Listen To ALL Disabled People

whether that's taking them, refilling them, or whatever you need!

And absolutely especially if your medication is very important for controlling a mental health condition, or if it's something where not having it could be medically dangerous, like seizure medications, or if you'd be at risk of withdrawal or other nasty symptoms should you find yourself without it

I am level two autistic. I am visibly autistic and always have been. And I still got misdiagnosed as not autistic four times for complete nonsense reasons.

- My parents always spoke to my brothers and me as though we were their intellectual equals, with proper sentence structure and the vocabulary they'd use when speaking to a fellow adult. The three of us all started talking early and we've all always had very good vocabulary and sentence structure, and they are pretty sure this was because they never baby-talked to us. They essentially used parentese before parentese was a widely-known thing

- They aren't actually sure when I started genuinely talking. I hit the baby babble stage where I would copy things I'd heard them say earlier than normal, but they aren't sure at what point I reached the stage where I figured out that those sounds had meaning. All they knew was that at some point in the late eight-month to early nine-month range, they realized that I had graduated from babbling to genuinely calling my mom Mama. They were first-time parents so they didn't know how to tell at that point. And yes, part of the babbling I did included copying phrases and sentences I'd heard with a strange level of clarity, and looking back they remember a few things that were clearly vocal stims. My mom very clearly remembers me, an avid Dora enjoyer, at ten months old, repeatedly saying "Swiper no swiping" at our dog so constantly that poor Alex started to respond to Swiper the way he responded to his name. And also that it took me a long time to actually start conversing. So even if it wasn't autism, she knew something was up there because that's not normal.

So like, regardless of anything else, the fact that the doctor refused to go "Yeah, that's kind of strange" is wild to me. Say it wasn't autism, sure, I can forgive that considering it was 2005. But I do not know how he genuinely saw that and didn't think anything was abnormal.

(My mom also remembers he pointed out that I made good eye contact, but that I actually didn't. They'd noticed that while I would look at people if not otherwise preoccupied with drawing or something, they'd never actually seen me make eye contact. But when she pointed that out he said she was imagining it.)

(My mom was also a special education teacher and interacted with autistic kids constantly because that was her job. So.)

It's a disability, not a cute voluntary anti-establishment quirk.

This is anti brain injury and disfiguremisia.

this is the kind of violent ableism im always talking about. you did not need to wish death on vulnerable people. medical care professionals literally exist to facilitate life for people who would otherwise die. shall we just do away with the medical field as a whole?

and as for the value of severely disabled people’s lives… people who need care can have rich, complex, wonderful lives and can have beautiful impacts on the people they know. my carer talks so highly of her clients that need constant care. they are loved and appreciated even by the people who aren’t required to love them.

And these people are not burdens. Never. I don't care, there is no 'but' to that. They just need help. They deserve that help, whatever that may be. And as for the "burden" on those of us who provide that help? This is a passion-driven field. Like teaching, nursing, social work, and so many others. The people I work alongside chose this career because they care, because they want to help. We love getting to help them. My life in enriched by every client I work for, I love working with them, I love getting to help them. I am privileged to work with these people. If it was possible, I'd gladly do it for free.

I was diagnosed AuDHD very very late because I was too smart, a year young for my academic level, just a bit immature… (the list goes on. eventually my parents realized they couldn’t keep making those excuses.)

I’m living alone now because I’m at university and I am struggling a lot more than I expected. I think it’s been environmental (I hate the dorms and I can’t sleep), as well as being unprepared. One class for my degree track didn’t give us homework (there were many practice problems, but doing them didn’t count as part of the grade and there was no penalty for doing them late), so I completely ended up forgetting I should’ve been doing those problems and had to basically play catch up for most of the course. Because it was too easy to miss. This made my actual important quizzes generally go poorly, and I was only able to think up a “plan” to keep myself from procrastinating as an urgent response to realizing everything was going to hell. Because it was in the middle of stress, I also couldn’t be consistent with it. It’s been harder to take care of myself as well because I’m exhausted from thinking about my academic issues. I think I will do better next year with a less awful living situation but I’ve been really upset with myself. I’ve never gotten results that were this bad across the board. I also have only made like 3 friends and one was my roommate. They’ve also basically told me in varying degrees that I shouldn’t try to talk to them about the problems I face or that I need to just “stop worrying about it”. I don’t know what to do other than maybe try to get accommodations for late assignments if I need to because after a period of stress it feels impossible to do ANYTHING and I just stop being productive for a week. Unfortunately I can’t afford to have that happen, so it kills my grades and then I get thrown back into a week of panic again. I have been forced into the centrifuge and cannot get out.

I don’t know if you would have any advice for me so if you don’t I am sorry for wasting your time. I am just tired and need to yell at the void.

Okay, as someone deeply unqualified to give you advice because what you just described sounds exactly like my final semester of college before said college got shut down by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (my favourite lore to drop,) here's my advice;

You know your weak spots, right? You know where you struggled? And you know where you struggled but didn't completely fail versus where you struggled and thus failed? Reinforce those weak spots. I used to put post-it notes on my computer so I'd have a tangible reminder to do something, and I wouldn't let myself take the note off until that thing was done. I don't swipe notifications away until I've taken the appropriate action (like responding to a text.) Don't look at things like you've got eighty-nine tasks ahead of you, pick out one task and finish it to the best of your ability. And as you do that, keep a notebook next to you so that if you think of something that's relevent but not to the task at hand, you can write it down there and come back to it later rather than forgetting it or switching tasks and losing focus. The Job Accomodation Network has a lot of very great tips for accessibility measures you can implement yourself or ask your school to implement. See where you struggle, see where you fail, and build reinforcements around those areas.

And remember, you do the best you can with the information that you have, and you do the best you can with the resources that you have. You did what you could with the information and resources you had, and those information and resources couldn't stretch far enough to produce success. That's not a failing on your fault, you simply did not have the tools you needed in order to succeed. Take what you learned and move forward, apply it to the next thing and maybe it'll be enough, or maybe you'll still find it not enough and you'll learn even more to take forward again. You can't succeed when you have no way of succeeding.

(And also, I absolutely despise when I have a problem and people just say "don't worry about it." Like thank you, I was drowning and you told me to just breathe air, now I'm no longer drowning (sarcasm.) "Don't worry about it" is some of the most useless advice one can give when not added onto with a reason why it shouldn't be worried about. And also, you can't just stop worrying about something unless you are given a reason to not worry about it. I hate it when people tell me not to worry about it. It's the worst.)

And all in all, what works for me when I fail like this? "Breathe in, breathe out, bitch about it, and just keep stumbling vaguely forward." That's the best you can do, anon. Just keep stumbling vaguely forward. Because even if you fall, you've gotten farther along than you would have if you'd stayed in place until you knew you could walk without issue. Just keep stumbling forward, it's the best you can do. Take a deep breath, complain about it to the void, and keep going. That's all you can do. Maybe you don't got this, but you can still push forward. Failure is still a way of moving forward, it's still progress. One minute, one hour, one day- just put one foot in front of the other. I believe in you. I believe that you can keep stumbling vaguely forward.

To fail is simply the nature of the human condition. Learn from your failures and just keep moving.