Raven Ambition's Aspergers BLOG

I feel like I haven’t blogged in so long! ((Because I haven’t.))

Some of you may know that myself, partner, and son participated in a documentary a few years ago. For our part, we spoke of the transgender experience. The docu-film isn’t through being edited and produced, but I stop and think of how different things are now, than when we were interviewed in NY and filmed at the beach in Connecticut… I’m glad there is going to be an ‘update’ interview before the film is out.

When my daughter first got top surgery a few years ago and changed her given name to a male name, I felt very badly every time I messed up and said ‘she’ instead of ‘he.’ I think of it this way. You know those Stroop tests where there is a color, and they show a word on top of the color, and then they say, “Just name the color.” Or: “Just read the word.” That’s sort of like how it feels.

Consider the first word here: You are seeing the color red (you are seeing the child you named Kerry Annie, she is known to your brain as female) but you are told to say “BLUE” (or…Silas Matheus, who is a “he”.) The neural pathways want to do one thing, but they do another. And the more you do the Stroop, the better you get. I do mess up sometimes with pronouns and that’s okay with my son. I’m close to my adult children, I never take that for granted.

I slowed down my writing and art the last few years and it isn’t for wont of ideas, I’ve had plenty, I think it’s just, like a lot of people, the state of the world, the pandemic and etcetera, really got me down. It’s Murphy’s Law when you turn on the news. Murphy’s Law applies to me as well. I plan to channel myself into more creative pursuits though, it’s good for the soul. I’ve made some changes and life has thrown me some since I’ve updated this blog:

I was in a serious car accident.

This is the van such as it looked when Silas went back to take a picture of it. I was in the passenger seat, seat-buckled in, thank goodness. But I still got all bruised up, especially my leg, I was limping for weeks and the bruises were a beautiful Deep Purple.

Here is where my head hit the window. The white thing is the air bag. I think the seat detached which is why I went forward with such force. I had two broken ribs. The driver, my partner, did too.

My hearing prosthesis is shot.

I had another operation a few months ago, to fix my hearing prosthesis which was attached to a small bone that became fractured, it knocked out of place. I had a really good doctor but the new prosthesis never took. So here I am, with my connective tissue disease, one-sided hearing loss that’s not reparable, tinnitus and dry eye. Oh boy good thing I’m like one of those inflatable clowns that you punch and they keep getting back up. I’m an eternal optimist too, that helps!

I started training at my workplace to be an Accessibility specialist.

This blog is a mess. I’m in training to spot accessibility violations. That means sites and apps are accessible for everyone, whether they have epilepsy, are blind, hard of hearing, etcetera. I’m trying to carve out time to totally make my own websites and blog accessible! Bear with me. As they say, the time to think about accessible websites, is when you’re first building them. Less work that way.

I decided to leave my board position with The Art of Autism.

After my accident, getting Covid and probably LONG-Covid, as well as focusing on QA work, I had to take some things off my plate. I may not be on the board at AoA anymore, but my heart is with The Art of Autism forever. I 100% support them and have made many friends there I know I’ll have for the rest of my life. Besides I’m still an advisor and I don’t intend to stop doing art anytime soon.

I’m amusing myself.

I hug cats a lot. They give you an endorphin rush after all, like doing art or some of the other things I amuse myself with in my down time, like these things:

I couldn’t believe this. I was ‘playing’ toy horses with a 3 yr. old with this toy from a thrift shop, when I realized the toy was male. I had such a chuckle. So, having an inquisitive mind I Googled “anatomically correct horse toys” and soon realized this is a thing. Target for example has a lot of anatomically correct toy animals. Any farm kid knows what’s what. I grew up riding in the back of pick-ups and watching people bale hay. I’ve no issue with it, I just found it a bit… unexpected. Click this blog link if you are not easily offended by such things…but return here and finish reading, ok? Or read the whole thing and then click over.

I write this post on Halloween. Here is a filter I applied to my dog. I applied some filters to dolls too.

Oh I wish they had Snap Chat when I was a kid. But then again maybe I wouldn’t have been so active. My childhood: croquet, badminton, softball, tennis, fishing, hiking, bocce ball, hopscotch, camping, bike riding… Nowadays, I make my fun. here’s how I entertained a 3 year old recently, in keeping with the Halloween spirit. I made some cut-outs and we played “Nosferatu and his Minion scare the politician.”

Great fun!

Ideally I’d wrap up a blog by sharing new artwork. SOON!

That’s enough of a catch-up blog for now.

I leave you with this picture of my father, who had a 90th birthday recently:

Neural pathways ARE a funny thing because I still think of him like this:

Bye for now