Comments on: Autism and competition; she just won’t compete!

By: sandrar

sandrar — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 13:13:17 +0000

Hi! I was surfing and found your blog post… nice! I love your blog. Cheers! Sandra. R.

By: Adrianna Hey

Adrianna Hey — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 03:44:05 +0000

I am not a competetor either. I have no desire to dominate others-in real life, anyway:)-and I HATED being dominated. I hate the stress. When I love doing something, competing ruins it because winning becomes my primary goal.

Alfie Kohn has a lot to say on the subject of competition. Competition is inherently usavory, for auties and nonauties alike. It’s also completely unncessary when you think about it.

Do we really need to rank students according to their GPA? Does it really matter who is at the top of the class, especially since grades don’t seem to matter much what you will be like as an adult, or how smart you are? Autistic people know this-they tend to score below average on IQ tests despite being highly intelligent. It’s the test, people.

You score again. I love this blog.:)

By: donna

donna — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 03:23:02 +0000

I tumble left, right and didn’t get all the in/on, above/below, under/over, here/there type concepts I didn’t begin to learn until I was about 11 (I remember the grade 5 teacher trying to help me not get angry at these ‘nothing words’ demonstrating them to instil a sense they really did have meaning) so in that context, the idea of who is ‘it’ in a game of chase is really hard to hold in one’s mind.

This week we were walking around a lake when I drifted off down a PTSD ‘rabbit hole’ (the one’s one fall down when having a week engaged with a troll) and Chris tried to get me back to the external world by saying, where are you, where are your feet, what do you smell etc…. GREAT strategy by the way, I taught him how to help me as he felt so helpless when I’d go down those ‘rabbit holes’.

Anyway, he said, what do you see around you. I was striding at the time and we were passing a lake. I looked around and replied, “a duck, swimming past me”. Later he pointed out that in fact it was I who had strode past the duck.

I rest my case

By: donna

donna — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 02:42:24 +0000

ah, a budding Zen master, I presume

By: Amanda

Amanda — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 02:37:54 +0000

When I was a kid, there was a game where you had to lay cards down and line them up like pipes.

I actually used to deliberately avoid anything that would end the game (either me or the other person winning) because I liked lining up the pipes!

This aggravated other people because I would neither win nor lose if I could help it.