Anniversaries of Turning Points and Self-examination in My Blog

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 wanted this celebration to be accessible to all autistic people, not just those with an extra $3,000 laying around to spend on the expensive diagnostic process. This is why, this October 16th, I'll be celebrating my two-year Autistiversary and all the self-discovery that came along with it.

Given that my occupation, my blog, is entirely focused on autism and my thoughts surrounding it, my occupation is extremely focused on topics related to the self, including my internal thought processes and the theories I use to make sense of the world around me. Especially when thinking about my relationship with the topic of autism, what I understand about it can change how I understand myself. Likewise, I use my understanding of myself as a measuring tool to examine new information I receive about autism. For example, if I read a textbook that says that all autistic people lack imagination, I can look at myself, knowing that I am autistic and I have an imagination (sometimes too much so), and I can decide that this new information is ill-informed, incorrect, and decidedly unhelpful. On the other hand, if I learn that many autistic people experience stress from their environment due to certain sights, sounds and smells, I can analyze my surroundings when I am experiencing stress, learn to recognize environmental stressors, and find ways to minimize these while participating in my occupations to a much fuller extent. In this way, my new occupation, learning about autism and sharing this knowledge in the form of a blog, is extremely transactional both in how I understand the world and how I understand myself within the world.

When I originally chose this occupation at the beginning of the term, it was something that I'd actually been thinking about doing for a while, but hadn't gotten around to it yet. In class, we've learned a lot about the topics of self-knowledge, self-esteem, self-perception, and self-awareness. I would say that all of these concepts was involved in my choice of occupation for this class. First, knowing myself and knowing my interest in autism along with my desire to share and educate others about this topic, I knew that this was a topic I would find enjoyable as I learned more about the subject. 

Second, throughout my biology degree, I became used to classes that misrepresented autism and autistic people, making claims that autistic people lacked empathy, that they suffered from autism due to chemical contaminants, and even that we were less human because we lacked the apparently innate ability of all humans to read minds. As an autistic person, these things were really stressful to have to listen to whenever autism came up in class, and it came up a lot. Being told that I lack empathy, that I am the result of deficits caused by exposure to chemicals, and that one of the most positive turning points in my life was actually just a sign that I am less human than my classmates, I knew that all these things could be extremely damaging to someone's self-esteem. Part of my reasoning for making this blog was to combat these ideas, creating a space free of this stigmatizing information that was all too common in my undergraduate degree, where information on autism could me more informative than hurtful, and more positive than fatalistic. This is tied in with my self-perception. When faced with these opinions about people like me, I had two choices: I could decide that these thoughts were correct, that I was deficient, sub-human, lacking in empathy, etc, or I could reject these opinions and come to the conclusion that I was a complete, complex, human being. I chose to see these ideas as incorrect, and I perceive myself outside of these negative viewpoints when sharing my thoughts and opinions about autism.

In terms of self-awareness, I know that I am a decent writer, and that I am capable of best expressing myself in written word. When picking this occupation, I almost chose to create a youtube channel instead of a blog, but I decided in the end that blogging was cheaper, less time intensive, and less focused on my ability to communicate these topics verbally. 

Another thing we learned about this week were the descriptors of occupation as a servant, a reflector, and a mirror. I would say that my experience of my occupation reveals aspects of all three of these things. A servant, according to our reading, "fosters the achievement of important goals and end states," which I can see in my fairly consistent blogging, and the fact that I have already touched on important topics like identity-first language, descriptions of autism, and how disability relates to my faith. The recruiter aspect, "pulling a set of attached consequences into play," is met through going from discussions of autism to discussions of faith, since my faith determines how I see myself, and my views on autism also determine how I see myself, so the consequences of learning about autism required finding a sense of cohesiveness and agreement between these two sources of identity. Faith is still the primary identifier I use, but through studying this topic, I was also able to better understand both of these parts of myself. Finally, the mirror is important because it reflects the self. One could say that the entirety of my blog is focused on my reflections of myself, learning more about myself, sharing that knowledge, and seeing its implications for how I understand the world around me. In these ways, my occupation is all three of these things, servant, recruiter, and mirror, and my blog itself continues to be a source of enjoyment and learning for me and will hopefully serve others as it continues.