Disability colliding with the world

There is a big court case going on in our neck of the woods right now.  It involves a tragic killing that took place at a school a few years ago.  The boy who killed his fellow student suffered from many of the same issues that my eldest does.  I see my Chet in the testimony that this child's father gave to the court.  The inability to make friends.The depression.Perserveration on specific symbols.  The lack of social grace resulting in bullying and name calling.  The anger boiling up. The fear of the bully hidden poorly behind it. 

Like Chet, this young man appears to be very intelligent but out of touch with what is "real" and what is fantasy.  He fixated on specific authors and images. Chet is very very prone to this.  I confess that to this day I vet his book reading choices.  Ditto on his movies.

Part of me feels really badly but I know I have to do it.  He doesn't have the ability to self check. To see that too many dark vampire themed books evoke in him that same type of darkness. He can't see that he begins to try and act them out in his room.  He can't see until much after the fact, that the images are making him actually unhappy and gloomy.

His tendency toward fixation means that he would not voluntarily try a new author and new genre.  So each week I have a quota with a set number of books being fantasy or sci fi, a set number being romance (oddly his other favorite genre) and the remainder divided between mystery, biography and some type of contemporary nonfiction, such as the book Stones into Schools.  I do not get books that will feed into conspiracy theories about the government.  He is prone to seeing conspiracies everywhere also.

Managing his movies is actually easier.  I let him request what he wants from Netflix and then I just shuffle them around in the queue so that something heavy is compensated by a lighter, more humorous movie afterwards.  Chet requests so many movies at a time when he updates his queue that he has no concept of what one is coming next.  Just knowing it is in the queue and hasn't arrived yet is enough for him.

I used to think when he was little that things would be easier when he was older.  And in some ways, that is true.  But in the most profound of ways, it is not.  Because legally he is an adult now and this means a different form of accountability within society.

And every time I wonder if I am too controlling, I remind myself that he has a lot more freedoms than he would in jail.