I recently realized that some of the people that follow my blog are autistic. Well, this isn’t surprising because a certain percentage of the population (about 0.5%) are intelligent autistics, and many of them are active on the internet because using the internet is one of those activities that don’t require face to face interaction with people. Therefore, I think that I will provide some advice for autistics, and for people in general, that can help them in daily life. I’m doing this mostly for myself, however, in order not to forget about these tips. I’ve been able to accumulate a few decades of life experience already due to my age. One thing that I would recommend for autistic people is to take a pause and relax your body when you’re around people and when you’re feeling nervous. Autistic people are often in a state of tension. Because of this, their bodies are in a condition of tension, and they make rapid, jerky, or unusual movements that normal (neurotypical) people find strange and even repulsive. I know that being relaxed isn’t something that comes easy for an autistic (neurodivergent) person, but this helps to appear normal around people, to make proper eye contact, to make decisions better, and to avoid outbursts. Getting into a state of relaxation also helps an autistic person to retain that much needed energy, which can be easily lost when an autistic person is around people. Staying relaxed and keeping my body relaxed is something that I forgot about for a while, but, fortunately, I remembered about this recently. I don’t mean that an autistic person should always be relaxed, but being relaxed can often help in social situations. Of course, there’s another, much more simple, way to relieve tension for an autistic person. This method is stimming with a so-called stim toy. Using a stim toy is a much easier way of relaxing than attempting to relax your body consciously. This is something that I found out about very recently. But I decided to use a pen instead of a stim toy. I bought a pen with a cap that opens and closes. I take this pen everywhere with me now, and I stim by opening and closing the cap of this pen, by turning the cap, or by simply holding this pen in one of my hands. A pen is one of the most common things that a person can carry, and one can even take it to a job interview. I think that if I had used a pen or some stim toy to stim since my childhood, my life would have been a lot better. When I use my pen to stim, I cease to be nervous, I gain confidence, I can focus better, I can appear normal around people, I can make better eye contact, and I cease to worry. Another thing that helps me to get through a tough day is aspirin. For some reason, aspirin helps me to feel better and more confident. If I’m nervous, if I’m feeling down, or if I have a headache, I take one aspirin tablet a day, but not more than one tablet a day. The stronger the aspirin, the better the effect that it has. It’s definitely not a good thing to consume a lot of aspirin because, like any drug, it’s not really a good thing for a person’s stomach and digestive system. Therefore, I try not to consume aspirin every day. But, when I need to feel better or when I’m in an important social situation, aspirin definitely helps. Another thing that some autistic people do when they go outside is wear sunglasses. They do this even when it’s not sunny outside. Sunglasses cover their eyes, thus making them less nervous and less noticeable to the people around them. Wearing sunglasses is not something that I’m in the habit of doing, but many autistics find this to be very helpful. I already mentioned in one of my posts that I prefer to sleep for at least 10 hours per day. This is probably one of the things that keep me looking very young and healthy for my age. I also don’t smoke or drink alcohol. It’s obvious that the more a person sleeps, the better a person feels during the day. Some people say that they like to sleep as little as possible in order to get more things done, but I think that this is a mistake. I think that sleeping less affects a person’s health, well-being, and life expectancy. Therefore, I try to get as much sleep as I can. Since I learned that I have autism at the end of July of this year, I’ve been trying to find out as much useful information as I can about this condition. I haven’t been obsessed with autism, and I learned pretty much everything that I needed to know about it in the first 3 or 4 weeks after finding out about it, but I recently came across more information that I found to be of some use. One thing that I’ve been doing sometimes is watching videos by autistic people on YouTube. I watch videos that are only by autistic women because I don’t really want to watch autistic men talk about their experiences. Moreover, almost all of the videos that I’ve been able to find about autism on YouTube are by autistic women. It seems that autistic women are a lot more willing to talk about their experiences than autistic men. This is a good thing because I find their videos to be usually informative. Some researchers say that there are a lot more autistic men than autistic women, but I think that this might not be the case. Autistic women are better at hiding their autistic traits than autistic men, and they spend more time and effort on fitting in. This is why fewer of them get noticed or diagnosed. I try to avoid clickbait videos because I find clickbait videos to be unpleasant and often useless. Since monetization got introduced on YouTube some years ago, YouTube has become even worse than American television, in some ways. It’s now a website that’s filled with dumb and useless content because many people try to make only clickbait videos in order to make as much money as possible on YouTube. This is one of the reasons why I’ve been using YouTube less in the last several years. It’s not surprising that there are clickbait videos about autism on YouTube because there are millions of autistic people around the world that would like to know more about their condition. Because of this, I’ve tried to watch videos about autism that are obscure and that don’t have many views. Therefore, I try to avoid videos that are on channels that are dedicated to making videos about autism. Why I do this is simple. Clickbait videos are almost always a waste of time. Still, even with all of the negative changes that have taken place in the last decade or so on YouTube, YouTube remains the best website for watching videos. This is a downer, but such is reality now. YouTube is certainly better than Rutube, for example. In the last few years, the people running Rutube have deleted hundreds of my videos because they don’t like some of my blog posts. Something that I noticed some time ago is that whenever I make a post that can be perceived as being critical of the Russian Federation, a dozen or more of my videos on Rutube get deleted at random. But there is a pattern. Since the Russian Federation is a right-wing state where real opposition figures, such as nationalists or socialists, have been getting killed by the authorities since the early-1990s, the first videos that got deleted on my channel were the few videos featuring such opposition figures. I didn’t realize this at first, but this is now clear to me after I noticed that there’s a pattern and after I read some comments by people. After that happened, almost all of the videos that have been getting deleted on my channel have been about sociology and history. I don’t watch or read Russian propaganda, but, as one of my followers informed me, Russian propaganda does watch me closely. Another thing that I’ve done recently is read two of Michael Fitzgerald’s books. These two books are titled ‘Autism and Creativity: Is there a link between autism in men and exceptional ability?’ (2004) and ‘The Genesis of Artistic Creativity: Asperger’s Syndrome and the Arts’ (2005). These books aren’t easy to obtain, but they can be bought online. I was able to buy them for a relatively low price in used condition, though they still cost me over $50. They might also be available in some libraries. I haven’t finished reading these books yet, but the information that they contain has been very useful to me because Fitzgerald knows a lot about autism, specifically about Asperger syndrome. In ‘The Genesis of Artistic Creativity’, he selected 21 famous people (Jonathan Swift, Hans Christian Andersen, Herman Melville, Lewis Carroll, William Butler Yeats, Arthur Conan Doyle, George Orwell, Bruce Chatwin, Baruch Spinoza, Immanuel Kant, Simone Weil, Alfred Jules Ayer, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, Erik Satie, Bela Bartok, Glenn Gould, Vincent van Gogh, Jack Butler Yeats, Laurence Stephen Lowry, and Andy Warhol) and explained why they had autism. When it comes to Carroll, Fitzgerald wrote, “He had ‘a compulsive orderliness’ and was systematic in his approach to organizing his work and activities. Undoubtedly a severe disciplinarian, he was ‘a master of regulating his life, and superhuman in today’s terms, in controlling his impulses during waking hours’.” In his books, Fitzgerald states that people with Asperger syndrome are very creative and that they’ve been responsible for much of the progress that mankind has made. In one of his interviews, he said, “Well, Asperger syndrome has massive impact on all our lives. If we didn’t have people with Asperger syndrome, we’d still be in the cave. We would not have developed technology. We would not have developed fire or the wheel. That’s the first point. The second point is that the large group of genes in my view that give you Asperger syndrome also have a tendency to give you creativity of extreme proportions. Other people have the same view. So, there’s an overlap between Asperger syndrome and creativity. And this has been known for thousands of years, at least what has been known is the link between genius akin to madness, for example. So, this kind of phenomenon has been observed as long as written records are there. Asperger syndrome was developed by a man in Austria. He worked on it throughout the 1930s, and he published on it. The first publication was in 1938 and later in 1944. It’s a condition characterized by autistic features. People with Asperger syndrome have poor eye contact, they have problems reading non-verbal behavior, they have problems reading faces, they have problems with social know-how, they’re naive and immature, they’re emotionally immature, they’re loners, they have problems sharing, they have problems turn-taking, they use repetitive language, and they have narrow interests and repetitive behavior. It’s not surprising then that Asperger syndrome is associated with depression and anxiety. In later life, psychosis isn’t rare. The perfect example of that is Isaac Newton, who is the greatest creator in the past thousand years. He developed a psychotic episode in later life, and he had all the features of classic Asperger syndrome. There’s still a great deal of prejudice against persons with Asperger syndrome in the world. They suffer enormously. They suffer unnecessarily. They’re often unfortunately bullied or ostracized, mistreated, maybe put in prison. Their condition isn’t recognized.” In ‘Autism and Creativity’, Fitzgerald wrote, “However, in order for the scientist to innovate, he must ‘break the grip on his imagination that our powers of logical-seeming storytelling impose’. Creative people with HFA/ASP are obsessed with fundamental, bedrock discoveries. They have no interest in being merely replicative. Hence they have little regard for their contemporaries and do not conform to the values of society. They have a peculiar ability to become lost in the present, in the here-and-now, which appears to be a sine qua non for creativity of an HFA/ASP kind. Indeed, the HFA/ASP might facilitate this disconnectedness from the world so that creativity of pure genius can take place. High-functioning autism and Asperger’s syndrome are pervasive developmental disorders and therefore different from mental disorders such as schizophrenia and manic-depressive psychosis. The differentiation between high-functioning autism and Asperger’s syndrome has never been achieved scientifically, so I have retained the term HFA/ASP. The term, while cumbersome, does describe the scientific situation today. Indeed, Asperger’s syndrome is often used as a synonym for high-functioning autism. It is possible to speculate that humankind would still be at the stage of development before the wheel was invented had it not been for the type of creativity that people with HFA/ASP developed. There is no doubt that HFA/ASP can also occur in females, and therefore a similar type of creativity should be (and is) possible. Nevertheless, to date there is no female equivalent of Newton, or no female equivalent in the mathematical/physical science domain.”
One thing that I’ve noticed recently is that I like to often listen to soothing music or sounds and see films that I find calming. No doubt I do this because of my autism. Therefore, now I understand why The Ring (2002) is one of my favorite films. I think that I enjoy watching it even more than Jacob’s Ladder (1990), A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987), Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988), The Hitcher (1986), and Halloween (1978), which are among my favorites too. Although The Ring is a supernatural horror film, it’s not really that frightening, and I find its music and tone to be soothing. I would also add that, in my opinion, The Ring is one of the best films of the last two decades. It’s certainly one of the best horror films. For me, it has replay value. It also has an artistic touch, which is something that almost all of the films that got made since 2000 lack. When it comes to albums that are calming, I can mention some of the ones that I have in my collection. They include 2010: The Year We Make Contact by David Shire, Aja by Steely Dan, Avalon by Roxy Music, Beverly Hills Cop by Harold Faltermeyer, Bloodsport by Paul Hertzog, Body Heat by John Barry, C’est Chic by Chic, Creid by Yasunori Mitsuda, The Crow by Graeme Revell, Disintegration by The Cure, Everything by Climie Fisher, Black Rain by Hans Zimmer, Eye In The Sky by The Alan Parsons Project, Ghost In The Shell by Kenji Kawai, Halloween II by John Carpenter, Hats by The Blue Nile, The Hitcher by Mark Isham, Lethal Weapon by Michael Kamen, The Mack by Willie Hutch, The Yakuza by Dave Grusin, When Marnie Was There by Takatsugu Munamatsu, Three O’Clock High by Tangerine Dream, Thelma & Louise by Hans Zimmer, Starman by Jack Nitzsche, Risque by Chic, Return To Forever by Chick Corea, Rapture by Anita Baker, Rain Man by Hans Zimmer, Princess Mononoke by Joe Hisaishi, Spirited Away by Joe Hisaishi, Howl’s Moving Castle by Joe Hisaishi, Poltergeist II by Jerry Goldsmith, and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service by John Barry. Moreover, I can add that in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild I’ve found another location where it’s pleasing to stay, to look at the scenery, and to listen to the sounds. This location is called Keya Pond, which can be found in East Necluda. Since it hasn’t been easy for me to think of a picture that should be included in this post, I will just include a photograph of Seabreeze Walk and Beach Avenue in Downtown Vancouver. This avenue is where I sometimes like to take walks. It’s one of my favorite places in Vancouver. Another one of my favorite places in Vancouver is the section of British Columbia Highway 1A between Jervis Street and Bute Street.
The blog of Igor Boyar 