by Jennifer “Grimalkin” Partin from Felis Autisticus. Y is for Youth. I’m young as shit. I’ll be just 21 in a week. Young. As. Shit. Sometimes— most of the time— this hinders me. I don’t have a lot of the life experience or the fancy degrees or even the general not-living-with-parents autonomy that older activists do.
Wait… what? What is X? X marks the spot. Solve for X. X is the unknown. X feels impossible to define or narrow down.
I know what I want. I know I want equality. I know that I want Autistic children to grow up feeling a sense of pride in their identity…
by Anna Savva Smirnov from vodkadietcokes. Why time is a rubber band: on autistic perception of time as difference without deficit. This is a non-definitive short essay on autistic temporality. I became interested in the question of ‘autistic time’ a few months before my formal diagnostic assessment.
by The Caffeinated Autistic. V is for Vigilance. There are many things that being autistic have provided me. Attention to the small details, seeing the world in a different light, experiencing the world in new ways, problem solving and having the neurotypical people in my life completely confounded…
by Cat Walker from A is for Autiste. With understanding comes responsibility. Not broken. Not bad. Not wrong. Autistic. Spending my whole life thinking I was broken, bad and wrong have certainly taken a toll. I sought out a formal diagnosis because I was conditioned to believe that people in positions of authority knew better than me.
by Briannon Lee. Dear Therapist, It’s time to let go. Let go of your big manual of mental disorders. We can’t be defined by the way you observe our bodies and minds at work and rest. We will not be limited by your reports damning us to disorder, even when you couch those words in pretty euphemisms.