Looking Forward and Looking Back

After three weeks, I finally finished my blog post about autism representation in media, and I'm really proud of how it turned out. I'm a little worried it may be too long, but everything in there is important. If needed, I could probably separate it into good representation and bad representation, but it looks good for now. Along with this post, I created a list of various movies that engage in autism representation, ordering them from really good representation to really bad representation and a short explanation why I placed them where I did. 

With thinking about next steps, I've been planning my next post for this blog. Over the years, I've noticed that autistic people and other disabled people tend to act as metaphorical "canaries in the coal mine." When places are inaccessible, when attitudes create barriers, and when people are secretly terrible human beings, it's disabled people that experience these things first. They're the crash test dummies, the ones who are hurt first and worst when things go bad, and we often don't hear about these things until it's too late. 

I've experienced this tendency both firsthand and secondhand, seeing teachers that loved me completely belittle and exclude my younger siblings because they had the label of a diagnosis at the time, and I did not. I've heard stories of schools that locked the elevators during fire drills, meaning that wheelchair users couldn't leave the building even in a fake emergency. I've seen stores that banned plastic straws, meaning that if a person with quadriplegia or physical disabilities tried to buy a drink at their store, they wouldn't be able to drink it. Some of these results are intentional but many are unintentional, and they all cause harm to people with disabilities. In my next blog post, I plan to go more into these tendencies, how they hurt disabled people, and ways to avoid these results.

Past this next week's blog post, I do plan on continuing to write my blog as time permits, and maybe even starting a YouTube channel at some point, but I may be posting less regularly in the future because this is no longer a homework assignment. Overall, I've enjoyed this occupation a lot, and I feel like I got a lot out of it. While it may not directly apply to my job as an occupational therapist, blogging about autism has given me a lot of opportunities to think about potential modifications to activities for both autistic people and disabled people at large, which can help me better serve my clients as an occupational therapist.

When looking at the search for meaning in occupation, I can see how my chosen occupation has been affected by the material we learned in class. My favorite lecture included conversations about disability studies, inclusivity, and the importance of identity-first language, which are topics that I've talked about multiple times in my own blog. One article in particular, "Rethinking disability and what to do about it: disability studies and its implications for occupational therapy" by Kielhofner (2005), shared early perspectives that it was important to recognize the influence of environment on a person's ability to make meaning through participation in occupations. Written all the way back in 2005, this article gives us a glance into occupational therapy when the field first became aware of disability studies and its implications for respecting patients with disabilities in their efforts to create meaning through their disability, rather than in spite of it. While this is a topic I had already been introduced to, I really appreciated learning about it in-class, and having the opportunity to do so had a great impact on my knowledge of occupational therapy and the process of making meaning.

Now that we're getting closer to the end of the term, I've been thinking more about the choices I made when picking my new occupation, and I thought I'd share a few recommendations for future students in this program.

1. Pick something you're passionate about that you'll enjoy doing, but not something that will be ruined by making it required. Writing for me was a great choice because I already write for fun, and I already do writing as homework, but I hadn't created a blog like this before, so I knew that I would find it enjoyable without feeling like the requirement would ruin the experience.

 

2. Pick something that you can make visible progress on throughout the term. Knitting, for example, can take a long time, but certain projects like Weather blankets are great for showing slow progress over time, and other projects like hats are reasonably doable within a shorter period of time. Blogging was a great chocie for me because I can look at my word count to see my progress, and I can also spend multiple weeks on the same post as long as I'm still making progress.

3. Pick something affordable. College is expensive, and blogging cost me $0 throughout the course of the term. Originally, I considered creating a youtube channel, but this would have been more costly in both time and money, so I decided on blogging, which has been a great choice. Of course, my other hobbies are a bit more expensive, but I can do those at my own pace, so it balances itself out. Low costs also makes it more likely that you'll want to continue your occupation in the future.

4. Choose an occupation that meets your needs. For some people, this means picking an active occupation to get more exercise, for others, this means choosing a quiet occupation as a way to destress after class. Other people recharge from being social, so picking a social occupation could be helpful for them. For me, I wanted a quiet but fun way to express myself, so I picked writing a blog, and I've enjoyed it a lot. 

5. Pick something that you can present in Show and Tell. I'm still not quite sure how I'll present my blog in Show and Tell at the end of the term, but I'll figure it out eventually. This isn't a requirement, but it is something that would make your lives much easier in the future.

References:

Kielhofner, G. (2005). Rethinking disability and what to do about it: Disability studies and its implications for occupational therapy. The American Journal of Occupational Therapy, 59(5), 487–496. https://doi.org/10.5014/ajot.59.5.487 

My Blog:

https://www.blogger.com/u/0/blog/post/edit/2857488203907300840/5747449259624841167