Back to the Basis: Foundations for a Blog
I mentioned in a previous post that I've been thinking about blogging and content creation for a while before I actually started, and part of that was thinking about potential topics for posts. Currently, my list includes describing autism, addressing misconceptions about autism, explaining my personal stance on things like functioning labels, symbolism for autism, identity-first language vs. person first language, and therapy options for autism. I also hope to address Autism's History and look at a variety of topics related to disability studies as a whole. Outside of these topics, I'll likely talk about day-to-day experiences as they come up, and any advice I have for other autistic people in similar scenarios.
Eventually, I hope to come up with my own iconic way of writing, although I've always been a little short in the charisma department. Predictability is something I'm pretty good at, and I like to think that my topics are interesting enough as is, given that I decided to commit a decent chunk of time to writing about them.
When thinking about how much I still have to cover, it can feel a little overwhelming and a little exciting. Exciting because I have a lot of interesting topics to cover in detail and overwhelming for those same reasons. Many of these topics are a very important foundation for the rest of my blog, and it can be easy to put too many barriers between myself and posting blog entries. For me, this can look like over-planning but never actually starting a post, or it could look like writing a post and then spending a week deciding whether or not it is finished enough to post. It's hard too because a lot of the topics I want to write about are topics that I care about a lot, and I want to do them justice, both for myself and for others like me.
In this sense, Hasselkus's definitions of occupation really hit home. His first definition of simply "doing" was expanded to seeing occupation as "the synthesis of doing, being, and becoming." However, I believe that my occupation aligns more fully with the next definition, which comprised of doing, being, becoming, and belonging. In the "doing" or writing of my blog, I am representing and explaining parts of my being, becoming a more skilled self-advocate as well as a better advocate for future patients. Throughout this process, I am reminded that I share a sense of belonging with a larger community. My occupation is interesting because it connects to both my sense of self and to my sense of community with other autistic people and people with disabilities.
Not all occupations may exhibit these things quite as explicitly, but the idea remains true throughout. For example, I've recently adopted a second hobby or "occupation" of creating cosplay costumes. For the past few weeks, I've been working on a Star Wars costume mimicking what Princess Leia wore on Endor in Episode 6 of Star Wars. This occupation, similarly to blogging, accomplishes these goals of occupation. It involves a lot of working with my hands (doing), fully embracing my status as a nerd who is overly invested in the Star Wars fandom (being), working to "become" Princess Leia in costume if not in reality (becoming), and working on this project in the art center on campus in preparation for a large-scale event like Comicon means that my hobby connects me to a larger group or community of Star Wars nerds (belonging). While the end product of these two tasks is very different, the title of "occupation" is rightly shared by both.
Thankfully, neither of my hobbies are excluded from these definitions of occupation, since even typing at a computer counts as "doing," and while both are done mostly in solitude, they tie into a sense of belonging to larger social groups than those directly involved in the creation of the end product.
Wilcock, in our reading, takes it one step further than most of the others in the reading, stating that this sense of doing, being, becoming, and belonging would lead to our survival and overall health and wellbeing. When thinking about this model in the context of my blog, I would say that while this blog isn't directly tied into my physical health, the ability to share thoughts and ideas in this way could be very beneficial for mental health. While certainly not an activity of daily living, this leisure activity can
provide additional meaning and value to the time we spend in a day. For me, working on my blog or spending time painting a helmet is more meaningful than spending an hour surfing the internet, so while they may not add to my ability to survive, they definitely help bridge the gap between surviving and thriving as a grad student at ISU.
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