There’s no such thing as “too sensitive”, there’s just chronically unheard.

There are power dynamics in play in all of our interactions everywhere that are informed by race, class, gender, neurotype, etc.

Those of us who are white or male or etc enjoy power we didn’t ask for.
We can’t escape those dynamics, can’t choose to put that power down. We can’t choose not to be intersectionality empowered.

That’s what privilege is.

Privilege is the freedom to ignore something. Lack of privilege means having to deal with it.
A lot of people with privilege think they can just ignore that privilege, thereby making themselves just like anyone who doesn’t have it. “I don’t use my white privilege” they may think.

But ignoring the fact that you’re ignoring things is actually just doubling down.
We have a crisis right now, and it’s been brewing for a while, on #ActuallyAutistic twitter. A large portion of our BIPoC community feel unheard, spoken over and misrepresented.

These are the things we fight against, ostensibly. But here we are, speaking over and for.
And white people we’re so bad at this. We get told “hey that’s kinda racist” and how often do we respond by melting down and running away instead of saying “yikes, thanks for telling me!”

That second response is hard BUT THAT’S TABLE STAKES! It’s the minimum commitment to play.
And the intersection with neurodiversity is *hard*, of course it is, that’s what intersectionality means.

As autistic people we are routinely misunderstood and accused of saying things we didn’t mean. That’s a thing.

But this gets complicated by intersectionality:
If I’m used to people misunderstanding me, I’m used to talking through it and clarifying what I meant.

But if some marginalized group calls me in on something problematic, explaining what I meant is the wrong solution.

They’re telling me how what I *already said* hurt them.
The correct thing to do here is to stop explaining what I meant and thank them for the call-in.

I gotta interrogate my biases seriously and consider what they’re saying, because it’s not a debate it’s them informing me that I caused harm.
This is easier said than done when tempers are high, when you’re emotionally invested, when listening to the hurt means listening to people tell you your behavior was racist or harmful, etc.

I find myself increasingly good at it in most domains, but it’s still very hard.
I don’t know where I’m going with this except to say that we all have to do better, white autistic twitter. It’s not enough to not be racist, we need some anti racist actions.
Anti racism 101: get rid of the idea that only certain people are racists and understand that all of us have internalized white supremacy and that it manifests in myriad ways. Including you.

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More from @mykola

17 Jun
There's this old show Northern Exposure about this arrogant young doctor who just graduated med school and has to go work in Alaska to pay off his debt, and it's an ensemble cast about a quirky small town, and it's a lot of fun.
As I take my meds this morning I'm particularly reminded of an episode featuring "Chris In The Morning", the local radio DJ who plays esoteric tracks and rambles philosophical musings onto the airwaves every day. Totally lovable dude, turns 40 and gets super sad.
"It's just, I love life so much and I'm sad that I have to die soon. All the men in my family die in their early 40s."

And the doctor is like, dude, you just have high blood pressure. You can take pills for that and live a full life.
Read 4 tweets
16 Jun
My god is it Bloomsday already?

James Joyce #wasNotNeurotypical. I read him and his stand-in character Stephan Daedalus both as autistic+adhd.

His daughter was almost certainly autistic before we had words for it.

I need to write this paper.
"A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" is a story of a kid who grows up as an outsider to his own culture. He is constantly seeking to understand what makes him unique, what makes him not fit - religion? values? He sets off to find himself.

Short answer: he's ND, without dx.
When he comes back to Ireland a few years later as a young man in Ulysses he's just as alienated, he's living in his own head.

The book gives him three chapters of attention and then sort of restarts with a different protagonist.
Read 8 tweets
11 May
A hundred years ago the modernist era in literature was thriving.

The entire social order of western civilization had just been burned away in a senseless war. Identity had to be created from scratch. You couldn’t just go on being the person you’d been, the world had ended!
Writers like Virginia Woolf and James Joyce and Ford Madox Ford took as their themes this deep into identity, but crucially into identity as defined in opposition or contrast to society at large.

Put bluntly: these people wrote about ND experiences suddenly being valid.
Here in 2021 we are in a similar cultural moment. The old world, where media decides truth, is over. We’re in a post-truth postmodern future, and we are once again in a place where identity itself is broken.
Read 8 tweets
10 May
You know, reflecting on how I used to feel before I knew I was autistic and had reasonable but different limits, I think about how often I felt like "I don't want to do X" but did it anyway.

And I think about how "I don't want to" is a box that could hold one of many things.
Now it's never "I don't want to X", it's often "I don't have the energy for X" or "I'd prefer not to have to do X if Y is going to be there" or "Doing X is really loud and therefore painful".

And how before I started getting to know myself I just thought I didn't want to do X.
I used to think "I don't feel good" or "I feel good". Now I think "I'm proud of the work I did today but bothered by my friend's comment and a little bit anxious about that family thing next weekend" etc.

These things can be learned - it's just sometimes we don't learn them.
Read 8 tweets
9 May
I still think sometimes about the therapist who didn’t believe I was autistic but was down with me having aspergers. She argued that collapsing the distinction was purely “political” and I didn’t understand enough at the time to see the red flags.
This was in the US.

So yes, medical professionals are still using “aspergers” here, and there are parts of the world where “aspergers” is still diagnosed.

That doesn’t make it ok. We are working to remove it for a reason. It just means “this autistic could speak as a kid.”
If you personally received an aspergers diagnosis that’s great, I’m not saying you’re a nazi.

I’m saying consider the reasons why that phrase was phased out and consider adjusting accordingly.
Read 4 tweets

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