Hi everyone,   I have been pondering a lot lately about what living in a speaking society means to those of us who are non-speakers. I recently learned that term, “non-speaker,” and how it is different from being “non-verbal.” I am verbal.  I make lots of noises, sounds, and words. I can communicate simple things with words, but I am hindered dramatically when it goes beyond a very basic level.  I certainly am unable to have a back-and-forth conversation about anything useful or important. So, in a speakers’ world, I am dysfunctional, a “non-speaker.”  Human society is set up for speakers. Non-speakers are almost unrecognizable as people. We are more like…

Goals are important for everyone. They provide motivation and a pathway for self-improvement. Without some sort of goal, we will either wander without direction or, even worse, stagnate in the same place. I have learned for myself how important it is to set goals that will challenge me to push outside of my comfort zone. Hard goals drive me to really change for the better. But I also realize that I need to be patient with how autism affects my abilities to accomplish things that might otherwise be much easier. Today, I want to talk about what I have learned about myself by setting goals and working hard to achieve…

Hello again, everyone. Thank you for reading and I hope you are finding my insights helpful. Today, I want to talk about how difficult it is for people with autism and other disabilities to feel included by our more typical peers. I have mentioned in a previous post how I have frequently felt jealous of others who are my same age but were having vastly different experiences as they matured. An age-level appropriate education is one of those experiences, for sure. I would have loved to have been challenged in high school with real grades, AP tests, and college-entrance exams. But no one knew that my mind was capable of…

Hi again, everyone.  This is the third post in my series about what it is like to have autism. For those who haven’t met me, let me describe my current relationship with language and what the journey has been like for me. Speech is the natural way that most people communicate with each other and is one of the first things that we start learning as an infant.   But for some reason, the brains of many people with autism work in a different way. For us, speech is hard.   When I was diagnosed with autism as a young child, I had some verbal language. To clarify, I could say some words,…

Hi, everyone. I appreciate the great response to my last post about autism symbols and how I would prefer to be seen as an acorn with great tree-like potential rather than a random piece of an unsolved puzzle.   Today, I want to focus some attention on an uncomfortable topic for me:  behavioral meltdowns. These are dreaded by teachers, principals, therapists, and parents, I’m sure, but maybe you are not aware of how much those of us actually having the meltdown dread them, too.    Behavioral meltdowns are hard, and they take a toll on everyone involved. For me, they are uncomfortable physically because of the stress on my body and chance…