What's in YOUR Refrigerator?

Sorry about the delay. I have been quite busy with med school applications.

Anyway, in my anxious wait for interview and acceptances (and I already have one interview invite, yay for me!), I come up with paranoid thoughts about how I will be left forgotten. One has come up to be a very good metaphor for prejudice. I have decided to take a leaf out of ABFH's book and write about it.

The way we interact with people is like how a college student interacts with food in his/her refrigerator. A college student will typically buy all kinds of food he/she thinks about eating. In time, some food gets consumed more often than others. Over time, the college student will purchase more of his/her favorite foods and ignore the ones that they don't notice so much. When it does come time for the student to notice the forgotten food, it will have gotten sour, moldy, and smelly. As a result, the expired food is then thrown in the garbage (believe me, this has happened to me a couple of times).

How does is relate to prejudice, specifically prejudice against autism? The people we interact with is like the food we keep in our refrigerator. Occaisionally we give a nod to those we may not feel most comfortable interacting with, and they lay forgotten while we "consume" opportunities to socialize with people we are more comfortable with. All in the while, our perception of those people we have forgotten are decomposed by stereotypes, misconceptions, and ignorance. It then won't be long before those people are permenantly forgotten or, to use a familiar Autism Speaks phrase, become "a word for the history books".

Our parents have always told us not to be picky about our food. Perhaps they should've told us the same message about people.