The Library

So there are books, of course, and I might even read them. Reading books is hard, though, because I want to say All The Things about every book I read. That's what this page is about. I'm going to list books I have read (that deal with autism; I'm also reading Your Movie Sucks by Roger Ebert right now for some comic relief, but I won't talk about that here), and then link down the page where I write about the experience.

• Brown, Debi. The Aspie Girl’s Guide to Being Safe With Men: The Unwritten Safety Rules No-One Is Telling You. 1st ed., Jessica Kingsley Pub, 2013.

(A quick note: Brown uses the term "Aspie" to refer to persons (including herself) who are autistic, and the term "non-spectrum" to refer to persons who are not autistic. This is not well-explained; I think she has assumed that if you're in her target audience, you know what an "Aspie" is, but this book's title was quite simply the first time I had ever heard of or seen this term. I could plausibly use it to describe myself, but it would feel for me that I was co-opting someone else.)

I found the Brown book (though I keep calling it the Green Book, because the cover is green) when I was early for work one day and stopped in at The Urbana Free Library, decided I ought to look for books on autism, and found the call number 616.85882. (Those of you who read The Official Preppy Handbook in 1980 may remember that a hallmark of a Preppy is a slip of paper with only a call number on it. This is me; I do this, because you never know what you'll find on the shelf that isn't the exact book you went in search of.) I don't remember if I found the book that sent me to that call number in the first place, but I did find another book, which will likely be next on my list. I also saw this, and I hesitated, because, well, I'm not the target audience, on account of I'm the wrong gender. (Not the first time.) But I decided that it's a book and I'll read what I damn well please, and so out of the library it went with me.

I am fairly certain that Debi Brown would be horrified to learn that her book, specifically this book (as she may have others), was literally My First Autism Book, the first book I read having to do with autism after I got my diagnosis. I say that because this book, as she makes great pains to make clear, is not a book about autism. Oh, but it is! Yes, Part 2 of the book is basically a sex-ed book, and that was more or less uninteresting (I'll get to that), but Part 1 spoke to me, because so much of what she said about herself and other autistic women was so very, very familiar (despite the easily observable fact that I am not now nor have I ever been an autistic woman). There were pages it was hard to get through (and I pity anyone sitting around me) because of the number of times I said aloud, "OMG that's me." What follows is I am sure an incomplete list of these and similar moments, arranged more or less chronologically through the book.

Foreword

• Page 9: "They may … want friends, yet find this difficult to achieve. They may be less knowledgeable … having missed out on the sharing of information that happens among teenagers." This reinforced what I'd read on the back cover that made me think, hey, I want to read this even if I'm not supposed to read this. The last part, what Brown calls on page 14 "a cultural knowledge system", made me shout excitedly, because this is something my wife has specifically talked about, and is gobsmacked that I don't have the experience of, and here it is on the page saying that yes, non-autistic people do this, and autistic people often don't. The first part, I've heard that before, that friends are more difficult to obtain and retain (I heard that from my clinician, who I am certain was speaking less as a clinician there and more as an Autistic Voice Of Reason). There's a word I left out there, because I don't think it's quite right.
• Page 10 (also quoted on back cover): "Debi doesn't use innuendo or assume knowledge on the part of the reader." Now again, ostensibly this book is about sexual safety, so the particlar dangers of obliqueness are, well, particular, but the whole "not assuming prior knowledge" is huge. Yes, it's the part that really made Part 2 for me not be instructive (again, more on that when I get there), but this whole idea is appealing, that there's a recognition that an autistic person might not know something that others in society might expect her (or me) to know. Brown has a great line on page 32: "Usually the communication error that non-spectrum people make is starting from step 7 (assuming steps 1 to 6 are known) rather than step 1."

Why I Wrote The Aspie Girl's Guide and Why You Should Read It

• Page 14: "From our side, we Aspies can usually communicate extremely well if we realise (a) the need to communicate, (b) what we need to communicate, and (c) what we do not already know that we need to know. But the problem comes if we do not realise the need to communicate, or the need for more (or better) information than we have." (Note: "realise" instead of "realize" because the author is Scottish; I had to correct myself in typing it.) The context here is unimportant. This is after she's referred to the "cultural knowledge system" concept that bowled me over above. Reading this for the first time, it just felt like an incredible summary of so much of how my brain works, and how I wind up what seems like so frequently in situations where I don't know something that I'm supposed to, and I can't understand why, or how, or what I did wrong. It also gives some insight as to how I can have these problems and still have been a teacher: a teacher delivering content never really has a question about the need to communicate or what we need to communicate.

Introduction

• Pages 18-19. She lays out several bullet points here about why women with autism can be more vulnerable (to nefarious men, chiefly, since that's the point of the book), and five of them stood out to me:
  • we might have difficulty interpreting facial expressions
  • we are overwhelmed a lot of the time with too much ionformation to process in every instant of our lives, so we can be slower to work things out
  • we might not automatically know how to act in socail situations
  • if we do know that someone is doing something wrong to us, we might not know how to stop it
  • a lot of what we really need to know are 'unwritten rules', which non-spectrum people may find intuitively obvious without their ever being told them, but which we do need to be taught. If we have not been lucky enough to know the right people, perhaps no-one has ever taught us, or no-one has taught us in the right way
  Once again, her words here go well beyond the realm of sexual safety for autistic women (though I can painfully see how this can be exploited in some bad ways; let it not be said that I'm trying to take away at all from her aims for her actual target audience). I cannot possibly even remember all the times I have discovered too late something which I'd reacted differently (or not at all) to, or when something was happening that I didn't anticipate and …. Most of these haven't turned out wholly badly for me, and certainly I haven't suffered the Extremely Bad Events that this book will inevitably have to discuss. Still, there's so much "OMG It's Me" here, and again, it's a bit of a whipsaw to go from "I'm neurotypical and this stuff happens" to "I'm not neurotypical and this stuff is normal for me but not for others who don't have the neurodivergence that I do", though it's exhilarating to come out the other side.
• Page 19: "we Aspies are very good learners if we can get the information explained to us properly," Oh my; please see also this and anything else I may have written about how unintentionally supportive it was to have been a Seahorse. This is kind of like being hit with a Truth Brick.
• Page 19: "As a good, typical Aspie, I love rules, I love certainty and I can have very black and white thinking at times. I feel so tempted to write this book as a rule book and tell you exactly what to do and what not to do, according to my personal opinions and beliefs." If the last paragraph had a Truth Brick, these opening sentences are an avalance of Truth Bricks. I cannot adequately describe the mix of joy, bafflement, and probably several other emotions I had reading that. To see the words "as a good, typical _____", and then to see what feel like absolutely core parts of me laid out as if they are the most obvious traits in the world. I do not choose to use her term for myself, but it is so overwhelmingly obvious that if I wanted to, it would fit, because she's describing me.
  The last bit there, when I read that, I said aloud, "How To Autism". (To be more accurate, I may have actually shouted it.) There's a YouTube channel called "How To ADHD" that my wife (who was diagnosed with ADHD Inattentive Type ten years ago at age 31) has found tremedously valuable. I've said a few times that it would be nice to have a book called "How To Autism: A Practical Rule Book For Autistics", but it's impossible to actually write that, because autism is very individualized, and there are no rules that would apply uniformly to all of us. Reading her statement about a rule book (about sex and relationships with men) not being appropriate or helpful, even though we autistics would like that and find it easier, was a burst of joy: we would all like a rule book, really we would, even though the nature of autism says that such a rule book can't exist.

Chapter 1: Your Support Network

• Chapter 1, and indeed all of Part 1, speaks to people outside the target audience. (Hi!) It's all phrased in a sort of friendly hug, as it tells the reader things about herself that she may not know or understand, because surviving Part 2 of the book is much easier if you have the structures (a wonderful word) that Part 1 talks about. Specifically Chapter 1 talks about a support network, and oh do I feel so much of this.
  I think before I go on, I should say a couple "me" things. I have said for decades (at a minimum) that my friends are busier than I am, and that my friends are largely more important to me than I am to them. I don't mean that as a criticism or a slight; it's an observation. I can guarantee you that, given any week in the last 25 years, I thought about whoever was my closest friend at the time more often than she thought about me. (My current spouse gets an exemption from that, just in case she was my closest friend at some point.) That's normal for me. I know I get to actually spend time with my friends incredibly rarely, and I also know that I can come off as obnoxious and overwhelming to them (such that small doses of me are handy). That's my life. I have very few friends I consider close (or have considered close), and particularly in my adult life they are nearly all women (the two most obvious exceptions are both people I met before I turned 18). I don't know that I would say I wish I had more, because honestly I don't think I keep up that well with the ones I have; I could say I wish I had fewer, but that doesn't work either (because of that whole overwhelming bit, and because of the whole busier than I am bit).
• Page 25: "This is harder with professional as, however kind, good, capable and brilliant at understanding you they are, they are getting paid to do it and they need to maintain a professional—service user distance." (Note: Again I had to correct the quote, because the author does not use the Oxford comma, and it grates on me; her lack of a comma before the last "and" grates on me as well, as that's a full clause; I will continue to get hung up on that as we go on, but I won't mention it again.) Can I say something here about my therapist? She's lovely. (I don't mean physically; that's beside the point. You can go look her up and see if you think she's lovely in that way; I'll wait. Back? Okay, good. She usually has her hair up, by the way.) She's wonderful for me. She's very understanding; she's very supportive; she's someone I'm surprised at my own comfort level with. That's all great. She's also not my friend. Sure, she cares about me, but it's in the same manner where a teacher cares about his students; we want good things for those we serve (clients for her, students for my experience), but it's a professional caring, not a personal. I think (and I've mentioned this to her, months ago) that if there were a way that I could have met her professional persona in some nonprofessional setting, her professional persona could be a really close friend for me (and that's saying a lot). Now, she's not autistic; my clinician has actually suggested that I might benefit from an autistic provider, and that's fair, but I'm not changing right now, because I'm very comfortable and happy with the service I'm getting from my current therapist. The point that Brown makes, though, and which I'm wholeheartedly agreeing with, is that it's a service, and as uncomfortable as it may be to look at someone who acts caring toward you and see "mercenary", it's there. There are two reasons Brown cautions about overreliance on professional support: the first one is that the support is couched in professionalism, and the second one is that they can go away, a situation she has seen all too often as resources are removed or fundings cut. Neither of these are (or should be) vulnerable when support people support you because they love you, be they family, actual friends, or what have you that doesn't have another authority or professional layer to it. So the point that professionals ≠ friends, in terms of support, is critical, especially when you think about autistics being generally challenged to obtain and retain friends in the first place, it can be easy to cloud the professional relationship. (I don't have that problem, but I can see how it could manifest easily, especially with how I feel about my therapist.)
  An aside: if you're surprised that I have a female therapist, you don't know me very well at all.
• Page 26: "Your support network is not something that is going to be given to you – you are going to have to make it for yourself." Yikes. As someone for whom not only does making friends not come easily, but unless they fall in my lap it really doesn't happen at all (even the one friend I claim was intentional it could be said fell in my lap; I just rigged where my lap was when she fell), this is a particularly brutal thing to read. Oddly, though, I think I don't do too horribly. My support network is for sure small, but I didn't really set out to build it; it still mostly just fell in my lap.
• Page 26: "The non-spectrum world uses such networks a lot and I think this is how a lot of unwritten rules get spread around and learned by non-spectrum people." Uh-oh. I think "uh-oh" is probably how most autistic people react to that sentence.
  An aside: I find it incredibly hard to unlearn things. There's still a part of my brain where Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Yasuhiro Nakasone, and François Mitterand are still in power, because they were all in office in 1985 when I learned that. My age is listed at the top of this page, because it's computed when the page is rendered; I don't typically remember it (even in years), because it keeps changing (time is marching on and time is still marching on!). I remember my date of birth, because that doesn't change. (It's hard when I sign something on my birthday to write the correct year, because I'm so used to "18 August" being followed by "1976".)
  In some cases, I think, it's better for autistics (if they are anything like me) to not learn these unwritten rules this way, because if Susie told me when I was 11 that tampons grow on trees, I'd still be looking for the tampon tree. I understand the author's point, though (remember what her goal is, and that I'm not the target audience), in that there's good information, potentially safety-ensuring information, that can get missed. Perhaps also non-autistic people have better filters for identifying bad information, so that none of them getting bombarded with the unwritten rules is gullible enough to search for the tampon tree. (I'm not clear as to whether non-autistics might have a sagaciousness advantage over autistics. I am clear that the only reason I know the word "sagacious" is the opposite of "gullible" is from an episode of Cagney & Lacey, which I doubtless only saw because I didn't get up or change the channel fast enough after whatever was on before it ended (I liked the Monday night comedies on CBS when I was a kid), and if there's a TV on in the room, I'm going to pay attention to it, whether I want to or not, which I have found a good number of people neither do nor understand, and these people often have a TV on all the time.)
• Page 27: "Communicating as an Aspie, with anyone, involves a phenomenal amount of effort and a phenomenal amount of words." Oh, this is so much me. *gestures at everything in this directory* So, so many words, and so much time to actually write the words. I have said many times, especially in the last ten years, that I write well but I do not write fast. A neurotypical person commented that it took her an hour to write me something, and I fully expected writing back to her would take three hours (and I was right). At this point in writing these words on this page, it's probably been about four hours (I did take an overnight break after the previous item), and I'm less than halfway done. When Brown writes, "The full answer to one question might be nine pages of handwriting," I don't know whether to scream out of joy or frustration, but it's at least one of those.
• Page 28: "Aspies are extremely sensitive to criticism. Our motives are often misunderstood – our outward appearances often do not match the inner truth." Ah! *flail* I keep seeing myself in this book (which is not really the point, as the author was writing this with a different idea in mind, but oh my, is this me). The second bit of this, well, I don't know, do I? If I can't see my "outward appearances" the way others do, because I'm not them (and they are not me), how can I know what inner truth they do or do not "match"? I think that's an understated frustration, particularly for those of us who are autistic but spent 45 years believing ourselves to be neurotypical: we don't know that we don't know what we don't know, and in not knowing we are autistic, we don't know that we aren't projecting the same thing that we feel, because in our own minds, of course we are.
• Page 28: "I need someone that does not assume that all autism stereotypes apply to me." Here's one I don't feel, mostly because I don't know the stereotypes of which she speaks, because I haven't been confronted by them. I've had this diagnosis for what, two months now? In that time, as I have mentioned elsewhere, I haven't had any negative responses (just a couple ill-advised statements that I countered); I believe that those who would have negative responses (including some people who got this letter) have chosen to ignore me, which is disappointing but still their decision and outsiode my control (see later on in this book for more on that). That said, in the next sentence (which I choose not to quote) she immediately lists several of these "assumptions" she has had people make about her due to her autism, which do not in fact apply to her. I was unsurprised (and joyed) to see that they do not apply to me, either, which is why I do not bother to list them here.
• Page 29: "Aspies tend to get a lot of feedback about how we are getting things wrong and we certainly experience getting things wrong a lot. What we get frequently over our entire lives, from early childhood onwards, is feedback from others that we are too slow, too stupid, too selfish, too naïve, too poor at communicating, too weird, too wrong, that we do not fit in, that we are inferior to everyone else and that our place is at the bottom of every social hierarchy." This one stood out to me because I feel like it's not me. I mean, my notes here say "frequently: not really". I think that this is a place where my early environment possibly had a huge effect: as I've mentioned elsewhere, being a Seahorse meant that I, in the words of my clinician, was readily accepted for who I was. As has been observed by someone who was there with me, when I got to public schools, while that may not have been the case, and while I may have been getting a lot of this negative feedback that she describes, I either didn't notice or didn't care (certainly a combination of those at different times). I admit the possibility here that there may have been times when this "frequently" happened to me, but I didn't see it as frequent. It's like … I've had situations in my life (which I have found very bizarre) where people have accused me of being gay. I say "accused" because that is their intent, not because I feel that observation (particularly if true) need feel like an accusation. While I find these sitautions bizarre, they do not faze me, and if I do notice they are happening (I think I often do not), I just consider these people underinformed. None of my friends, none of the people I feel actually knows me, would judge that particular trait wrongly about me. I think that the negative feedback she mentions here is a lot like that: if someone told me those things, I'd just blow them off as being (a) underinformed and (b) attempting to hurt me. I've commented at other times that while I have been bullied, bullying me never was all that effective, because I didn't react they way the bullies wanted or expected me to. (Sometimes the way I did react caused other problems, but not problems that the bullies would enjoy.) The only feedback she lists that feels like it might fit me is the social hierarchy one, but again, so what? This may be a learned behavior, influenced of course by autism, but why do I care?
  Okay, that said, there are times where being a social outcast hurts. Here's the thing about that, though: when that happens and it hurts, it's because there was a time earlier in my relationship with that social group where I would have been included rather than ignored. I can think of two specific instances of that, and it often comes with a side order of "I have to arrange social gatherings that keep [me] separate from [some specific not-me]", which devolves into "ignoring [me] makes this all so much easier".
• Pages 30-31: "Most of my life experiences have taught me that being different to others is a very bad thing.", "I need someone who does not take offence when I tell them something they already know", and "Simple explanations … work well for Aspies." This set was interetsing. The first one, I want to give the author a hug, because it's so sad to me she feels that way. She also says in the same vein, "In this world, being different is not safe," and, well (remembering what the point of her book is and who her target audience is), I can't argue with her. It's still sad, but it's sad in the same way that any "existing as a female makes one vulnerable" is sad.
  The third one (which actually came second) is sensible, though I don't fit (or feel) her context, which is actually about relating to parents, i.e., people with children. I don't find that people with children understand or relate to me better at all; on the contrary, I find that people with children have even more on their plates (understandably and correctly) than people without children, and as a result there is less room for me (and the substantial amount of time and effort that I can suck). If I could name my ten closest friends (which I would struggle to do), I would guess that at least half do not have children. I don't think I relate well to people who have children, because those are choices I have made differently in my life (and would not at all want to change).
  The second one makes me think of my maternal grandmother, the one who I think would have been hard to tell about my autism, but also the one who I think if she had known I was an autistic child would have been even more protective of her only grandchild than she was already (and that would not have gone well). I know that as an adult (she died in 2005, so I was 29), I would have many conversations with her where I would tell her things she already knew, but she never seemed critical of that at all; she just enjoyed hearing them from me (in some cases again).
• Page 32: "I need someone who sees it as their responsibility to adapt to me as much as it is my responsibility to adapt to them." This is one it is safe to say that I am bad at, on both sides. I am hopeful, perhaps, that part of the reason there is I have never seen either responsibility because I, in not knowing I am neurodivergent, have never seen myself as someone who needs to be adapted to. I'm also bad at adapting? I realize that looks like a statement rather than a question. I guess I should just say "this is hard" and move on, at this point, but I think it should be highlighted.
• Page 33: She has a paragraph here in a section that I think I need to just quote in its entirety:

  Note to support people

  If you get even some of this stuff right, you will be very precious to us. Probably a lot more precious to us than we are to you. We might not know how to repay your kindness. We may not know how to meet your emotional needs. We might really like you and appreciate you, but not realise that we should communicate this to you in any way. We might eventually catch on and understand a little bit of what you need emotionally from us, but it could take us years.

  Hoo boy. Even laying aside the "a lot more precious to us than we are to you", which I feel so, so much (and have mentioned I think earlier on this page), there's just so much to unpack here. Saying I don't know how to do this feels like such an understatement as to miss the point: even if you tell me how, it doesn't mean I can do it. Emotionally, I am a lousy faker. If it doesn't come naturally to me, it feels forced, and thus insincere, and thus wrong. It's like the old conversation (and yes I had this when I was a child):

  "I'm sorry!"

  "For what are you sorry?"

  "I don't know."

  "Then you aren't really sorry."

  Looking at that with the lens of autism, I can see that part of what I was doing there was trying to placate; I knew I was supposed to apologize, and so I did, but since I didn't know why it was insincere and unacceptable. Still, that's a … thing.
  The author mentions somewhere (it might be on the next page, for all I know), the Five Love Languages, and she says it is great for autistics, because it's like five simple rules for expressing appreciation, love, and affection, and of course we can follow rules! *sigh* No. No it is not. Do you know how many conversations I've had, and my wife has had, and our respective and joint therapists have had with us, about exactly that topic, and how <expletive> simple it's supposed to be to just do the things? It doesn't work that way. I can go through the lists, and I can say that I crave Physical Touch, and that I crave Whatever The One I Can't Think Of Is (EDIT: Quality Time, it says on page 37), and that she craves Words Of Affirmation, and that she craves Acts Of Service, and that neither of us cares about Gift-Giving (I sometimes care as a giver, but not as a recipient; I hate the premise of gift-giving holidays, because it's forced; I always have hated (and still do as an adult) being asked what I want for Christmas, because my brain doesn't work that way, and because you don't ask for gifts because that's <expletive> rude, and if you want to give a gift you should give a gift because you want to and you want to make the recipient happy and I don't care what day it is and … I seem to have digressed from my earlier rant with a new rant), and that's supposed to make it simple, and I'm supposed to just dole out Words Of Affirmation, except if you tell me that's what I'm supposed to do, I then can't do it, because it would be forced. (Acts Of Service is a little different; there I feel like I could do the thing, except then if the thing isn't received well, I feel like I did it wrong, and it doesn't matter – and that's not even looking at the concept that if I have an idea about something to do for someone, and I'm all set to do it, and then she asks me to do it, it's now completely worthless, and this great idea I had about trying to do something for somebody is all for naught.) Anyway, the point (which may have gotten a bit lost in all that parallel ranting) is that even if I do, in the author's words, "catch on and understand a little bit of what you need emotionally", I still have no guarantee of being able to actually do the thing that, at that point, we both want me to do.
• Page 34: "Not because we do not want to [give anything back], but because we might not have figured out how to do it." This is really a continuation of the last one. Once again, let me reiterate that there's a difference between knowing to do something and figuring out how to do something, and that even being told how (and in this context often especially being told how) is not only not as helpful as it may seem to be, it can actually be counterproductive.
• Page 37: "Reach out to people – make the first move. This is against all my instincts, but if you are only ever passive, people are unlikely to reach out to you." This is in a section (which is a list of bullet points, this is Point 9 (of 10), and the Five Love Languages (see previous rant) is in Point 10) about advice for relating to others, and I guess I appreciate this one because the author admits here that it's counterintuitive and difficult (those aren't necessarily the same thing, of course, but this is very much both). This is something I would argue that I am incredibly bad at (and I think I have argued that earlier on this page), but I would also argue (and have stated this to several people, including my therapist the very first day I met her last August) that I have no idea how to not be incredibly bad at this. I also feel like – and this goes back to the comments I made at the beginning of Chapter 1 – I do not actually do too badly despite this. There are situations, certainly, where things don't fall in my lap and I don't know what to do, but the ones (like jobs) that feel experientially problematic aren't exactly this. As I said earlier, I don't really feel like I need more friends, and the ones that have fallen into my lap feel adequate. This advice then might be better twisted into other realms.

Chapter 2: Boundaries

• This is an important section, and it's something that I think anyone who has ever been to a therapist (especially as a couple) has had a lot of discussion on this topic. It's still solid information to hear. Brown lists (pages 40-41) six bullet points that emphasize what the reader should understand to be within her boundaries:
  • Your skin and your body.
  • What you believe and think.
  • Your behaviour and your choices.
  • Your feelings.
  • Your time.
  • Your money.
  The upshot of this, of course, is that you have control of these things, and if somebody else asserts control of these things, that person is wrong, and you have the right to object. That's an important thing to understand. I didn't so much learn anything here, because as I said, I've been down this road before. Still, that also means I grasp that this whole business can be a problem for autistic people. Self-advocacy is not my strong suit, and I'm guessing it's not for a lot of the readers of this book. That doesn't mean that boundaries don't become a source of conflict in relationships; of course they do. The author's goal here is to give the reader the tools to self-advocate for herself. She clarifies this on page 42: "We can only defend ourselves and stick up for ourselves when we are sure of what our rights and responsibilities actually are."
• Nearly all of the rest of this chapter is about saying "no". Consider again the actual target audience and purpose of this book, and saying "no" is a crucial safety skill. Saying "no" is often difficult, and can be more difficult for conflict-avoidant people-pleasers (or maybe that's just me, except not really). On page 45, for example, she says, "Another Aspie-related reason that I find it hard to say 'no' is it often takes me a while to process information, to decide if someone's request is reasonable or not, and to work out how to respond." (Hey! Oxford comma! YAY!) Some of these specifics were enlighening, but they were also retreads of CHapter 1 stuff that I've mentioned above. I don't mean to shortchange this chapter, because there's all good stuff here, but it's wearying at this point to try to talk about all the stuff here, because (unlike Chapter 1) I've been here before.

Chapter 3: Useful Rules

• Remember where the author mentioned wanting to write this as a rule book? That's actually not what this is about. These rules are actually more about self-care. About half of these rules I felt like having a strong reaction to, and I'm going to list those with <strong> tags. I'm still listing them all, though.
  1. I do not have to be perfect. It is okay to make mistakes
  2. I am precious and I have great worth. I deserve good people in my life. I will not give myself away to just anyone who will have me
  3. It is okay to develop at my own pace
  4. It is okay to be different. It is okay to be myself
  5. You cannot control other people or change them. Therefore you cannot control your dating life or other relationships
  6. It is okay to trust. It is okay to trust myself
  7. Obsessions with people are not allowed
  8. I deserve to be loved
  9. I am not stupid
  10. I am not selfish
  11. It is okay to love myself. It is important to love myself. It is not selfish to love myself
      1. Understand why loving yourself is a good thing to do and get any thoughts out of your head that is is wrong or selfish
      2. Recognize your needs and communicate them
      3. Give yourself treats
      4. Watch out for 'shoulds' and relace them with kind, forgiving and accepting words
      5. Talk to yourself in a loving, compassionate way
      6. Healing exercise
  I didn't <strong> Rule 7, though some people who knew me in high school might think I should have. Rules 1 and 2 are important, but I don't feel like I have problems with these. Rules 3 and 4 I think are important for me, though again I don't feel like I have problems with these. Rule 9 is about the same. Rule 5 goes back to the Boundaries discussions in Chapter 2, and there's probably a lot I could say there, but this isn't where I'm trying to go with this.
  Rule 6 goes along with Rule 11, and the steps after Rule 11 (which are strategies for implementing Rule 11) have one that obviously sticks out. Rule 11.2, you might call it, is something that is hard for me, so hard. I am very, very, very bad at identifying needs. (My therapist would totally agree with that assertion.) As such, I am bad at communicating needs, or standing up for my needs, or not subjugating my needs to those of others, because I don't recognize needs, and so it's hard for me to justify standing up for myself against the alleged needs of others. This is where Rule 5 often comes in, too. I think if I keep going on this topic, I'm going to drift away from reactions to the autism topics of this book and never get this done, so I'm going to just stop with Part 1 now.
• Page 65: "[An autistic lecturer the author heard] also said that we Aspies often do not see the need for more than one friend, and I think she is totally right." Okay, I lied; I'm not quite done with Part 1 yet. This line (which was under Rule 7) jumped out at me, because I can totally see it. I also see the problem with it before she reveals it: if your one friend says "no", it is good to have a backup friend. I know who my best friend is right now, and I know there are a lot of things I can talk to her about, but I also know that (1) sometimes she's not available (see above about my friends being busier than me et al.), and (2) sometimes there are topics that I'd rather not make her uncomfortable with (in part because that will cause her to ignore me and hello reason 1). So I have what you might call a backup friend. Now as I write this, I haven't heard from my backup friend in a week, and if she ever catches up, she's going to have a lot of stuff from me to read. It does frustrate me that I am waiting on her, because I want instant gratification from my support network! Bwa ha ha! ("I laughed. Did, uh, did you laugh?" –Victoria Brisbane (played by Madeline Kahn) in High Anxiety) I never get instant gratification from my support network, of course. I'm lucky to get daily gratification. If I had more close friends who I trusted, I might do better on that issue, but then what I really want is like copies of the same person, rather than different people and different viewpoints. I don't want to want that, but … yeah.

Chapters 4-12: Part 2

• Part 2 of this book reads like a sex ed book. That's only disturbing to me briefly, and then it's sad: disturbing because I think how does anyone not already have this information, and then sad because obviously some people do not, which leads to an almost unfathomable list of problems, and also shows why this book is needed. I mean, really: I don't know that there is anything I didn't learn (or at least learn the then-accurate versions of) in 1991 when I was 15, sitting in my high school Health class. Things I learned in school tend to be viewed by me as universal knowledge, which I know isn't quite right since not everyone went to the same school or took the same classes; not everyone even took seven semesters of P.E. in four years of high school, because not every state requires that (but my home state, Illinois, does). When it's something that I learned in a course that everyone in my world had to take as a high school sophomore, though, it really feels like universal knowledge. Notice here I have no dependence on what Brown calls the "cultural knowledge system", so I really don't expect this. (There are a few bits that I didn't know or remember, and I'm not calling them out because they don't really matter.) I do understand, though, that people (especially women) who don't have this information and knowledge are even more vulnerable to Bad Things Happening To Them. Put bluntly, it's easier to get ***ed if you don't understand what that is or that it's happening to you. If that sounds horrifying, good; it felt horrifying to the author as she was writing it.

Chapter 13: Emotional Healing

• I'm not going to say anything specific here, or about the very end of the book (Why The Aspie Girl's Guide Is Written As It Is and Note To Professionals), because frankly I am just too tired and want to be done with this. I apologize for that, but these parts were still worth reading even if you're not in the target audience.

Conclusion

• Page 163: "Being on the spectrum has a strong genetic component, so clearly some Aspies are succeeding very well indeed in their romantic relationships, because that is how little Aspies are made…" (Note: I spent hours looking back through the book for this trying to find that line; I knew I hadn't made it up.) I have said that I do not want to play that game with myself, the "And you may ask yourself: how did I get here?" I'm 45 years old; I'll be 46 in August. My parents are 72 (or will be in August). This isn't something that I want to go genetics spelunking about. That said, this line stuck out for two reasons. The other reason is that the target age for this book is anyone over 13, so says the author (well, and also autistic and female, but I'm glossing over that bit). When I was 13, I had zero interest in romantic relationships. That changed a little when I was 18, and a particular person is most responsible for changing that (and might wish she hadn't if she had known what that would do). I didn't actually have a romantic relationship, or any of the sexual activities that you might think might have that as a prerequisite, until I was 28. There were times when I questioned whether I was asexual (without a good understanding of that term; clearly now I never was) or whether I was, as I would often phrase it, "heterosexual with no proof". I was fortunate, in contrast to some of the author's own experiences and those of others she writes about, that I never felt any pressure from others (peers, family, or otherwise) to be any different than I was. My choice not to want children (for a variety of reasons which I choose not to get into here) was not strictly tied to my choices not to have a sexual relationship; the latter didn't really feel like a choice so much as a default condition that I didn't have a problem with. I mention that because the author does link children and romantic relationships, albeit playfully. I did eventually have a romantic relationship, when I was 28, and it became the married relationship I have now. (How much of a sexual relationship we have, dear reader, is none of your business.) I still don't have children, because I happened to find a partner who was (at least at the time) as interested in not having children and not being a parent as I was, and so whereas I thought that perhaps someday I might have a conflict and need to be convinced of the benefits of being a parent (which my friends who are parents occasionally do at some length), that never happened, for which I am quite pleased.

There is probably gobs more that I could try to convey from this book, but it would be so much easier if you just read it yourself, which I would recommend you do, even if you're afraid of usurping the target audience. It's a book; it won't judge you or bite your hand off if it thinks you're not an autistic female and have no business learning its secrets. You do have a business learning from it; I certainly did.