Stop telling people in the #ActuallyAutistic community that they should or have to label their tweets as sarcastic, rhetorical, or as jokes, etc. because people don’t get them. 1/?

We shouldn’t have to. Not everyone gets a humor. And that’s okay. I understand content warnings, etc., but if you don’t get someone’s joke, just move on. There’s nothing wrong with not understanding it. 2/?

And this is coming from someone who used to REALLY struggle with humor. 3/?

Starting my third (!!!) hashtag. This one is called #CallMeLivingProof. My aim here is to talk about how there are people with rare diseases where the known cases are in the hundreds or less. And I want to talk about how the zebra term applies to ALL rare people. 1/?

Rare ≠ fading. There are those of us who don’t fit it in wholly in the disability community BECAUSE of how little is known about what conditions we have. I’m one of the eldest IN THE WORLD out of a few hundred known people. There’s a reason I said my rare disease isn’t EDS. 2/?

Most of the people who have Macrocephaly Capillary Malformation syndrome are kids. And/or nonverbal adults. This illness also takes patients often in their CHILDHOOD. I can’t tell you how sad that is. Or how sad it is to see people I love suffer. 3/?

Gatekeeping is bad, but it seems to be especially rampant in the disability community. Am I wrong? No? Didn’t think so #DisabilityTwitter

Actual rare people do exist. I’m talking about those of us in the few hundreds. There are more Pokémon now than there are people in world with known cases of my syndrome. The word ‘rare’ DOES have meaning. I am living proof of it.

Fuck off if you tell me that the word is losing its meaning. Or does living with a disease that OFTEN takes kids before age five not matter? I wouldn’t wish this on anyone, but here I am. Extra rare zebras do exist. We are here. We are valid. We will not be erased.

Look. I know I talk a lot about having a rare disease. It's important to me. But I've been noticing lately that a lot of people are telling me that 'rare' is kind of losing its meaning because the condition *they* have has people in the thousands. Just stop it. 1/?

I don't care, if you're going to be like that. So just stop it. I've been on this rare disease train officially for about a decade, and I'm still learning. BUT what I have is actually in the hundreds of known cases worldwide. 2/?

Perhaps 250-300 is the current tally. In the whole world. THAT is rare. We are literally outnumbered by Pokémon. How's that for crazy? 3/?

#DisabilityTwitter A 🧵about an epilepsy memory: This girl I went to school with, who was also in some of my special ed classes didn't believe at that I have epilepsy. For some reason, it annoyed her that I was reading a lot on MY own chronic condition. 1/?

We were friends, but I was about to dump her by this point in the school year because she was ANNOYING. One day, she had enough, and just mocked me relentlessly about being epileptic. 2/?

Then she wrote 'Mary had a seizure' on my pencil bag. But she couldn't spell, so it said 'caeser' instead. It was SUPPOSED to be a mean taunt about the subject of seizures following me everywhere. But it lost its effect because she wrote the wrong word. 3/?