Grey Matter

no dude it's so cool how attached you are to that character who is singled out and ostracized due to the external monstrousness that clashes with their internal spark of humanity. and i love how drawn you are to themes of horror and love, nature versus nurture, otherness, isolation, and the abject. i bet you have normal feelings about your own personhood

I hate when I get two problems in a row. They’re all gonna think I’m making it up.

I’m so proud of myself for no longer being conflict-avoidant or conflict-initiating but mostly just conflict-meeting.

Direct byproduct of being neurodivergent and growing up isolated from your peergroup is having no idea when it's appropriate to define someone as your friend

Is this person I met yesterday my friend? What about this person I've been talking to every day for three months? What about this person I've known since middle school? Is friend a title I have to earn? What are the limits of friendship? Is it a static state, make-or-break, or is it some endless dance-dance-revolution style cavalcade of prompts and challenges and social cues I have to hit perfectly to keep it up? Does it bend? Does it break? I don't fucking know man I just work here.

i still remember when the dude doing my autism assessment asked me how many friends I had, and I was like "okay but how are we defining friendship?" and he just like, stared at me for a second and then wrote down some notes

before my egg cracked, i had noticed that trans people were often pro-accessibility and up-to-date on the needs of disabled people, but i hadn’t seen any inherent connection between the two (other than the obvious minority-looking-out-for-other-minority thing). but now that i’m trans and medically transitioning, and i have to constantly repeat myself while talking to doctors and nurses, and explain things about my own anatomy to medical staff who should already know this, and having every single problem i might have blamed on my “condition” so nothing i say is taken seriously, all of the sudden i have a little sneak peak into the life of someone who has to deal with this all the time. like shit bro, being disabled probably sucks ass, someone should do something about this

happy disability pride month, we all deserve autonomy and respect and access to medication

#this is the star trek i wanna see#like when somebody asked gene roddenberry why piccard was bald#because wouldn’t they have found a cure for male pattern baldness by then?#and he was like ‘no by the 24th century no one will care’#i wanna see that attitude with disability and neurodiversity#it’s not that we’ll have a magic cure for everything#there’ll always be something new#but disabilities and neurodiversity will be celebrated and seen as part of the norm#it will be accomodated#so blind people can serve in star fleet#and so can people in wheelchairs and autistic people and people with prosthetics and people with chronic illnesses (via @hunterinabrowncoat)

This episode ends with Geordi saving the planet by using something derived from the technology found in his visor (an adaptive device that lets him sense things around him). So a disabled man literally saved the lives of an entire culture that wouldn’t have considered his life worth living, using technology they would have never deemed necessary without the presence of his unique needs.

I don’t watch Star Trek, but I can’t stress enough how important this message is

“my friend is ALWAYS sick and cancelling our plans” it sounds like your friends life suuucks and you should check on them

One of the worst parts of being chronically ill is how lonely it gets. You need a community to help you but you realize just how conditional your friendships are on you being able bodied.

Hat tip @eloso

sorry can you repeat that. i was busy trying to make eye contact and act normal and didn't hear you

[Getting so angry it makes my brain disease worse] people sre supposed to be nice..

get in loser we’re gonna try again despite it all

eat something proper today. not as a reward or a punishment, just because your body is doing a lot of work and it runs on actual fuel

thing I am proud of: when the doctor started going on a weird rant about long covid not being real I paused and listened to his nonsense for a bit and then very calmly said, in a polite and curious tone, "you don't believe in post-viral illness?" and he like. stammered a bunch and was like OH WELL I'M NOT SAYING -- I DON'T...I just think ..! and backpedaled awkwardly while I just sat there like :3c interesting :3c thank you so much for clarifying your stance on this :3c

an important skill for chronically ill people to develop is the ability to treat the doctor as though they are simply a person you are interviewing to find out how much they know about your condition.