currently

The conclusions are as such: the students in my house are very different from me. No matter how many times special needs advocates may claim otherwise, I have determined to stand by this observation. Not to say that I haven't been taken aback by the unexpected similarities between myself and the companions, but it's operating from the perspective that the companions can learn about things like myself, or understand things in the way that I do that sources much of my frustration. In our Monday seminar a little over a week ago, we discussed autism as a disability and a lot of what it does to a person. One of the things that I walked away with was that an autistic person suffers from an excess of neurons (I think it's neurons), and this results in an exacerbation of their sensory perception. They can be frightfully sensitive to light, sound, taste, being touched, and so on, making the world they share with me a much more uncomfortable place for them. A. throws tantrums when food he doesn't like will be his only option for dinner. I have become frustrated when I think of his actions as immaturity. Now I can think that A. is looking at a table where food that will reek havoc on his tastebuds is his only option for sustenance, and he is raging against the fact that dinner will mean suffering for him. When it comes down to it, most, if not all, of the companions unpleasant behavior can traced back to an understandable source if I try to trace it. We've been given descriptions in seminar that help us imagine the space between the ears of any given companion, and we've learned about the chaos they have where we would have negligable order. So much of the brain function we have and take for granted acts as an exhausting obstacle course for the companions, which is why when I ask N. what dried fruit he would like to eat at the bowling alley, he stares at me and at the ground and mulls over the question for minute after minute, all because the idea of choosing registers as something much different and apparently stultfying for N. If I think of N. as being like myself, I would sigh and tell him about how it doesn't matter and that he should just pick, and I would think of him as incompetant because I certainly could have made such a choice quickly. But N. actually knows all the reasons for why a choice is easy. He is as smart as a twenty year old can be, but he has a different brain function in the realm of making decisions, which not only arises from his having down syndrome, but also, if not entirely, comes from the fact that his whole life up until this point has had people in it who take his ability to choose away from him because of how hard it is for him to express himself clearly. I may even think that if I spent my life letting others choose what's best for me, being asked to make decisions as a twenty year old would be as diffficult for me as it is for N. With this, I will drive home the point I will make before I stop this post, and that is that much of the frustrating behavior exhibited by companions does not come from the fact that they are neurologically different from me. It comes from the fact that having a disability means having a difficult set of circumstances in your life. People exclude you, tease you, move you away from home, and often times do much, much worse to you. These are the factors that can make a person, any person, challenging to live with.