Blogception: Blogging about Blogging

This week in class, we talked about how having a diversity of stories is extremely important in creating a complete picture of a culture, and how this can help us to better achieve cultural humility as occupational therapists. This is an idea that I agree with very strongly, especially because, for the last two weeks I've been writing a post on autism representation in media for my new occupation. In our OT Professions class this week, we talked about how only having one story about a population can lead to stereotypes that alienate the population we intend to represent, and I think this tendency has a huge effect on media representation of autism.  Often, representation in media of autism shows a white autistic man who is able to speak, and other characters see this person as socially repugnant, cold, burdensome, and generally difficult to interact with. Often, this character is only accepted by the other characters because of what they can contribute with their special skills. Ob...

Over the past few weeks, I've thought a lot about various forms of autism representation in media. My own blog is, itself, a form of autism representation. Because of this, I figured it would be useful to talk about various forms of autism representation as a big part of my blog. Originally, I had planned to go through a few of these examples individually with a blog post each, but then I realized that it would be most useful to talk about autism representation in media as a whole: what it means to represent autism well, how to do it, and how others have failed in this arena. This is a pretty complex topic, so this week's blog post isn't quite done yet, but I am making good progress. So far, I have come up with a few criteria for what makes autism representation good. Participation, or inviting input from the autistic community when creating autistic characters. Research, which includes both learning about autism as a medical condition and learning about the lived realities...

 When writing my weekly blog post earlier today, I thought it was ironic that the focus of my writing was my current struggle in regulating my focus on important things. This week, we have our anatomy midterm, and this weekend, my brain was much more interested in making a Halloween costume for my cat than studying for said midterm. This motivated me to spend this week's blog post talking about the topics of special interests and hyperfocus within the autistic community, and how these topics applied to me. This is a topic that I find pretty interesting, especially given the fact that I created my blog because of a special interest in autism itself.  I was a little worried I wouldn't be able to finish this week's post, given the business before a midterm, but I was thankfully able to complete it with some time to spare. For future weeks, I have plans of writing about a variety of media depicting autism and my opinions on that media. It'll be interesting to see what other...

Throughout the term, it's been really interesting to see how my blog has been developing. Now with ten different posts completed on my blog, I look forward to doing a word count at the end of the term. As my blog has grown, it's been satisfying to see how I've been able to touch on lots of different topics that matter to me, topics that I was worried I wouldn't be able to get around to in a timely manner, but I'm making good progress. This week, for example, I talked about my opinions on the term "Impostor Syndrome" as someone who was diagnosed with a syndrome myself. Personally, I'm not in favor of the word, which you can read about in my other blog if you have the time.   In doing all this writing, it has been neat to see how making this blog has been beneficial for my wellbeing. In general, I like to learn a lot about disability, autism, and other topics, but before making this blog, I didn't really have a good outlet for sharing this interest ...

After a nice relaxing weekend, I was ready to get back into blogging. Brainstorming about a few different ideas, I decided to write a post about various "life hacks" that I use when doing chores. As an autistic person, there are a number of chore-related activities that I've learned to make easier on myself by modifying how I do what I need to do, whether that's wearing headphones and dishwashing gloves for doing dishes, or making a list of every single meal I like so that I have ideas when it comes time for meal-planning. I feel like I did a pretty good job on this one, although I hope I didn't make it sound too much like I have everything figured out, since I am still making it up as I go along.  I also recently started reading the book "The Reason I Jump," which was written by a thirteen-year-old nonspeaking autistic person, and I would highly recommend it. I'll probably make next week's post a book review on this book, analyzing its represent...

This week marks the two-year anniversary of learning that I was on the autism spectrum. Because of this, I spent this week's blog post talking about the diagnostic process, how it was a very positive turning point for me in my life, and how for me, this date was a cause for celebration. When google didn't reveal a name for an autism diagnosis anniversary, I decided to coin the word "Autistiversary" for this event. However, since I'm the one making this term, I decided that it would refer to the date that I realized I was autistic, not the day that I got a phone call telling me that I'd receive an official diagnosis, or the day that the paperwork came in the mail. This is because diagnosis is a privilege, something that can be very difficult to attain for some people, especially women, racial/ethnic minorities, and adults. Being a member of all three of these groups, I wasn't officially diagnosed until just after my 21st birthday. In making this term, I wan...