care – Autism: Explorations

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[…] health is frequently presented as an absence of symptoms. No more soaring mania, no more blood, no more voices […] So many of us would rather soar and crash like Icarus than crawl the face of the earth like insects. What we crave is the wildness and the depth without the agony and destruction.

Out of context, Sarah K Reece

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… I still do hate meltdowns. […] Meltdowns are hard, messy, frightening.

I still want to avoid having meltdowns. […] But I vow to honor and respect my meltdowns.

Meltdowns teach me what is too much for me and what my body can handle. […] Meltdowns teach me how to take care of myself.

Max Sparrow

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part of living well as a person with a disability is accepting the body and the brain that you have, and working with it rather than against it.
Because you can’t live in an imaginary body; you can’t live in an abstraction. You have to live your own life, as you actually are. […] You can’t willpower yourself into being someone else.

part of living well as a person with a disability is accepting the body and the brain that you have […]
Even if the therapy helped you. Even if you gained new […] abilities. Even if you learned things from it you wouldn’t have learned without it. […]
You have to live your own life, as you actually are. And sometimes that involves medical treatment, sometimes it involves equipment, sometimes it involved therapy – but always, it involves reality.

Ruti Regan

At all times

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[…] That’s reasonable […] The same can be said of a lot of professional situations.

Teachers, for example, are usually expected to be more emotionally expressive and intuitive of their students than a stranger on the street would be.

The problem is, for a lot of people with flat affects or atypical body language, we’re expected to keep up that mask of extreme and regulated emotional expression at all times, and around all people.

Not just the people we’re working with or the people under our care, but our peers, friends, and family.

And worse, we’re expected to keep it up around the people who should, by rights, be taking care of us: parents, bosses, cops, and yes, even doctors and teachers.

The constant demand to perform emotions in ways that aren’t natural to us at all times leads to genuinely destructive problems with our abilities to self regulate.

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I fear your excitement over my As and my Bs. Like a giant bird, it clutches and carries me too close to the sun.

Beneath the height of your As lies the abyss of your Fs.