Being yourself.

Last Wednesday was our education day for work. We attended a lecture in the afternoon, given by a doctoral candidate - Shane Lynch - at the University of Alberta. His lecture was about Positive Behavioural Support, which is a type of Applied Behaviour Analysis that is used in many fields besides autism treatment.

At one point in his lecture, he asked the director of the agency to list off about seven things she'd done on Saturday. She had to think pretty hard to remember everything, but she did manage to put together the list. Then he told her to tell him all of it again, this time without using words with the letter 'n' in them, and if she did, he was going to hit her in the head with a pen. That was a lot harder, but she managed it. Then Mr Lynch turned to the rest of us and said, "Now, imagine if I told you do do that for two weeks."

It was his analogy for what poorly-run autism treatment programs do to the autistic children they are "helping".

The icons I use on the posts here were created from screencaps of various episodes of the TV series Firefly (they also include some caps from the 2005 movie, Serenity). The series and movie were created by Joss Whedon, who is the creator of both Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, both TV series that were amazing commentaries on our time. Joss' sense of humour is somewhat "off", as you can see from the quote in the sidebar, "Remember - always be yourself, unless you suck." But he is also a man of deep thought and insight, as you can see from another quote in the sidebar, "A person who is broken becomes whole partially because the people around her decide that she is."

Many of the icons I use feature the young woman in the icon on this post. River Tam, portrayed by the actress Summer Glau (who can currently be seen on TV playing the terminator character in The Sarah Connor Chronicles), is a broken person. Her mind has been shattered by the government, causing her to ramble incoherently at times - but her enhanced psychic abilities make it impossible to know if she is truly speaking nonsense. And, of course, to top it all off, the girl is a genius.

I like River a lot. Not because I think I am like her, but because the struggles she faces are so realistically portrayed. And because, when you watch the series and the movie, you can see her growing and changing - becoming that whole person Joss is speaking of in the second quote.

But River is always herself, no matter what, and that is part of what makes her so appealing, so charming - so charismatic.

I wish I could be like that.

I don't think people ever truly know who they are - not fully. But wouldn't it be beautiful if we were all able to truly be who we know we are at any given moment?

That is what I'm learning to be. But it's difficult, because I'm trying to overcome years of conditioning to "not use words with the letter 'n' in them".

Ah, someday...