Another Stage of the Intentional Communities Odyssey

You might've noticed I haven't been writing in this blog for a while.

That's because I've been in Tennessee, visiting (among other things) the Sequatchie Valley Institute near Whitwell, TN. A friend of my boyfriend's and mine is staying there to work as a gardener, and we decided to visit her and help out with some of the work they're doing, as well as attending a couple of workshops*.

Staying at SVI was a very different experience than staying at The Farm was --- for one thing, it was a very different type of environment, being on a densely forested, steep hillside rather than a flat, grassier area. (The Farm, I was told, had acquired most of its land from a defunct paper mill, and the land had been clear-cut several times during the mill's period of operation). There were also a lot fewer people there: six people living at Moonshadow, which was the part of SVI we were visiting --- there's also a house and gardens at the foot of the hill, called Sweet Gum, where a family of seven people lives --- plus the other visitors who came either for the workshops or the workday at Ulinawi. But, unlike at The Farm, the other visitors did not stay overnight, and even the people who lived there mostly seemed all to have their own, generously spaced, sleeping quarters, with people gradually filtering into the main communal building throughout the day to cook, eat, and hang out. Accordingly, I did not have to interact with people constantly, and the number of people I did see every day was a lot smaller. (Also, two of them were well-known to me, while at The Farm I was thrown together with about a dozen strangers for a very immersive, intensive experience).

Even with all that, though, I had a lot more trouble with overloading at SVI than I ever did at The Farm. I think the main reason for that is because we got there right before the busiest days --- the two workshops, when the most people would be around and the most structured activity would be going on. Also, I was pretty sick physically at the time, so it might also have been that my usual defenses were somewhat lowered.

I really liked the layout of Moonshadow, though: the one communal building with kitchen, fireplace, shower and offices, with smaller sleeping cabins scattered around it. For me, I think the ideal community has both shared spaces for cooking, eating, work and play, and also separate individual spaces to which people can retreat if they need to.

*A wildflower-identification hike and a shiitake-mushroom-growing workshop, both of which I ended up missing because I was sick.

A Brief Experiment in Communal Living

As you can probably imagine, I was a little worried about whether I'd be able to adapt to life at The Farm's Ecovillage Training Center. Classes were all day long, from 6:30 AM to 6 PM, meals were shared, and we all lived together in the Eco-Hostel, sleeping in dorm-style rooms with a bunch of bunk beds and sharing one or two bathrooms. From what I've experienced previously, in high school and college, just the human contact I had from going to classes was enough to tire me out. I could not imagine being constantly around people for ten days straight.

With this kind of background, I was accordingly skeptical of my ability to stay sane in a communal setting. It turns out I needn't have worried; oddly enough, I was probably the most at peace that I'd ever been while I was at The Farm. I never experienced sensory overload, even though we were constantly doing things, and often outside, and even though I retained my hypersensitivity to visual and auditory stimuli and my inability to tune anything out. I also did not find interacting with any of the people there to be a draining experience; normally, I have to withdraw from company periodically to regain the energy I lose just being around other people. I did not have to do that there. I also did not experience paranoia or panic attacks, both of which I've been having for about five years now whenever I enter a crowded space. Finally, I did not have depressive episodes while I was there, which may not be significant given the short duration of my stay and the cyclical nature of my depression, but I arrived deep into an unusually severe "down" phase. So either the depression suddenly lifted of its own accord and did not return (not out of the question since episodes often begin out of the blue), or whatever environmental factors negated my sensory and anxiety issues also alleviated the depression.

I don't yet know why I felt so much better overall there than I ever had anywhere else, although I have a couple hypotheses. About the sensory stuff, the rural environment may be enough to explain it. Obviously, while there's as much stuff to perceive in a rural or wild environment as there is on a busy city street or in a crowded room, the stimuli are of different types and aren't as densely packed together. You don't get a huge, oppressive wave of sights and sounds breaking over you all at once, like you do entering a crowded room; you get a steady ebb and flow. The other stuff might well have lessened just because the sensory environment was more tolerable; a lot of times I find if I am at or near overload, the slightest stressor can cause me to melt down, just because I have no energy left to deal with it. I also might have fared better with the social interactions there than elsewhere because they were unusually direct: as total strangers sharing an immersive experience, we confided in each other without any of the usual preliminaries, which tend to trip me up.

I took advantage of my unusually sociable mood to answer everyone's questions about my life with autism and autism in general; it turns out there were quite a few people there who knew someone with it. There was an older man in my class who had a nephew with Asperger syndrome, who was brilliant in physics but had underperformed at his old private school because he tested poorly (mostly due to poor fine-motor skills*; he could not get the thoughts out of his head and onto paper in time). This man was accordingly very interested in how I thought and how I perceived the world, about which I told him as much as I was able to get out. There was also a man who had taught autistic children in a special-ed class, and a woman who did not mention any specific experience with autism, but who is a retired schoolteacher and also expressed a lot of interest in how I thought and how I differed from most people. (She asked me once, "Can you lie?" to which I responded after much thought, "I probably can, but it would be really hard.")

One exercise we did as a class that I found instructive was the consensus circle. I have always been a lot more successful at one-on-one interactions than any kind of group discussion (except for class discussions, where you can raise your hand). I cannot judge conversational timing, or tell the difference between a pause and the end of someone's turn to speak, and I turn my thoughts into words so slowly that I'm usually running several jumps behind the conversation in terms of what I'm ready to express. Not surprisingly, group conversations almost always leave me behind. I expected this to happen during the consensus circle, so I proposed that we discuss that: how can people with poor communication skills gain access to full participation in a group discussion? We never got around to addressing that question explicitly, but there are several methods the consensus circle uses that help lower the barriers to participation.

They include:

• explicit, agreed-upon nonverbal signals, such as "twinkling" your agreement (spreading your hands and wiggling the fingers) or steepling your fingers if you want to speak next
• use of a "talking stick" or other formal way of recognizing who is speaking
• having officers, the Facilitator and Vibes Watcher, whose duty it is to keep the discussion on track, make sure no one person dominates, make sure everyone has a say who wants one, and monitor the emotional undercurrents of the discussion and defuse any overly intense situation

Again, the dynamic at this particular session was so laid-back and welcoming that I was able to participate in group discussions without all that rigmarole, but those are ideas I could use elsewhere, if I think I am being shut out. In particular, the rule that explicit signals be used looks like a good one, and a great equalizer for autistics, who lack the body-language-reading ability that NTs take for granted.

*There is one theory, advanced by Morton Ann Gernsbacher, that the deficits in communication observed in autism are not deficits of social attachment, attention or "theory of mind," but rather arise from "executive" problems --- i.e., trouble verbalizing or acting on thoughts. The paper I link to establishes a correlation between autistic toddlers' motor skills and later speech fluency, which would support the hypothesis she put forth in a lecture at KU, that this lack of executive control explains the communication difficulties that characterize autism.

Addendum

There were a few things to come out of my experiences at The Farm that are germane to the purposes of this blog, but before I get to that I'd like to explain a few things about how my autism affects my ability to travel.

I hate traveling. About the only means of transportation that doesn't do terrible things to me physically is walking, which I can do fine in pedestrian-friendly Lawrence, KS but which is impracticable in suburban Kansas City, where many huge, busy intersections don't even have crosswalks. I have never learned to drive, due to a combination of really awful motion sickness making it unpleasant to practice driving and my slow reflexes and inability to multitask* making me a slow learner. Eventually, my ability to tolerate the constant nausea would give out before I got good enough to take the driving test, and my learner's permit would just lapse. (This happened three times).

I had never flown before 2007, when I flew out to Washington DC for ten days to visit my boyfriend. Since then I've done it once more, to get home from The Farm, and am of the opinion that, even though flying is a lot easier on me physically than driving, the mental and emotional strain of navigating airports is about all I can handle --- if something goes wrong, I'm helpless. I am so panic-stricken just from being in the danged airport that the only thought, the only possible course of action I can entertain is to leave immediately. When going home from Washington last year, I was routed through Atlanta, where I missed my actual going-home flight due to a delay. I was already so overloaded that I could not handle standing in line for a new boarding pass; I only wanted to curl up and shiver somewhere. I was able to tell a flight attendant what was happening, and get her to go get a boarding pass for me, and have a guy escort me to my gate. But if she had been less understanding, well, I might still be in the Atlanta airport right now.

(Because of this, I believe the TSA's policy of monitoring the behavior and body language of air travelers is going to net them a whole slew of autistic --- and otherwise invisibly disabled --- "terrorists". Seriously, some of the things they look for --- signs of stress, walking too fast, not making eye contact --- are things I exhibit every time I go out in public.)

Apart from a radical redesign of airports** such that human traffic is directed along lots of smaller corridors to minimize crowding, and getting rid of the cacophany of audible announcements in favor of issuing everybody headsets or a tiny monitor that keeps them posted with information relevant to their flight, I can't think of a lot of recommendations for how to make air travel more autistic-friendly. One quick and easy fix would be more precise training for security personnel about what kind of person (besides a terrorist) is likely to show the cues they're looking for. A few quick questions when they find a potential suspect would then sort out whether the person belongs to one of those categories.

Sadly, since the airlines appear to be hemorrhaging money this year, and high fuel prices are probably here to stay, I think we can rule out any measures that would require any significant investment in improving airports.

*The motion sickness is not related to my being autistic; that, as near as I can tell, comes from my having a series of really bad ear infections in toddlerhood that messed up my inner-ear apparatus, giving me poor balance, tinnitus, high-frequency hearing loss, and the motion sickness and dizziness. The processing difficulties (slower reaction times, lack of multitasking), however, do come from autism.

**The Kansas City airport actually has a decent layout for crowd-minimizing. They have three separate terminals, with security checkpoints at each one, so you only have to deal with a third as many people as would be in an airport of its size. It's not perfect --- that's still more people than I feel comfortable around, and it's still pretty loud --- but it's a step in the right direction.