firecat

Analysis of Amos Burton from The Expanse that claims he is autistic and has CPTSD. I personally don't care about diagnostic names for what is going on for Amos, but there are a lot of good points in this article, about both Amos and what it's like and not like to fit into those categories. https://almostdefinitelydying.tumblr.com/post/157406005655/okay-so-the-thing-about-amos?fbclid=IwAR2or9zBxkTivEvghQ5NmREamMo6brNMJXcwoB2nYkGxpwMfNLMh62KjUxM

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From:

oracne

I haven't seen the show or read the books, but I still found that post really informative. Thanks for the link.

From:

firecat

Glad it was a worthwhile post for you!

From:

greghousesgf

I've never seen this show but I do have Asperger's (which I don't tell a lot of people) and I found this article really interesting. Thank you for posting the link.

From:

firecat

I'm glad to know it rings true to someone with Aspergers. (I'm not sure if I have it myself, but I like a fair number of people who do.)

From:

sasha_feather

Thanks this is interesting!

From:

kore

Oh, that's a great essay! T and I love the show and LOVE Amos, and I think that post really gets to his essential vulnerability (and Amos isn't a sociopath, WTF WTF). I think the actor really pours a lot of effort and love into Amos, too, and it really shows. Everyone on that show is so good. ~~Except Holden~~

I was bopping along reading that, though, and got stuck on there will often be late development with certain things such as delayed speech, delayed motor skills, and struggle to understand skill sets that aren’t innate (such as reading clocks or tying shoes) and I was like bzuh? Because I had the hypersensitivity, especially to LOUD noise (still do), and the difficult socialization, but man. It was an epic fucking struggle to get me to learn how to tie my damn shoes. I finally learned in like late fourth grade and still use the bunny-rabbit method (and friends still make fun of me for it). It always got written off as just me being Quirky/Nutty/Crazy or attention-getting ("You DO TOO know how to tie your shoes, we showed you and you did it just last week!") or plain Fucking Weird ("How can you still not know how to tie your damn shoes"). Same with spatial navigation, sense of direction, other stuff, it was all assumed to be Just Me, and that half the time I was faking. (Why would you fake not being able to tie your goddamn shoes, Jesus.)

From:

firecat

Glad you like the post!

Traumatic shoe-tying memories, argh! I remember the helpless feeling of "I'm behind everyone else" and people being exasperated with me. Some of it had to do with being chubby and not good at some athletic stuff. Some of it had to do with math. If it's a learning disability to be able to do high school math but only reeaaalllly sllooowwwwlllllyyyyyy, I have that.

From:

kore

All the bits about PTSD were good (and on the nose, aagh) too. It's always interesting to read writing from people who have the conditions, rather than outside "objective" (lol) medical observer.

It made it SO HARD to focus on stuff when I had the feeling all the adults -- teachers, parents, tutors, whoever -- were so exasperated with me and also thought I was making it up, FOR SOME REASON. And then at one point, I was actually tested by some kind of learning disabilities office, because my parents were so frustrated with how badly I was doing at school! (Or the school referred me, I don't remember, but it wasn't on school grounds.) I was actually DIAGNOSED with dyscalculia. Did the school help design a learning plan for me? No, they threw me into a catchall class (called, of course, "math for dummies") which included me, ESL kids, kids with behavioural problems, and other kinds of kids who all needed DIFFERENT treatment plans, not ONE (terrible) class taught by a (bad) math teacher. Did my parents take the diagnosis seriously? LOL no. Did the colleges I applied to waive required entrance math tests? LOL no. Did the college math classes I was required to take offer any help? LOL no. (This was the eighties.) I thought after a while I had made it up and there was no actual such condition until later in life, my husband was like "....have you always had this kind of trouble with math? Because I think there's an actual math learning disability," because he is a physics nerd who taught himself calculus when he was 12 so he was doing math tutoring for college students when he was IN college, and he was an actually GOOD tutor so he educated himself about stuff like learning disabilities. And suddenly I was like "Oh yeah, they diagnosed me with something like that! Dyscalculia? But then nobody ever did anything about it really," and he just kind of looked at me like how fucked up were the public school systems in New Mexico. (Answer: a lot.)

It REALLY pissed off all the adults when I would get tutored for hours and hours on stuff like times tables (man, don't ask me how much of my life was wasted on fucking times tables, and FRACTIONS) and I would finally, finally, finally seem (operative word here is "seem") to have a grasp on the most basic, simple, absolute ground level concepts, and then I would finally have a test (it all worked up to testing) and I would totally blank out and cry and then guess wildly, and oh boy was I in trouble then. (I found out LATER that blanking out on tests is something often seen with both learning disabilities AND childhood anxiety disorders. Whee.)

tl;dr AFAIK it's absolutely a learning disability thing to learn various rules that seem totally arbitrary painfully, with a lot of effort, and then be able to do math or whatever taking a long period of time, in a non-timed non-stress environment. Samuel R. Delany writes about having dyslexia in his writing memoir, and I was struck at the similarities with me and numbers -- how hard it felt to understand anything, to make anything stick, and then to not be able to self-correct -- so frustrating and anxiety-provoking.

(Also, since I was good at reading, it was just Assumed I would also be good at math, because smart kids are good at everything! and Delany apparently had the exact opposite problem with math/science and writing, and that's a whole other level of shame and pressure.)

From:

firecat

Sorry I didn't reply earlier; I can relate to so much of this. I don't think my math disability is as strong as yours but whether I did well in math had everything to do with whether I had a teacher who approached it in a way I could understand...whereas I learned language stuff no matter how bad the teaching was.

And blanking when anxiety is triggered. Fuck yeah.