Category: Inside My Mind

I have a prosthetic eye. The last one I got was about twenty years ago, so I decided it was time for a new one. This is a write-up about my experience while it’s still fresh, and also to answer many of the questions I get. (Weak narrative structure here, this is somewhat stream-of-consciousness.) Popular…

While I believe it has never been explicitly stated on either “The Big Bang Theory” (BBT) or “Young Sheldon” (YS), it seems pretty clear that the character of Sheldon Cooper is intended to be autistic. He represents one of the common stereotype sets of an autist: Annoyingly obsessive about some topics, lacking in overt empathy…

Sunday: My two brothers and I had a long, deliberate talk about childhood traumas. This is the first such conversation I remember having, at least in person, with both of them together. My older brother lives in northern Saskatchewan and visits every few years. My younger brother lives about an hour south of me. Saturday,…

I have long had this discomfort having conversations, especially about emotional topics. It feels like I’m playing out a script: I speak, you speak, I speak, and I can see the galleys of dialogue that we’ve been working our way through. As if the point of conversation is not to connect with another, but rather…

It would be nice if the people who live in my head would pay rent from time to time. The first people who moved into my psyche were my parents. They have separate rooms in the cellar, well entrenched there in apartments that most of the other residents aren’t even aware are there. There’s no…

I have long avoided phone calls. If I have to call someone else, I usually need to work myself up. And when the phone rings, I either let it go to voicemail or (much less often) answer with an anxious aggression. I have generally attributed this avoidance to PTSD: After I moved out of my…

Special interest: Our language choices can affect and even effect thoughts. This is generally known as the Weak Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. And though this generally focuses on word choice, it’s also true of grammatical choices. One example is the debate between “person first” (“person with autism”) and “identity first” (“autistic person”) language. Disabled people (persons with…

This week I had to euthanize one of my cats. She’d been with us for nearly 20 years; she came in as a stray that refused to leave the porch. She was stubborn until the end, but it was clear that her various physical problems, particularly a cheek infection of some sort, had overwhelmed her….

This morning I saw a headline that said that some 400 police officers were on site in Uvalde before an off-duty non-police-officer border guard showed up and killed the shooter. My first instinct was to sarcastically comment “That’s a lot of bad apples”, but I didn’t. Instead, my brain decided to compare the standard police…

So someone asked why Demi Lovato is so controversial and… I can’t tell. I feel like people take every little thing they say and twist it way out of proportion. They accepted a free trip to Israel and were excited about getting baptized in the River Jordan. This becomes: “Demi Lovato is a Zionist!” They…