I’m a bi-gender person—masc and femme together in parallel unison. Like a Tootsie Roll, a Twinkie, a Ho-Ho, or a KitKat, I have a more brittle, masc outer layer; and a creamy, femme inner core. The femme part of me has been surprised when I have proposed activities to femme friends that I think of…
There’s a mindset I keep seeing—in Buddhist sanghas, autism advocacy, establishment political discourse. I call it ‘cognitive centrism’—inhabiting a kind of middle ground, not because one felt their way there, but because they computed it. Like cognitive empathy: decode, then perform the answer. Here’s what it looks like: Someone defending an argument gets confronted with…
How Making Sense of My Child's Cannabis Use Helped Me Understand The Beauty of Human Adaptation
Does Domestication of the Human Species Really Represent Our Shared Future on the Planet? My almost-adult child is a gifted and challenged person, navigating the transition to adulthood in post-industrial American society. They’re a systems thinker, who aces every test, and who also can’t sit still or conform to the demands of a quiet workplace…
In part one, I explored my mother’s life and work, relative to the social conditions she experienced as a low-income, self-directed woman navigating the public health and housing systems, and asked whether, viewing her life through the arc of 76 years of continuous productivity in the fiber arts, different decisions could have been made resulting…
I’m not sure we should even be studying autism in the United States. My mother just turned 82 today. She has faced challenges in every measurable area of her life, that I won’t go into—that’s a different story. Her diagnosis has changed with the trends of the healthcare industry, and she has only recently been…
i passed 3 tween girls doing a coordinated dance for tiktok on a walk recognition: that’s me. memory: when i was a kid, i wanted to play jump rope and hand-clapping games with the girls, instead of kickball and four-square. the boys were always trying to win, and would spike the ball; girls were smiling…
this is one kind of harm caused by the abled/disabled binary when it is applied as a permanent designation to people: it erases from view the environment that enables or disables a person, and it makes invisible all of the ways that the environment is designed to enable the abled person. it functions to other…
Two people in a boat. One can row, but cannot navigate. The other can navigate, but cannot row. If we view each as a whole, each has both an asset and a liability—each is both abled and disabled. If we view the relationship as a whole, we can describe things differently. If participation and cooperation…
continue reading complementary adaptation: toward a kinder view of neurodiversity and disability
be honest:
is culture the ability
to sing the same songs together
in joyful abandon
with your neighbors?
250 Years of What?
On June 29, 1776, five days before Philadelphia’s Declaration was signed, a different founding took place three thousand miles west, on the shore of a California lagoon. Spanish soldiers and Franciscan friars said the first Mass beside a creek they named Arroyo de los Dolores, the Creek of Sorrows. Within months they had raised a…