Loop & Float

First: ‘Float’ – where a father deals with his child’s neurodivergence (coded as floating powers).

First it’s cool that the baby has these abilities that no one has.

Then it becomes a burden for his dad to deal with – the kid is all over the place, drawing on the ceiling, and the exhausted dad ends up hiding his kid and weighing them down with rocks.

(Pausing to explain to the Earthquakes how the creator of this short is a dad with an autistic kid)

AND YES IT IS ACCURATE.

It’s just… this exhaustion, and most of it comes from the horrible stares and judgement of others so you have to get your kid to comply just to get through the day, or else never leave the house.

And it’s a super hard line to balance – because you can’t talk about parenting a ND kid openly without all sorts of caveats. Because SO MUCH of the problem isn’t the kid, it’s the expectations and lack of access and support we get in parenting them.

But if you whisper ‘this is harder than parenting a kid without disabilities’ there are so many Autism Warrior Parents who are quick to leap in and blame autism, blame neurodiversity, blame the kids themselves. And like – NO THANK YOU, WE ARE NOT IN THE SAME BOAT, BIGOT.

So this short is doing a good job depicting that. There is nothing wrong with this child. The problem is all the internalized bigotry, the ‘shoulds’ this dad has picked up from trying to get his kid to fit into a world that’s designed to make his kid miserable.

My Autistic kiddo is curled up in a sad ball. That part where the kid has a meltdown – and dad screams at him-  is so agonizing but also perfect. Speaking both as an Autistic person and a parent raising an Autistic kid – this really captures how it feels to be on both ends of that relationship.

(He seems okay at the resolution though.)

Loop was pretty awesome.

We don’t have friends outside of school and online who are nonspeaking, so while we did get some validating parts where the Allistic folks have to wait us Autistics out when we’re having a meltdown or a hard time, we also got to talk about how much easier we have it with our speaking abilities and the privileges that gives us.

For any folks who haven’t been anticipating watching Loop like we were – it’s (I think the only?) movie where they FINALLY hired an ACTUALLY AUTISTIC nonspeaking actress to voice the autistic nonspeaking character