This is Legwork and Life, where I track the legwork and opportunities in my career as an autistic advocate, and also describe parts of my adult autistic life, including my perspectives on everyday problems and situations.
Y'know how last week I mentioned I wasn't sleeping well? I have introduced a new and exciting way to be awake. In fact, I am now so awake most of the time I find it hard to gauge my tiredness. I'm very impressed. Not entirely positively.
The cause of all this is an older model HappyLight. While the models on the website provide 10,000 lux, this one only provides 4,500... but that seems more than sufficient. And while the box recommends use up to an hour, I am only using the silly thing for 20 minutes out of a whole day... and still having this "I am VERY AWAKE" effect.
I do still find myself yawning through activities that don't require my entire attention, which is discomfiting and makes me feel rude. But I was doing that before, and my overall level of sleepiness versus awakeness is very much toward the latter. I can't really decide if, after a week of use, I really feel better, or just more awake. It's disquieting to not be able to easily judge how tired I am. Case in point, I don't have enough sleep this morning and I'm still quite awake and feel quite unable to take a nap.
My actual capabilities in terms of nap-taking are unknown, though. I do still seem to fall asleep at night in a reasonable time, despite just... not feeling tired. That lack of feeling-tired-ness hinders me in gauging whether I could benefit from a nap, so I mostly haven't tried.
In other news, I went to a lecture by a local professor (and parent of an autistic teenager) regarding representations of autism in the media. This is a facet of the autism world I'm nearly illiterate in, so I really didn't want to miss it. Unsurprisingly, I found I have a lot to learn yet. I haven't, for example, seen Rain Man, which was the movie that put autism on the public radar in the first place. I haven't read any of the books he presented on.
It's humbling that even after all this reading I've done, I still have so much to learn. I think I've been keeping my fiction (pleasure) reading and my autism-education (work) reading separate on purpose, to avoid bleed between the two. Professor Rozema, on the other hand, has kind of merged those two things in pursuit of being a better parent. More power to him, and I'm really glad.
I found the lecture itself enlightening, if a little depressing. Seems between the tendency to portray autistic people as savants (only 10% of us are savants, actually) and the tendency to only portray us as our autism (only autistic traits, never "this is a person with traits besides the autistic ones"), we're pretty non-existent out there. He also pointed out that when autistic people are portrayed, they almost invariably cast neurotypical actors. Even in cases when the actors then go to great lengths to learn how to portray autistic people, this is undesirable. It's better to hire actual autistic actors for these parts, just like how you shouldn't hire white people to play First People or African Americans.
It was the post-lecture discussion that really wore me out, though. The person I attended the lecture with kind of threw the spotlight on me during the Q&A, pushing my blog to the crowd of 40+ people. I made an offhand comment about answering any questions people had from an autistic point of view after everything was over, and several people took me up on that. All the conversations in question were interesting, and all were worthwhile, but I felt wrung out afterwards. I suppose I wasn't expecting quite so much conversation when I wasn't even a presenter. Maybe if they do this next year, I will be? Not sure how I get hooked into that.
Anyway, it was an eventful week between those things and managing the juggling act that is my life.
Y'know how last week I mentioned I wasn't sleeping well? I have introduced a new and exciting way to be awake. In fact, I am now so awake most of the time I find it hard to gauge my tiredness. I'm very impressed. Not entirely positively.
The cause of all this is an older model HappyLight. While the models on the website provide 10,000 lux, this one only provides 4,500... but that seems more than sufficient. And while the box recommends use up to an hour, I am only using the silly thing for 20 minutes out of a whole day... and still having this "I am VERY AWAKE" effect.
I do still find myself yawning through activities that don't require my entire attention, which is discomfiting and makes me feel rude. But I was doing that before, and my overall level of sleepiness versus awakeness is very much toward the latter. I can't really decide if, after a week of use, I really feel better, or just more awake. It's disquieting to not be able to easily judge how tired I am. Case in point, I don't have enough sleep this morning and I'm still quite awake and feel quite unable to take a nap.
My actual capabilities in terms of nap-taking are unknown, though. I do still seem to fall asleep at night in a reasonable time, despite just... not feeling tired. That lack of feeling-tired-ness hinders me in gauging whether I could benefit from a nap, so I mostly haven't tried.
In other news, I went to a lecture by a local professor (and parent of an autistic teenager) regarding representations of autism in the media. This is a facet of the autism world I'm nearly illiterate in, so I really didn't want to miss it. Unsurprisingly, I found I have a lot to learn yet. I haven't, for example, seen Rain Man, which was the movie that put autism on the public radar in the first place. I haven't read any of the books he presented on.
It's humbling that even after all this reading I've done, I still have so much to learn. I think I've been keeping my fiction (pleasure) reading and my autism-education (work) reading separate on purpose, to avoid bleed between the two. Professor Rozema, on the other hand, has kind of merged those two things in pursuit of being a better parent. More power to him, and I'm really glad.
I found the lecture itself enlightening, if a little depressing. Seems between the tendency to portray autistic people as savants (only 10% of us are savants, actually) and the tendency to only portray us as our autism (only autistic traits, never "this is a person with traits besides the autistic ones"), we're pretty non-existent out there. He also pointed out that when autistic people are portrayed, they almost invariably cast neurotypical actors. Even in cases when the actors then go to great lengths to learn how to portray autistic people, this is undesirable. It's better to hire actual autistic actors for these parts, just like how you shouldn't hire white people to play First People or African Americans.
It was the post-lecture discussion that really wore me out, though. The person I attended the lecture with kind of threw the spotlight on me during the Q&A, pushing my blog to the crowd of 40+ people. I made an offhand comment about answering any questions people had from an autistic point of view after everything was over, and several people took me up on that. All the conversations in question were interesting, and all were worthwhile, but I felt wrung out afterwards. I suppose I wasn't expecting quite so much conversation when I wasn't even a presenter. Maybe if they do this next year, I will be? Not sure how I get hooked into that.
Anyway, it was an eventful week between those things and managing the juggling act that is my life.
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