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straycatboogie · 11 months

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2023/06/17 English

BGM: Pet Shop Boys - Go West

Today I watched the video by Steve Silberman, "The forgotten history of autism" again after having my lunch. I cried a little... I was born in 1975 so the word or concept of autism was not popular at the period when I had spent my sensitive, wonderful teenage days. Therefore I had to spent these days with troubles. People treated me as a weird, crazy one so I had been having a hate or rage toward them. "Why should I be treated terribly like this?" or "They are the ones who are crazy". It was the same even though after graduated the university, and joined in a company. At 33, by a comment from a female friend of mine, I noticed that I could be autistic. I tried to be checked if I could be so, and it became clarified... I told that to my company and tried to show the paper by my doctor to explain that more. But my boss didn't read that... That was about 10 years ago. 10 years. The time changes. Now we can see the topic about autism anywhere in mass media or the internet. My company listens to my story about autism seriously. We shouldn't lose the hope we are having.

As I wrote before, I have read the Steve Silberman's masterpiece about autism "Neurotribes" once (only one time). After that, I learned that honest, trustable readers try to check how this book can contain mistakes through the process of translation (it can be said as deterioration). So I decided to read that book in English. But after buying that paperback, I have read it in a halfway and stopped. Therefore I can't say how that book's translation can be through the comparison by honest or steady reading. But I want to say this. If that "Neurotribes" were translated completely under the checking by a trustable doctor or specialist, then the situation around autism in this country could be changed definitely/absolutely. I believe so strictly. I can even BET it. This book must have such a wonderful, marvelous possibility in it. Ah, I wish I could read that book smoothly, and also could translate that into neat Japanese... I never have that kind of skill. So I try to improve my English as modesty as I can.

By that "Neurotribes", and also Oliver Sacks's "An Anthropologist on Mars" (it has an episode of autistic person, Temple Grandin), I remember that once I tried to look at how I could be autistic as modest as I could. I can never be ordinary or normal. It can mean I can never be a neurotypical person. Or I should never wish that (Even though I could become a neurotypical one by having any good medicine or any ways, that couldn't mean a solution of the difficulty autistic people must face in this world). It seems that I tend to be "a disciple" about this... I am now thinking that "I wish I can find a meaning of being born in this world as an autistic person" and "It must be. I want to try to find that even though it is impossible". Yes, I am basically living with no purposes. I am living really lazily. But I am thinking that I have a spirit of questing or looking for the truth.

After my work today, I went back to my group home and find the "Neurotribes"... But I was really exhausted by that work so I couldn't read it anymore. 10 years. I remember how it was 10 years ago. I had not attended the meeting about autism, and never met any current friends. I had to spend my days soaked into alcohol with solitude in this Shiso city. At that period, I could never imagine my future. My life had ended alreadly. I was just a loser (as Beck's song). And... life or the situation changed drastically. Suddenly, now, I try to imagine how it will change 10 years after. I can never even predict tomorrow. But I guess this. If my English could be improved and I could read English more speedy. then it would be possible to read that paperback of "Neurotribes". I want to make this true... Can I?

#diary #english #journal #steve silberman #neurotribes #autism #online diary #tumblr diary

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krispyweiss · 1 year

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David Crosby Tested Positive for COVID-19 Days before His Death

- Steve Silberman reveals diagnosis in tribute to his longtime friend

David Crosby tested positive for COVID-19 - his second bout with the disease caused by the novel coronavirus - days before his January death.

Crosby told his friend Steve Silberman of the positive result in a Jan. 14 email and “five days later, someone tweeted at me, … ‘Yahoo Finance is reporting that David Crosby died.’”

Silberman, in a heartfelt remembrance penned for Relix magazine, didn’t say if COVID caused the 81-year-old Crosby’s death. And Crosby - who lived the most rock ‘n’ roll of lifestyles - had a host of other health problems, including heart disease, diabetes and had had a liver transplant.

Crosby was vaccinated, Silberman said.

“A memorial celebration is apparently in the works,” he wrote. “Hopefully, it will include musicians from all of the phases of his career.”

Crosby may be gone, but more music is on the way. Silberman said Crosby had already finished another album with the Lighthouse Band, tentatively titled Light Years Lost.

“One of the last songs he recorded with the(m) is called ‘What Makes it So?,’” Silberman wrote. “May we never stop asking.”

3/23/23

#david crosby #steve silberman #the byrds #crosby stills nash and young #relix magazine

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pcnmagazine · 1 year

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revisit David Crosby podcast via Osiris; 8 episodes in conversation w/author Steve Silberman

HEAR DAVID CROSBY REFLECT ON LIFE, DEATH, MUSIC, RELATIONSHIPS AND MORE IN PODCAST, FREAK FLAG FLYING – LISTEN David Crosby was one of the most innovative, influential, and reflective musicians of his generation. In 2020 and 2021, New York Times best-selling author and music historian Steve Silberman sat down with his friend David for in-depth conversations on the Osiris Media podcast…

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#David Crosby #Osiris #Steve Silberman

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the-birth-of-art · 6 months

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#steve silberman #jerry garcia band #dead heads #deadheads #grateful dead #halloween #your hallucinations are my costume #susana millman

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isagrimorie · 20 days

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Source: from Steve Silberman

#kate mulgrew #star trek cast #voyager cast

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autistpride · 25 days

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These books are written "geared towards" adults and older teens. I personally would let my teen read all of these, so I'm not gatekeeping literature, but use your own judgement on what you think is acceptable for your own kid to read.

Nonfictional Books for adults:

All the weight of our dreams by Lydia XZ Brown

Stim: an autistic anthology edited by Lizzie Huxley-Jones

Connecting with Autism by Casey Corner

Sincerely your Autistic child by AWNN

Uniquely human by Barry m prizant

Engaging autism by Stanley Greenspan

Raising human beings by Ross Greene

Beyond behaviours by Mona delahooke

The whole brain child by Dan Siegel & Tina Payne Bryson

Autism and gender by Jordynn Jack

It's your weirdness that makes you wonderful Kate Allan

Women and girls with autism spectrum disorder Sarah Hendrick

Worlds of Autism by Joyce davidson

Authoring autism by melanie yergeau

Nerdy Shy and Socially Inappropriate Cynthia Kim

Autistic disturbances by julie rodas

War on Autism by Annie McGuire

Rethinking autism diagnosis by kathenne Cole, Rebecca mallet, and sammy

Leaders all around me by Edlyn Vallejo Peña, PhD

Ido in autismland by Ido Kedar

Typed words loud voices by Amy Sequenzia & Elizabeth J. Grace

It's an autism thing by Emma Dalmayne

What Every Autistic Girl Wishes Her Parents Knew by Autism Women’s Network

Women on the Spectrum: A Handbook for Life by Emma Goodall and Yenn Purkis

Unmasking autism by Devon Price

Neurotribes by Steve Silberman

Love, Partnership or Singleton on the Autism Spectrum & Bittersweet on the Autism Spectrum, both edited by Luke Beardon and Dean Worton

Autism, Anxiety and Me: A Diary in Even Numbers by Emma Louise Bridge & Penelope Bridge

Autism: A New Introduction to Psychological Theory and Current Debate by Sue Fletcher-Watson and Francesca Happé

A Practical Guide to Happiness in Adults on the Autism Spectrum: A Positive Psychology Approach by Victoria Honeybourne

Gender Identity, Sexuality and Autism by Eva A. Mendes and Meredith R. Maroney

The Guide to Good Mental Health on the Autism Spectrum by Jeanette Purkis, Dr. Emma Goodall and Dr. Jane Nugent

Different, Not Less: A Neurodivergent's Guide to Embracing Your True Self and Finding Your Happily Ever After by Chloe Hayden

Memoirs:

Odd Girl Out by Laura James

Uncomfortable Labels by Laura Kate Dale

Drama Queen by Sara Gibbs

The Electricity of Every Living Thing by Katherine May

Fall down Seven Times Get Up Eight by Naoki Higashida

The Reason I Jump by Naomi Hashida

The Electricity of Every Living Thing by Katherine May

Wintering by Katherine May

Diary of a Young Naturalist by Dara McAnulty

Explaining Humans by Dr. Camilla Pang

Fingers in the Sparkle Jar by Chris Packham

Adult Fiction:

Adult Virgins Anonymous by Amber Crewe

Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan

A Girl Like Her by Talia Hibbert

Get a Life, Chloe Brown by Talia Hibbert

Act Your Age, Eve Brown by Talia Hibbert

Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata

Failure to Communicate by Kaia Sønderby

An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon

#audhd #asd #autism acceptence month #autism #actually audhd #autistic adult #autistic pride #autistic #actually autistic #autism acceptance

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pgoeltz · 9 months

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STEVE SILBERMAN

THE ONLY SONG OF GOD

This morning, I walked past the Henry J. Kaiser Auditorium in Oakland for the first time since Jerry Garcia's death.

From 1979 to 1989, the Grateful Dead held forth there 56 times, and I probably saw 40 of those shows.

I had never seen the grass in front of the arena deserted before, with no Deadheads kibitzing on blankets or waiting in line at booths, no wet dogs in bandanas snapping Frisbees out of the air and galloping down to lap from the muddy creek.

Instead of the high archways carved with scenes from Romantic mythology, I remembered milling craziness spilling into the street, and the lines winding around back where the limos came in, growing thicker at the doors near show time as Willie in his blue security suit kept everyone honest by preaching the gospel of soul through a megaphone.

I knocked on the front door and a custodian let me in for a few minutes to look around. I walked through the tiled lobby into the main arena, barely longer than it is wide, the light tan planks on the floor marked with black tape, an antique scoreboard dangling from the ceiling.

From the bleachers to the back wall, I counted only 11 rows of wooden flip-up seats. I was so happy to be in that room again.

In the 1950s, gospel groups like the Swan Silvertones, the Mighty Clouds of Joy, the Soul Stirrers, and the James Cleveland Choir used to sing in that room. Smartly dressed ushers walked the aisles wearing white gloves, so that someone who got the spirit in the middle of a number - who might stand up in their Sunday finest, testifying in tongues, and faint dead over - could be carried out into the lobby, fanned back to consciousness, and ushered back in.

In the 1980s - the golden years of my life as a Deadhead - I used to think of Kaiser as the living room of the tribe.

The Dead's annual open-air jubilees, in drenching sun, at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley and at the Frost Amphitheatre at Stanford, were more spectacular. But Kaiser - with its midweek shows, and spiral corridors for schmoozing between epiphanies - was for locals. You didn't have to buy a plane ticket or hitchhike a thousand miles to see the band, and many of the people there, you'd know: your neighbors, your dentist, the other Deadhead from your office. For days afterward, you'd recognize faces that you'd seen in the big room, and smile to each other as you passed in the street.

If you weren't from the Bay Area, after three or four shows at Kaiser, eventually, you'd move here. Kaiser was for lifers. It felt like home.

At shows in those years, up at the front on "the rail" where you could observe the musicians at work, the crowds could get so dense on a Saturday night that you would lose your footing. But if you relaxed, you could nearly float, like a cell in a bath of nutrient, the rhythms coming to you as a gentle push in one direction, then another.

If you left your backpack under the bleachers before the lights went out, it would still be there when the applause ended. When the lights came up again, you might see a couple in the middle of the floor who had just made love in the swirling dark, laughing, exhausted, fixing each other's hair.

It was one of the safest places in the world.

I was a suburban kid, the son of agnostic parents who believed in a healing of the world by political, rather than spiritual, means. Still, wherever I looked, the universe seemed animate and mysterious.

The Martian Chronicles, the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, and The Outer Limits widened the horizons of my everyday life to include the infinite. In the sixth grade, I found a copy of Richard Hittleman's 21-Day Yoga Plan in the library, lit a candle, and gazed earnestly into the flame.

I remember one afternoon when I was in high school, sitting on my best friend's bed, listening to Europe '72 . The music I liked up to that point was vocal music, like the folk tunes my mother sang to me before I was able to speak; songs that told stories, like Stephen Stills' alliterative cowboy confessing his love in "Helplessly Hoping."

After the last verse of "China Cat Sunflower," Weir took a lead over Kreutzmann's breathing, elastic time, with Godchaux's piano cascading down like droplets of silver. But it was Garcia - even out of the spotlight - who added incisive punctuations that stitched the music into a tale unfolding, and I suddenly had the sensation of riding on a locomotive, surging forward on the track.

As I grew older, the music of the Dead - especially the restless, exploratory jams that were Garcia's trademark - often provided the soundtrack for my introspection.

While the rest of the world was asleep or watching television, I'd shut my door and put on headphones, and hear seemingly ancient voices broadcast their truths, listen to each other, and respond; delighted to be part of an intimate conversation beyond what could be said in words - like eavesdropping on God's thoughts.

After I started going to see the band in places like Roosevelt Stadium and the Capitol Theatre, I learned that at Dead shows, you could allow the music to go as deeply inside you as it did when you were alone; and you could do it with those who understood, in their own way, how the music felt to you.

Sometimes I liked to turn away from the stage, so I could see how others received it. Some would listen with their eyes shut, swaying; others would gaze toward the men onstage as you would toward your oldest friend - who was about to attempt something marvelous and difficult - with a blessing look.

If Deadheads were a tribe that sought collective experience, we were also an aggregation of loners who had learned how not to bruise each other's solitude: that place where our souls, and the music, communed.

If you were tripping, the music would pour forth celestial architectures, quicksilver glistening with might-be's, cities of light at the edge of a sea of chaos, monumental forms that could be partially recollected in tranquility, and turned into designs in fabric or clay, golden sentences, streams of bits.

And some nights, the hair on the back of your neck would stand on end as a presence came into the room, given a body by the magnificent sound system. In the hallways, the Dead's own dervishes, the Spinners, would bow toward the stage, their long hair brushing the floor. Dancers raised one another up like kids in punk clubs, laughing like babies in their father's arms, or weeping.

Startled out of my reflection by some grace note of primordial majesty, I'd look up and see his fingers -

That furrow of deliberation where all else was left to drift, in the secret place where everything was waiting to be born.

Four days after Garcia's death, my friend Raymond Foye and I picked up a young man hitchhiking by the roadside near Raymond's house in Woodstock. The perfume of sweet alcohol filled the car as he climbed in. We asked him where he was going and he said, "To the monastery at the top of the mountain."

We wound up the road to an enormous gate, painted red, and carved with lions.

The monks knew our passenger. "You back for good this time?" one asked.

When the young man offered to guide us to the shrine room, we eagerly accepted. The rooms and hallways leading there had the orderliness of sacred space. There was a rack for shoes, so you'd enter the room barefoot.

Along the walls, bodhisattvas glowed in the shadows. I walked slowly, with my hands clasped over my heart, as my old Zen teacher had taught me. With each step, I felt the cool floor against the soles of my feet.

I turned toward the front of the room. There in the dim light, an enormous Buddha, painted gold, sat in the erect, relaxed posture of contemplative alertness, like a mountain in a dream.

I walked up and made a full prostration, my forehead touching the floor, my palms upraised.

On the altar, there was an oil lamp lit, with a white card beside it. It read:

FOR JERRY GARCIA

MAY HE HAVE AN AUSPICIOUS REBIRTH

Sometimes it seems we have little greatness left to us to praise. Our leaders are liar or comedians, and our priests, like teenagers, have a hard time interpreting their own desires, much less the Passion of Christ.

Yet I'm confident that the Grateful Dead were truly great, by which I mean, were able to abide some portion of mystery, and allow it to come through them without naming it or taking too much pride in it, or appropriating its surface aspects as a pose or strategy.

Look at the shaman, standing in his once-living robe, holding up a drum, blazed on the walls of caves all over the Earth. The rock and roll fop, pursing his lips under the pastel lights, is a bare flicker over this image, graven in the back of our minds as surely as if it had been carved in the skull-cup of bone by a hand.

The image says: Drums are doors or vehicles, voices bear messages to the threshold of Heaven, and sliding or flatted notes are blue highways between this world and the other.

I once asked Garcia how it came to be that a young bluegrass banjo and guitar player with a taste for the blues and R&B had found, in the company of kindred spirits, a road back to the collective experience of music as mystery.

We didn't plan it out that way, he said, it just happened, like an escalator appearing in front of our eyes. We had a choice at the beginning, to get on, or not.

That was all.

I remember standing on a train platform after a show, when I heard a freight pass heavy on the rails, the couplings and wheels clattering with a lurching, quirky grandeur that was familiar.

Then I remembered: it was the rhythm of "Ramble on Rose."

For all I know, Garcia might have had the ghost of another tune in mind when he wrote it, or pulled it out of the air - but it was the American air, of boxcars passing (with Jack Kerouac's little St. Theresa hobo shivering inside) through towns with names like Gaviota, Las Cruces and Wichita.

No pomp and circumstance for us Yankees, but hard luck and a little grace - our own raw melodies sent up with the drafts of a campfire - rippling the moon in the corner of a fiddler's eye.

One night at Kaiser, after a delicate, shimmering jam that threaded out of "Estimated Prophet," Willie Green of the Neville Brothers joined the drummers onstage.

Mickey Hart moved from the traps to the berimbau to the Beam, an instrument he helped invent: a ten-foot aluminum girder strung with piano wire tuned to extremely low pitches, designed to launch huge standing waves into very large rooms, to shiver bones and make the walls of a coliseum tremble.

As the drummers faced one another, the tidal resonances of the Beam rippled through the floorboards, ebbing in a series of descending pitches that sounded then, to me, like the root of all music.

I felt my knees weaken under me. My palms came together as if of their own volition, and I dropped to the floor.

I didn't need to know or name what called me to make that full prostration. I only needed a place to do it that was safe, a place where I felt at liberty, so that inner life and outer life could come together.

The root of the verb "to heal" means "to make whole."

That's why the Grateful Dead were medicine men: the music, and the collective energy of Deadheads, together, helped heal the sickness of existence. To those blinded by habit was conveyed sight, and the lame were made - a little less lame.

In Tibet, the medicine that healed the sickness of existence was called amrita, "the strongest poison and medicine of all."

A black muddy river of amrita flowed through Grateful Dead land.

Though from the outside, Garcia had an enviable life, he - like all of us - had to learn to make himself at home among many contradictions. (He once said, "I live in a world without a Grateful Dead.")

An intensely humble and private man, his art earned him the kind of fame that plastered his face on bumper stickers. Branded for the duration of his career in the media by the decade in which he came of age, he sometimes seemed most at home picking the tunes of Bill Monroe, Doc Watson, and Clarence Ashley played for decades before anyone had heard of the Haight-Ashbury. For someone whose craft helped so many people rediscover the pleasures of having a body, Garcia seemed to only grudgingly acknowledge his own.

And while Deadheads tapped a seemingly inexhaustible wellspring of good news in his music, Garcia himself had endured several of life's great tragedies, including witnessing the death of his father by drowning, and the loss of a finger. (The luminous tracks on American Beauty were recorded during a period of daily trips with his brother Tiff to San Francisco General, to visit their mother, Ruth, who had sustained injuries in a car accident that turned out to be fatal.)

A witty and engaging conversationalist, of cosmopolitan interests and encyclopedic reference, Garcia must have realized that his social contacts were becoming increasingly circumscribed by his heroin habit, which he once referred to as a "buffer."

Garcia had made of his instrument a means for direct expression of his soul. In the last year of his life - as his buffer became an adversary to his art, his nimbleness became a thing lost, and the lyrics no longer arrived - the pain was audible in his music.

Last spring, when I asked a mutual friend how the sessions for the new album were going, he said that Jerry was uncommunicative, unkempt, and not playing well. I asked him if Garcia's behavior had any emotional coloration.

"Yeah," he said - "Do Not Disturb."

For the last year, I'd been reassuring panicky young Deadheads online that the rumors were suddenly everywhere - that the Summer Tour would be the Dead's last - were untrue.

The venues for '96, I'd been told, had already been booked.

But the mind at large knew better. The universe that set Garcia up as a medicine man in an age thirsting for mystery would not let him exit without the thunderclaps, lighting and palls of doom that Shakespeare brought down on the heads of a tattered kings and his clown.

At four in the morning on August 9th , Maureen Hunter stirred sleepless beside her husband, Robert. Garcia had telephoned the Hunters a day or so earlier, to thank Robert for all the songs they'd written together, and also to say, with unusual explicitness, that he loved him.

Maureen got up and walked into the kitchen where a breeze was blowing through an open window. She bolted the window, looked in on her daughter, and returned to bed.

A few miles away, a staffer at Serenity Knolls paused outside Garcia's room, not hearing the snoring she'd heard earlier. He entered the room, and found Garcia in bed, his heart stopped, smiling.

Part of the joy in being a Deadhead was in wedding yourself to a story that was longer than your life.

When I was writing my essay "Who Was Cowboy Neal?" I began to think of the surging improvised section of "Cassidy" as a place where Neal Cassady's spirit was invited to visit the living. Like Garcia, Neal had been a hero to many, but to himself, a man - fighting a man's struggles beside the titans whose footsteps echoed in those jams that I never wanted to end.

When the chords said look within, we trusted Garcia to ride point for us, to be the headlight on the northbound train, behind which we were grateful to follow. Each of his discoveries was greeted with recognition. He'd taken us someplace new again, but a place we felt we were fated to go, because Jack's words in On the Road - about burning "like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars" - had spoken directly to us, the lucky ones; the ones who found the stone, the old stone in the American wilderness that marks the way.

And when we arrived in that place we were born to seek, all our brothers and sisters were there.

Of course.

So now, the story is over.

As prophesied, Soon you will not hear his voice.

But it is not so.

There's an old Zen tale of two patch-robed monks, students of the same master, who meet, years after his death, on a footbridge over a foaming river.

Seeing one another again, the two old friends laugh aloud.

"Do you miss our old teacher?" asks the one.

"No, now I see him everywhere," answers the other.

For it was our love that wedded us to the ancient story, our love the music called to in the words of a poet, Scheherazade's tale of the Many Thousand Nights that included us, in which real moonlight fell on imaginary waters.

The same moon that Neal Cassady saw in the mountains above Denver, shining over the city of the dead.

The last time the Dead played at Cal Expo - a small outdoor venue outside Sacramento, like Kaiser with no roof - I used a backstage pass and a drop of liquid to peer behind the spectacle, wandering around the picnic tables like a stoned kid at one of my parents' parties.

It was hot and still, but I knew that at the end of the path that runs behind the stage, there was a swimming pool, where you could still hear the music perfectly.

There was no one else there. I stripped, lowered myself into the water, and looked up at the stars, my mind roaming in the constellations as I floated on the music.

Onstage, Garcia had come home to that little place that he and Hunter made, that he loved so much, "Stella Blue." How slowly the world seemed to turn around us in the night as he played it, night after night.

When he came to the line, "I've stayed in every blue-light cheap hotel, can't win for tryin'," I took a breath and plunged, down into the silence, the drifting where I once heard my mother's heart beat.

And back up, breaking the surface just as the moon and stars shone through the strings of a broken angel's guitar.

Friend, when I meet you on the bridge in 10,000 years, please remind me that our teacher's voice is in the wash of muddy river water over the ancient stones, and in the dancing light at the edge, where a fiddler calls the tune and we rejoin the great circle.

For the universe is full of secrets that gradually reveal themselves, but there is not enough time. Barely time for a song to praise this place where we found each other, and pass back into the "transitive nightfall of diamonds," the beautiful melodies and suffering in the meat yearning for transformation - the only song of God.

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robertogreco · 1 year

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Thelonious Monk riding a train in the 1950s, photo by Nico Van Der Stam (via Steve Silberman)

#Thelonious Monk #trains #Nico Van Der Stam #1950s #photography

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starlight-tav · 9 months

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List of Non-fiction Books on Autism

[Please note: I am only listing the books I have read on this list. This is not meant to be a comprehensive or complete list at all. I want to share the books that have been helpful to me so far. *Updated 09/17/23]

Approaching Autistic Adulthood: The Road Less Travelled by Grace Liu

| This book has a lot of advice about navigating adulthood as an autistic person. I found the advice on dealing with burnout especially helpful!

The Autism Friendly Cook Book by Lydia Wilkins

| This is one of my favorite books! If you're like me, and you really struggle with all things kitchen and cooking, this is a really helpful resource. Not only does it have a useful section that details techniques and supplies that you may need, but the recipes have an estimated energy and skill level! This book has helped me approach cooking more prepared, which helps me with coping with anxiety and preventing meltdowns.

Connecting with the Autism Spectrum: How to Talk, how to Listen, and Why you Shouldn't Call it High-Functioning by Casey "Remrov" Vormer

| This book is one of the most accessible books I've read so far. The language is both concise and easier to follow than most. It is less general than some other books on this list, so if you don't relate to it immediately or at all, that doesn't make you more or less autistic. Your experience (including location, assigned gender, gender identity, sexuality, co-occuring conditions, etc.) influence the way you exist as an autistic person.

Living with PTSD on the Autism Spectrum: Insightful Analysis with Practical Applications by Lisa Morgan, M.ED. and Mary P. Donahue, PH.D.

| If you're struggling with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and are on the Autism spectrum, this book could be really helpful! It provides research in plain language and offers helpful examples of how PTSD and ASD can interact. It also shares insight on how to recognize abuse and trauma, as well as how to advocate/seek advocacy for yourself or loved ones with ASD. I think the personal examples are really helpful, but I do want to caution that these also make it another very specific reading experience. If you read it, and do not see your experience represented, that is not your fault!

Neurotribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity by Steve Silberman

| Written by a journalist, this book packs a lot of information! It focuses on the history of Autism as a diagnoses, and for that reasons can be overwhelming and heartbreaking at times. The author is (I think) overly sympathetic to H*ns Asp*rger's contribution to Autism research; but from what I understand, the book was written at a time before the extent of his involvement with the N*zi party was understood, so maybe a future addition will reflect what we know now much better. I'm grateful that I read it, because it put my own late diagnosis into a perspective that gives me a little bit more peace.

The Reason I Jump: The Inner Voice of a Thirteen-Year-Old Boy with Autism by Naoki Higashida

| This book is excellent to read for both autistic people and people who have an autistic loved one since it is focused on answering questions about how some autistic people think and behave (like stimming.) The author is an autistic boy who uses communication aids to express himself, and he has many insights into what it's like to have specific support needs and how it can be challenging to get those needs met.

Sensory: Life on the Spectrum organized and edited by Schnumm

| This is an anthology of comics by autistic creators who use visual story-telling to talk about their experiences. It was so nice to see my experiences in their stories, and to see other's experiences that I can't relate to as well!

Sincerely, Your Autistic Child: What People on the Autism Spectrum Wish Their Parents Knew About Growing Up, Acceptance, and Identity edited by Emily Page Ballou, Sharon daVanport, and Morénike Giwa Onaiwu

| This collection of essays/letters is wonderful, especially if you wish to learn more about the experiences of a diverse group of autistic people. It highlights that there are as many ways to be autistic as there are autistic people in the world (something that many of the books on this list say.)

Spectrums: Autistic Trans People in Their Own Words edited by Maxfield Sparrow

| "friend of mine, i am here, too. i am flapping and humming and feeling and being. i am learning who i am, i am being who i am, i am being loud and bright and joyful and true! and they are afraid, and they do not understand, but i am not for them, and friend of mine, neither are you" (from "a letter to a friend" by ren koloni).

This collection is so, so important to me as a genderqueer autist. The above quote is from my favorite contribution in the book, and I'm so grateful to the author for their words.

Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity by Dr. Devon Price

| This was the first book I read when I learned that I'm autistic. It is informative and compassionate. I think it is on the lower end of accessibility on the list so far, but it still does a wonderful job of explaining some of the difficult concepts. I think Dr. Price's explanation of the difference between bottom-up and top-down thinking is the best I've read so far, which was especially difficult for me to wrap my head around as a literal thinker. Just remember that if you pick up a book and it's difficult to understand, you're allowed to ask for help, take time to away from it, or put it down for good.

That's the list so far! I'm constantly searching for more books to read, so if you have recommendations, please let me know!

#books #autism #autism books #autism resources #books by autistic people #books by autists #actually autistic #resources for autistic people #book lists #special interest #special interest: books

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