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 … Read more
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 … Read more
In my last reflection, I mentioned the intersection of race, gender expression, and neurodiversity in my family story—qualities that all have spectra embedded in them. I didn’t touch on culture and class, which are also observable as existing on spectra. I was shaped by aspects of Black domestic and expressive culture, but completely isolated from … Read more
i grew up in a biracial household where Blackness, white passing, and whiteness were all intertwined, as a neuroqueer, bigender, autistic child with high justice sensitivity, but low hierarchy awareness. being late-diagnosed, i didn’t have names for a lot of my experiences, but looking back, it all makes perfect sense. none of the labels i’ve … Read more
Framing gender, sexual, and relational preferences as choices does real harm. These choices are the result of a culture built around a specific origin story, that by now is clearly a failed metaphor. When the beauty of human variation has been forced through binary tunnels for centuries, who we are has to make a choice … Read more
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 … Read more
Saying that autistic people who question the current paradigm of neurodivergence are seeking proof of a superpower does real harm. Diagnostic criteria are a snapshot. To refer to the snapshot as reality, without considering the hand that crafted the lens it was taken with, and for whose benefit, or what it distorts, cannot be seen … Read more
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 … Read more
my tendency is to laugh at my first impressions.something in my history casts a sinister spellthat even the simplest question disperses.delightful surprises arise when i gobeyond the first brush of my eyes.followup questions are the love languagein my dialogue with life.
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 … Read more