Regarding physicals.
Physicals fascinate me, and for very good reason. I’ve always been unlike the kids around me, though not for a reason as impressive as fangs or a tail. But I do come to the table with a different way of approaching the world that’s also the only way I know how to do it.
I was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome in 1998, just a few years after it was rediscovered by the American psychiatric community at large. Until then, it didn’t properly exist as a diagnosis. Since then, it’s been embraced by those to whom it applies and the people close to them. Just as there are now guidebooks for people with AS, there are guidebooks for how to deal with those people written both by people with AS and those who don’t - books giving help to parents and lovers and friends on how to deal with the strange person in their life.
When I was growing up, the books my parents read now didn’t exist. There wouldn’t have been a way for them to exist, not even in a heavily modified form where their subject wasn’t AS in particular or strange kids in general. I can remember when I first saw a parental guide in my dad’s pile of reading books, just a little while after I got diagnosed.
In some ways, I find it strange to consider when I was diagnosed because beforehand there wasn’t any thought as to why I was so weird and my parents were just expected to deal with me. There wasn’t anything for them to read, or anyone like me that I could talk to, or anyone for my family to talk to that knew why I was the way I am. For a long time, parents of kids with AS were operating without anything to tell them what to do. When I think of all the stuff put out right now on autism and AS, I’m a little disappointed that it’s supposedly becoming a “popular” diagnosis, like ADHD was a few years ago. But mostly I’m pleased, because while it’s not a good thing slap a random label onto a person, it’s a very good thing to know the reason for someone’s strangeness.
With that in mind, I’ve gotten a fair bit more sympathy for Johnny Knoxville’s parents. They had a powered child in a society where there wasn't anyone who could tell them he wasn’t a freak, that he was just a kid - a kid with special needs, perhaps, but a kid nonetheless. It’s likely they simply deferred judgment about him to the doctors and went along with what they were told, though if they didn’t have anyone to tell them otherwise, I can’t blame them. It’s not that they were doing what they thought was best for their child - they were doing what they thought was the only thing they could do for him at all. Reading literature about various ‘cures’ for autism I wonder where the people are in the real world to talk to those parents and save them from the desperation they must feel about their child not being normal.
Since Knoxville’s childhood, Parents of Powers - an organization particularly focused on children - began and has been building networks and informing the public at large about physicals and how they should be treated. I seem to have helped build an extended metaphor into this world without realizing it.
As I consider that organization, I wonder how families with powered kids now view the networks and supports, and how adult physicals see those same structures. With the former, they - like parents who now hear that their child has Asperger’s or autism - can almost take the systems in place now for granted because as far as they’re considered they’ve always been there. With the latter, they’d probably be amazed at what was accomplished and how the next generation won’t go through what happened to them. For example, it’s likely the forced attempts to make Knoxville normal aren’t done anymore, or at least not with the same frequency. As in the real world, it’s a generation of parents learning and growing up with their children, and both are learning there’s nothing inherently shameful in a diagnosis.
I was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome in 1998, just a few years after it was rediscovered by the American psychiatric community at large. Until then, it didn’t properly exist as a diagnosis. Since then, it’s been embraced by those to whom it applies and the people close to them. Just as there are now guidebooks for people with AS, there are guidebooks for how to deal with those people written both by people with AS and those who don’t - books giving help to parents and lovers and friends on how to deal with the strange person in their life.
When I was growing up, the books my parents read now didn’t exist. There wouldn’t have been a way for them to exist, not even in a heavily modified form where their subject wasn’t AS in particular or strange kids in general. I can remember when I first saw a parental guide in my dad’s pile of reading books, just a little while after I got diagnosed.
In some ways, I find it strange to consider when I was diagnosed because beforehand there wasn’t any thought as to why I was so weird and my parents were just expected to deal with me. There wasn’t anything for them to read, or anyone like me that I could talk to, or anyone for my family to talk to that knew why I was the way I am. For a long time, parents of kids with AS were operating without anything to tell them what to do. When I think of all the stuff put out right now on autism and AS, I’m a little disappointed that it’s supposedly becoming a “popular” diagnosis, like ADHD was a few years ago. But mostly I’m pleased, because while it’s not a good thing slap a random label onto a person, it’s a very good thing to know the reason for someone’s strangeness.
With that in mind, I’ve gotten a fair bit more sympathy for Johnny Knoxville’s parents. They had a powered child in a society where there wasn't anyone who could tell them he wasn’t a freak, that he was just a kid - a kid with special needs, perhaps, but a kid nonetheless. It’s likely they simply deferred judgment about him to the doctors and went along with what they were told, though if they didn’t have anyone to tell them otherwise, I can’t blame them. It’s not that they were doing what they thought was best for their child - they were doing what they thought was the only thing they could do for him at all. Reading literature about various ‘cures’ for autism I wonder where the people are in the real world to talk to those parents and save them from the desperation they must feel about their child not being normal.
Since Knoxville’s childhood, Parents of Powers - an organization particularly focused on children - began and has been building networks and informing the public at large about physicals and how they should be treated. I seem to have helped build an extended metaphor into this world without realizing it.
As I consider that organization, I wonder how families with powered kids now view the networks and supports, and how adult physicals see those same structures. With the former, they - like parents who now hear that their child has Asperger’s or autism - can almost take the systems in place now for granted because as far as they’re considered they’ve always been there. With the latter, they’d probably be amazed at what was accomplished and how the next generation won’t go through what happened to them. For example, it’s likely the forced attempts to make Knoxville normal aren’t done anymore, or at least not with the same frequency. As in the real world, it’s a generation of parents learning and growing up with their children, and both are learning there’s nothing inherently shameful in a diagnosis.