Autism Traits In Girls

When I have a migraine...

I will irrationally hate anyone and anything that makes noise. 

I don’t make the rules, I just gotta hate.

Clarice Lispector, A Breath of Life

For anyone who has a disability or is in a situation that makes eating more difficult, I highly recommend this product:

I have extreme difficulty cooking, touching things, and using plates/cutlery due to my OCD and phobia. I have to rely heavily on premade food like ready-to-eat products made at my grocery store, frozen dinners, etc. This product I recently discovered has been an amazing help. 

There’s only four of these breakfast sandwiches in the container, but they’re a pretty good size and very filling. I can eat one of these sandwiches and be good for hours. The only thing you need to make them is a microwave. They cook for only a minute and thirty seconds, which is super fast! 

They require no preparation other than slightly opening the end of the package. You actually cook the sandwich right in the wrapper it’s stored in. This means that YOU DO NOT NEED A PLATE OR CUTLERY! You can use the wrapper you cooked it in to hold the sandwich as you eat it! So it is easy and quick to make, requires no preparation, it doesn’t make a mess, there’s no dishes to clean, you barely have to touch anything, and it tastes seriously good!

There are two versions of this product that both use different ingredients, but to me they tasted the same. The only real difference to me was that this sandwich uses turkey sausage and the other sandwich uses chicken sausage. This brand also makes some other similar breakfast items that are also very easy, but they require a bit more effort. The frittatas have to be put on a plate, and the breakfast burrito needs to be wrapped in a paper towel. I store paper plates in my fridge as an accommodation to help me still occasionally use plates, so I sometimes buy the frittatas. The breakfast burrito tastes so good and is a little easier for me to prepare with the paper towels than the frittatas that require a plate. But the breakfast sandwiches are probably the star of the show.

I know these sandwiches can’t fill someone’s entire dietary needs and that they won’t be useful for every disability that makes eating more difficult, especially disabilities like sensory disorders since they’re so individual, but I hope this recommendation can still help someone. If you have some days where cooking, touching things, standing for a long time, etc. is too hard, then this breakfast sandwich might be useful for an easy, filling, and tasty meal. The main obstacle of this product is that the price is about $6. Buy it on sale if you can. Since I tend to eat this as an entire dinner/snack, it’s not a terrible price since it averages out to $1.50 per meal. I’ve also accepted that food is just something I personally have to save more of my money for so I can spend more money on food that I can actually eat. Food that my disorders will allow me to eat is what I splurge on.

I hope this suggestion might help someone!

"War and Peace", Leo Tolstoy (translated by Constance Garnett)

Grandmas were so right about puzzles and knitting and crocheting and solitaire and reading slow and slippers and baking and watching deer in the backyard send post

I’m nonverbal, but I feel as if my support needs are low to medium because I am able to live by myself. I do have issues that I need assistance on like knowing when to eat and reminding myself to do things due to lack of time understanding, but I can function well on my own. 

There's a user on this site who is autistic and recently made a post about support needs, and I wanted your opinion as someone who has higher support needs than myself, cause I need to know if I'm in the right for disagreeing with them.

In their post, they claimed that when autistics refer to support needs, they're only talking about social deficits. If you're nonverbal, you're automatically high support needs. If you can speak clearly and verbally with ease but can't perform ADLs, you're still low support needs because autism is only a social disability.

Is that... right?? because a lot of autistic blogs are agreeing with them but I found it really perplexing and insulting, so I wanted to hear your thoughts.

I fully disagree with that person.

I know speaking people with high support needs. I know nonspeaking people with low support needs.

Support needs refers to how much support someone needs in daily life. I have mid-high support needs, not because I am nonspeaking, but because I will never be able to live alone, I cannot take care of myself, etc. and due to these things I NEED SUPPORT. Being nonspeaking absolutely makes my support needs higher than a speaking persons in the area of communication, but in general? Absolutely not. "Social deficits" can be related to support needs for some people, but that is most definitely not what it means.

I will always need to live with someone - that heightens my support needs.

I can not make myself food - that heightens my support needs.

I need quite a few disability aids - that heightens my support needs.

You probably get the idea.

Also, autism is NOT "only a social disability", that's part of it, yeah, but saying that's all it is is so invalidating and just-- isnt true??

Autism is a developmental disability. It affects my communication. It affects how I feel. It affects how I learn. It affects how I process. It affects how I think. There is nothing in me that isnt affected by me being autistic. Autism is not "just a social disability". A very quick google search will inform you that autism is a developmental disability.

Ok so at this point I've had two people roll up to me in manual wheelchairs, well, one of them was somebody pushing somebody who was nonverbal at the time, but it still counts. They asked me why I had zip ties around my tires.

It's winter where I'm living and we have really bad snow. And the snow plow people are really bad at their jobs probably because there aren't snow plow people who clean sidewalks. As a solution I got to thinking about how I could increase the traction on my wheels. And the most redneck thing I could think of was taking a bunch of zip ties and tying them around my wheels. They last surprisingly long, and work surprisingly well. It's basically the same premise as chains for your tires during the winter.

I chose to space them out pretty evenly so there's about one for every spoke. You could probably do more or less depending on how many you want and how much traction you get but I wouldn't go more than three per spoke. I realize that it's a bit later in the winter, and I probably should have made a post about this sooner, but I came up with it about a week ago. So please share this, even if you're not disabled, because there are tons of people I know who are stuck in their houses because they can't get around in the snow. A pack of zip ties costs about $5, which compared to $200 knobby snow tires is a big save, and if you want to invest you could get colored zip ties.

I'm starting a collection