I had poured so much of myself into my protagonist. When my agent called my character childish, naive, and vulnerable, I couldn’t help but feel she was calling me childish, naive, and vulnerable.
Tag: neurodiversity
Over-valuing certain abilities means looking down on people who don’t share them. Aspie supremacy is the ideology that follows from taking this to an extreme: ‘aspies’ have extraordinary powers which not only make their existence worthwhile, but make them better than other people.
Reading A Kind of Spark, I felt a part of myself represented and explained on the page that I’d never seen anywhere else before. I feel so much for Addie, the 12-year-old autistic main character: How she puts herself in the historical stories of witches, and how the injustice of their history upsets her, while others seem detached.
One of the positives of ChatGPT’s engaging with me on topics related to neurodiversity, access, activism, and autism is that I am giving GPT a chance to learn an Autistic perspective from an Autistic person.
Unmasking is something I am coming to terms with, but having an environment within which I can feel safe and be myself helps significantly with that. As things stand, it’s a lifetime of damage that needs reversing.
If you’re the parent of autistic child or adult, and you are also horrified by the blatant misinformation being peddled and swallowed by MAGA truthers, you should be just as concerned about grievance-based autism parents and organizations.
My brother died because of ableism. Because people—including very close family—were terrified to face his neurodivergence, and his disability.
“I have to be realistic about the community that I am nurturing in, and the community for my children and for the parents that I help, as a Black autistic woman.”
If your workplace wants to successfully recruit autistic and neurodivergent job candidates, consider these insider tips on how to make the hiring process easier.
Ira Eidle is the curator of the of Autistic Archive, an online resource that responds to “a need for better preservation of information related to the Autistic Community and Neurodiversity Movement’s history.”