The Loud Hands Project

So I’ve been busy.

INTRODUCING: The Loud Hands Project.

Our Story:

The Loud Hands Project is a publishing effort by the Autistic Self Advocacy Network. Currently, we are raising money towards the creation of our first and foundational anthology (Loud Hands: Autistic People, Speaking) and accompanying website.

Loud Hands: Autistic People, Speaking features essays, long and short, by Autistic authors writing on autism acceptance, neurodiversity, Autistic pride and culture, disability rights and resistance, and resilience (known collectively by the community as having loud hands). Questions posed to the contributors might include what does autism mean to you; why does Autistic culture matter; what do you wish you had known growing up Autistic; how can the Autistic community cultivate resilience; what does “loud hands” mean to you; and how do you have loud hands? The anthology is the first of a projected series featuring contributions from Autistic writers stressing the preservation and celebration of Autistic culture and resilience. The website will host shorter and multi-media submissions along the same lines, along with additional materials and videos, and serve as a focal point for the project and community.

Our Impact:

The Loud Hands Project is about survival, resilience, and pride. The Loud Hands Project is necessary because autistic youth face systematic oppression, abuse, and bullying every day. It does not “get better” for us—typically, upon graduation, it actually gets worse. This must change.

The Loud Hands Project is a structured, multi-facetted response by the Autistic community to the systematic disenfranchisement, bullying, and abuse experienced by autistic youth, young adults, and self advocates. Taking the form of a publishing effort by the Autistic Self Advocacy Network and spearheaded by Julia Bascom, The Loud Hands Project consists of multiple prongs organized around the theme of what the Autistic community refers to as “having loud hands”—autism acceptance, neurodiversity, Autistic pride, community, and culture, disability rights and resistance, and resilience.  We focus on cultivating resilience among autistic young people and empowering us in building communities and cultures of ability, resistance, and worth. To quote Laura Hershey: “you weren’t the one who made you ashamed, but you are the one who can make you proud.”

How You Can Help:

We need to raise ten thousand dollars ($10,000) to help cover the initial costs of putting together and distributing our first anthology and launching our website. Please consider making a donation here—every little bit helps!

Spread the word! Check out the share tools on our page, and please use them! You can visit our Facebook page, tumblr, and twitter too, and tweet about the project using the hashtag #loudhandsproject.

Response

When I was a little girl, I was scared.

That sentence has taken two months to write.

When I was a little girl, I was scared.

When I was a little girl, I was a lot of things. I was functionally blind, and other kids teased me about my huge, staring eyes. When I was a little girl, I was somber. When I was a little girl, I was remote. When I was a little girl, I was devout.

When I was a little girl, I was scared, and I was alone.

*****

I don’t know how to tell you about growing up scared and alone, except that I don’t want to, and maybe that says enough. I can tell you, though, what changed. What changed is that I was fifteen, and I found this.

I was fifteen, and I spent months circling Amanda Baggs’ site, skimming the front page (the background and url were different then,) afraid to click on any of the posts, testing and tasting the words autism and autistic and okay over and over in my mouth. I had found someone like me. I had found someone like me, and they were fine.

It was months before I could look at this straight on, accept it, and click a post to read. Eventually I was brave.

When I was fifteen, I stopped being alone.

When I was fifteen, I stopped being alone, and that meant I could stop being scared.

*****

A little more than a month after I wrote Quiet Hands, I woke up and found that the number of hits on this site had erupted. Quiet Hands had gone viral, and there were a dozen comments waiting in moderation, links all over facebook, emails. I was bewildered–it was a stupid, personal post I’d written in the middle of the night to process a flashback a terrible character on a wonderful show had triggered–and overwhelmed by the attention. My friends can attest to my state that week–head-banging, bewildered William Schuester did something good by accident, obsessively relaying the ever-increasing hit-count as my words died out. I told one of them:

The irony in writing about what I write about is that you write about not-existing, and then you very suddenly exist.

I’m not so good at handling that.

But as I adjusted, as I pieced together the history of what happened and approved comments and somehow, strangely, kept existing, I started being able to read what people were saying. I started getting emails from parents who wanted me to know that they’d brought the piece into IEP meetings and had it written into the IEP that their child would be allowed to stim and move, from parents who’d talked to their child and asked if this had happened to them, told them to come and tell if it ever did, from teachers who’d thrown away their Quiet Hands posters.

I get a couple of these a week, now, and I’ve never been able to respond because I cry every time I read them.

*****

When I was a little girl, I wanted more than anything for someone to tell the loud, looming people to stop.

*****

(No one ever did.)

*****

There’s another class of responses I’ve gotten. Autistic people, writing in. Sometimes only a word, a word scraped out and bled through with meaning I understand and never will be able not to.

Yes.

*****

Thank you. 

In my school, it was “sit on your hands.”

You remind me I’m a person.

I feel a little less alone.

******

I see another little girl, flapping in the pharmacy.

Raising my arms comes a little easier, every time.

Stuff And Also Things

This is a post of short, housekeeping things that are not enough for posts in and of themselves but together form one thing. It is not an essay.

So!

I haven’t really written anything since October. This is because I am Autistic, and I am inconsistent and cannot communicate on anyone else’s schedule–or even one of my own. I do have some essays planned to finish and go up soon. I actually have dozens of drafts on my computer, ranging from the rest of Metaphors Are Important to whole new series and a bunch of other things. But they aren’t ready yet, and that’s okay.

I say “that’s okay,” mostly to remind myself. I have a lot of anxiety surrounding my writing, and in particular this site.

Which brings me to my next item of business…

I cannot usually answer comments. It’s in part an access issue, as well as a matter of anxiety, discipline, and time, and it’s also a protective mechanism–my language isn’t the best for brief comments, and I have no desire to start a comment war. It’s my general internet policy, which I try to follow with varying degrees of success. I have similar issues answering emails. I wasn’t going to ever explicitly state this, but it turns out that just because I’m not writing doesn’t mean people aren’t reading, and since Quiet Hands (and more recently, Obsessive Joy) exploded, I’ve gotten more comments than I ever thought this blog would see.

A lot of those comments have made me cry, as much as the attention has made me want to run away. I am planning on posting a more specific response tomorrow, but for now I just want to say thank you. Thank you. Thank you for reading, thank you for listening, thank you for taking action, and thank you for letting me know that all three of those happened. I cherish your comments.

In the interest of directing you to something similar to read, an idea that needs to go viral, I’d like to link you to The Unbroken Spectrum: Stockholm Syndrome, over at Shift Journal. I did not write it. It’s important.

I’ve been working on several projects since October, all related in odd ways, which you can expect to hear more about soon.

I also participated in ASAN’s ELSI  symposium at Harvard Law this weekend, which was fantastic. I don’t have words for this experience, and I don’t know that I ever will, beyond too much excitement and optimism to be contained.  I’ll link to the youtubes when they are available. I spoke briefly about the gap between theory/law and what actually happens to autistic people. I actually spoke much more briefly than I would have liked, since my vision cut out about halfway through my response and I could no longer read what I’d scripted out. Perils of being a self-advocate.

And that’s what you’ve missed since October! Hopefully things will be back to normal here tomorrow. Thanks for bearing with me.