sometimes I have thoughts

"if you forgot then it obviously wasn't important to you" is an ableist thing to say and i'm tired of pretending it's not

I've forgotten *my own birthday* before. There are several years of my life just straight up missing. In the past I've forgotten silly little frivolous things like NAMES OF LOVED ONES or WHERE MY HOUSE IS. But obviously none of that was important. Fucking awful, ableist thing to say.

petition to relabel "strong sense of justice" in autism and adhd to "strong personal convictions"

One of my biggest problems in life is that I'm the type of blunt autistic person that has to work my brain way overtime to not constantly be a huge accidental dick

it’s actually quite easy to take over a small local government group if you really want to, bc if you volunteer consistently people will just put you in charge of whatever. I’m now one of like three people at a nature preserve making official decisions about trails, putting in a prairie, and designing a series of illustrations for a storybook trail etc., and it’s just because last summer I started coming over once a week to help the naturalist out for a couple hours. Mine now. you too can steal an organization and shape it to your will 🫵

“it’s just not my thing” voted most useful phrase for conflict avoidance for the third year in a row. “sorry, i’m in a weird mood” a close runner up

disabled people are often in permacrisis

there's never enough money each month. there's always an unexpected illness. new symptoms pop up or old symptoms flare up. meds have to be managed always and refilled constantly and any refill has the opportunity to go wrong. any regular care has the opportunity to go wrong. any mistake can send your health spiralling. it's always "i just need to get through this bad patch" but as soon as one ends another begins. another crisis begins in the middle of the last crisis. managing one thing leaves another thing to be neglected until that becomes a major issue and has to be managed asap and the cycle starts anew over and over and over

the thing about being disabled is that we can't do it all by ourselves. like yes, being disabled means things are more expensive for us. there's more treatments to manage. meds to juggle. intolerances and allergies and triggers to avoid. forms to fill, health meetings to attend, accommodations to acquire and so on. but the key difference isn't that we have more stuff to do compared to ableds. it's that we can't do them. the disabling nature of a disability limits what we can and can't do. it's a hard limit, even if we push and struggle, we can't surpass our limitations by sheer force of will. and that means all the basic tasks that ableds have to do and all the additional tasks needed to manage disability force us to rely on other people to survive. it renders us vulnerable to the wills and whims of other people. in the relationship between abled and disabled people, our participation is not something we can ever leverage. and that key difference is what impacts disabled people's rights, autonomy, power, and quality of life.

i don't want this to come across as condescending. but when i talk about the never ending crisis after crisis that disabled people face it is strange when people just link it it burnout. like yeah regularly overdoing it will lead to burnout. but it also leads to disability. ableds in permacrisis regularly become disabled as a result. disabled people regularly become more disabled as a result. being in a state of relentless deficit can and will burn you out. and it can make your health permanently worse. a lot of disabled people are disabled because their health got worse and just never recovered. and, as disabled people, we are painfully aware that there's only so far we can be pushed before the consequences become severe. not just burning out. not just having your health deteriorate again. serious health scares, losing large swaths of our abilities, shortening our life expectancy, mental health going to ruin, dying, becoming homeless... I'm not saying burnout is easy but I am asking people to consider that there is n bottom line. if we fall too far and slip through the net then we're done for, and disabled people who are barely managing and working in an unsustainable environment are painfully aware of this possibility