What Quarantine feels like from an Autistic Perspective
Tags: Autism, Personal, Covid 19

When quarantine started for me, my college campus closed down and I didn’t physically go to college for a week since my college was setting up the online schooling system – I had just got back from my family vacation in Florida with my family which just made it that much harder due to Autistic difficulties with Transitions.

It felt like everything was happening fast and it felt like my college life was slowly turning into something that I would feel isolated with during quarantine, and the last few months proved that.

I started to feel less like myself – Sometimes being angry and hostile whenever I felt hurt by NT mental health advice from one of my family members.

I started to experiment with my pronouns and with my gender, and I am proud of myself for doing so, while my family still uses she/her for me, and I’ve accepted that I cannot ever change their beliefs because it is on them to change their own beliefs, not me.

Anyway, in-real-life friends, I found real help since I had a difficult time with logging on to classes sometimes, but I was thankful and grateful that I didn’t have to physically go somewhere while taking a bus, and that I do not have to attend class while getting dressed.

But, in the end, I persevered

While I was going through this ending semester, which will finish tomorrow for me, I kept thinking about things that I feel would never happen to me in real life. For example, finding a joy-friend/date-mate.

I felt more dead inside since I know that my finding some “soulmate” will never happen and that I won’t even have one. Of course! As my Pilates instructor told me: “I don’t even know what will happen in the future, and as one of my family members told me, just because I had a shitty experience with my first love doesn’t really mean that I can jump to conclusions about it”.

But, of course, my – Still healing from my first-relationship-looking ass doesn’t even know it yet.

As for my field placement experience since I am an Autistic social service work student, I had an easy time with my weekly field activities at first, but then I began to notice that my peers were having a difficult time with them since they were also dealing with their personal lives while balancing online placement.

Online Placement

There was no organization for me since I had a hard time finding a placement and the place that I wanted to get a placement at was closed because of COVID-19.here were some weekly field activities that didn’t teach anything. And the reason? Well, read on…

The Social Service Work Field

The entire Social Service Work field runs on the same carceral – Anything that has to do with the corrupt and often fucked up justice and law systems. Especially a certain kind of justice/law system that diminishes a person’s sense of humanity by making them into a white supremacist cosplayer that upholds capitalism and state-sanctioned fascism system, and that it also runs on the same systemic discriminatory oppressions that it preaches against.

The Injustice Law/System and Christian Church Places Undue Constraints on the Social Services System Constrains Access to Services

Conservative religious and Christian/Xtian fundies attempt to seem trendy and with the times, but their misogynistic beliefs aren’t even in line with the complex realities of life anymore.

If I have to be frank based on what I’ve observed on fundie Tumblr {I’ll say more about it later on). I’ve heard from a classmate of mine (let’s refer to her as J) that she didn’t want to fail placement ever again while I was there for her and for my other classmates who were also dealing with similar shit too…

Another thing that I’ve also realized is how entirely fucked both my college’s system and the SSW field is since they both still rely on capitalism, ableism, along with many other forms of oppression, all the while claiming that they are against the bootlicking clowns they are.