Quotes from "Atypical" by Jesse Saperstein

I recently read _Atypical: Life with Asperger's in 20 1/3 Chapters_.  So much of it rang true to things we'regoing through with Z right now.
 
"The neurotypical public feels entitled to condemn a population who appears to lack empathy or consideration for other human beings while trampling their boundaries like a bed of posies.  Before some of my teachers even knew Asperger's symdrome existed, my uniqueness was judged as a black-and-white character flaw with no redeeming shades of gray." - pp 32-33

"The nonsensical costume is meant to prove a point.  Individuals with Asperger's struggle with flexibility and (in my case) feeling of entitlement.  If my intentions are good, then I lack empathy for the comfort zones of others and feel entitled to overstep my bounds.  Survival among the neurotypicals requries relentless comprominse, overanalying the situation, and making life just a little more compolicated in order to solve teh smimplest problems.

In my costume I am pretending to be a gross exaggeration of my inflexible, egocentric self -- someone who always flaunted his flamboyant uniqueness and paid a horrific price.  My character becomes clinically depressed from watching others enjoy the breaks associated with career advancement and romance.  And yet ... he continues to fail miserably.  In his darkest hour of loneliness, the  man finallly accept that his social and professional survival must depend on a willingness to conform."  - p184

Discussing movies about indiviuals on the spectrum:

"We can scrounge up countless adjectives to describe the fictional movie personalities:  obessive-comulsive, overly aggressive, over passive, passive-aggrfessive, vindictive, quirky, brillian, determine, neurotic, angry, frustrated, idiot savants, or losts souls.  The fictional entities, however, are given more of a chance than a type AS individual in the real world.  And moviegoes devote at least ninety minutes of their time trying to unravel their enigmatic psyches.  By the end of these films the neurotpical audience admires the character's courage and may even identify with some of his struggles.  Pee-wee Herman, Max Fischer, and Bobby Boucher are all extremely dissimilar characters who share a handful of universal truths.  They ar etoo high functioning to be considered disabled, while too odd to be judged as normal.

They all nurse the same desperation to connect with ttheir neurotypical peers and escape from a chronic social isolation.  They are prepared to case these goals through sheer determination, manipulations, overcompensation, and even allwoing themselves to be exploited.  Upon the culmination of these movies, they cease to be "losers" and find redemption as heroes.  Furthermore, their success could never have come to fruition without a handful of nerotypical supporters who give them a chance.

Our knee-jerk reaction is to dismiss theses characters as fictional entities and assume they just manifested themselves out of thin air.  But these characters are man-made and someone had to breathe life into them.  Therefore, maybe it is prudent to reexamine the real-llife geniuses crouching behind the scenes... bringing sentience to their imaginary characters like meppeteers from the Jim Henson Creature Shop." - 197