The Meticulous Choreography of Improvisation

I found this on thautcast.com: “What I Can Do Is Pretend To Be You”. It’s an Aspergian’s reflections on a life focused on passing, focused on perfecting “the character” others want us to portray. My first three-plus decades felt like this. I remember having to do an improv scene in the mandatory high school theater class and I just couldn’t grasp how to make improv work. Now I know that nearly every moment of my life was strictly scripted, with rationed moments of improvisation to perpetuate the illusion of flexibility and the words and looks that suggested that I was just a freak and not fitting in on purpose, and not possibly because of anything organic, formed in me before words and judgments and comparisons.

I struggled with that for years, as I tend to fixate on the things I can’t do, or can’t do well (training from my youth, when things were forever paraded about with labels regarding shortcomings, comparisons to other people, and my intelligence).

I fixate, I hyper focus, for the sake of pursuing mastery and approval.

I should say, I fixated. I hyper focused.

I’m so much happier now, being myself.

The approval I seek is my own, and I’ve learned to be flexible in my criteria and the word and concept of perfection aren’t in my vocabulary except as a scar that serves as a reminder to buckle up or watch where you are going as next time a scar might not even have the opportunity to form over the wound.

I wish I had this piece, from Larkin Taylor-Parker, on a sandwich board to wear around people who refused to look at me and instead focused on what they felt I wasn’t willing to be, for those who saw just the failure and the gaffes and not the effort and considerable choreography applied to each moment, to pass even just a little…

Click the link to hop on over to thautcast. I’d like to hear your thoughts on this piece and the concept of “passing”.

On Autistic Passing: “What I Can Do Is Pretend to Be You” | thAutcast.com.

Happy Friday,

B

40 Open Education Resources You Should Know About | Edudemic

A fantastic list of resources for adults and kids.  Documentaries, programming, information.  Oh my!  Check it out…

40 Open Education Resources You Should Know About | Edudemic.

I plan on looking at each resources and sending my kid links to “assignments” (watch, read, do, etc…) and cc’ing his dad on them so that maybe we can get out of the SSDD of summer break.   Not that my kid is just sitting in front of the TV, but he has been more self-propelled this year than ever before.  He has been teaching himself how to use Raspberry Pi, Linux, Python, Scratch, and more things that made me finally understand how overwhelmed and somewhat alienated and antiquated my parents felt when I became more tech savvy in the late 80’s/early 90’s.   I couldn’t remember a keyboard shortcut the other day, and I pride myself on my resourcefulness (read: I don’t ask for help unless it’s a last resort.  The results of this creed have found me in numerous situations learning experiences that would have escaped my eager grasp, had I not been endowed with such tenacity) but I went to holler an inquiry to Alex instead of seeking the answer the “me way”.

It’s surprising, to me, how technology has grown since I left the traditional workforce over nine years ago, due to illness.      It’s mind blowing, to me, that Alex’s education is largely technology based, but more organically than I would have imagined a few years ago.  Technology is there as a medium and I can’t imagine it having more impact than in a classroom for children with communication disorders, as the technology offers the versatility, when combined with traditional analog methods, to meet the needs of the kids concurrently.   Kind of neat.

So Alex has been playing with technology, this summer and  I have been flexing my problem solving skills. I’m trying to explore how we can integrate technology into our world, here at home, without investing in some of the ready to go tech that is so out of reach for us, financially, and in a pseudo-organic way so that it is less of a distraction, more of a functional tool, and less of a superpower with the ability to create human islands in a little condo in SW Florida.

Anyway, check out the link and the resources on that list.  There were some that I was familiar with and others that made me giddy with anticipation.

Did they miss any?  Please share, in the comments, if there are any you would add and I will do the same.

Hope your summer is going well!

B