Last night, MrLibby and I were in a conversation about a family member of mine. During the conversation, I realized that the behaviour was classic stimming behaviour and realized this family member was likely autistic. My speech is on the slower side as I was on my nightly medication, but I’m keeping the recording at that speed as it is easier for most listeners. You may have the option to adjust the speed in whatever you use to playback, or the transcript is below for those who have difficulty listening to recorded audio.
Transcript
We're sitting here, we're talking about how we didn't see the autism in me before. As I was starting to bring up before I started recording here is: I used to have the most debilitating migraines. I mean, it was four or five a week sometimes. They'd last for hours. I had no life. I was always exhausted, I was always sick, I was always anxious. I was always everything. I was masking myself into debilitating migraines. I masked so hard, I made myself physically ill. I have so many under- so many of my issues are caused just straight up by stress or exas-. Not caused by stress, but exacerbated in a ridiculous amount by stress. Anxiety, PTSD, fibromyalgia, PNES is a result of emotional repression to the point where it literally gives me seizures. Masking.
They say that it's not a disability, they say autism is not a disability, but (Mr Libby) “it is”. and this is why I keep saying that it's a disability. I am not disabled as an adjective. My body can do anything, everything that it can do, just like every single other body on this planet. So what if I can't go hiking? Millions of people can't. For some, some of them, for reasons they choose, like recklessness, they got injured because they were reckless with their lives, and now they can't walk again. I'm not shaming them, and I'm not. But at least, we sit there and go, okay, we, okay, but we get why you didn't. You can no longer hike because you did hike. You got - you ignored the signs, you got injured, but nobody's like, why can't you hike again?
I was, I've never been able to. I’ve done, I do everything my body can do, and I don't get the same consideration as to somebody who could do it and can't through their own choices that nobody forced them into. Do they still deserve the same accommodation, respect, and care as anyone else? Yeah, because we're all human and we're, we make choices that sometimes have bad consequences, and sometimes that consequence means we can't go hiking again. Sometimes it, , we all, , …but for me to get treated worse than somebody who could have avoided it, it's maddening, it's dehumanizing.
And it's not like we're new. We actually have fewer disabled people than we used to per percentage of population because we have things like prosthetics. We actually have to accommodate in fewer ways because we already naturally do. Contact lenses are a way of life. Contact lenses meant you didn't eat once upon a time. The difference between having them and not having them meant eating. If you can't identify this plant in your hand, that's a bit of a skill you need. We accommodate them all the time.
But because my autism is inconvenient for other people, for rules that make no sense. I was ill and I missed out on so much of life and I do miss out on so much of life, all because the rest of the world decides that “Well, it's too hard for us to do this”- for, for why? It's also too hard for us to have the Internet and wi fi and capitalism, but we manage to have those. It's actually harder to have eugenics and ableism. They make everybody's life worse. But you protect those.
All we have to do is shift that energy and decide that we want to work on what actually makes shit better. But no, we have the patriarchy and we have the religion that says somebody must inherently be inferior to me so that I can feel better about myself. We have an entire world set up on making my insecurity somebody else's problem and my entitlement to control. We have the patriarchy and religion says if “I don't like it, I have the right to eliminate it”.
I hate that it went from a conversation about somebody in my life, stimming, realizing retroactively that what they were doing was stimming and we were having a light hearted conversation about them being silly one day and having fun too. ..But this is where it comes from. We are disabled by a world that just says you're not enough. You're not allowed to exist like this because it makes me have to do a little extra work and care about somebody else. That's how we got here. I've studied the Holocaust, I've studied the rise of fascism since I was 8. I know where it came from. I know that they patterned themselves after us and we patterned ourselves after the previous. It's the same cycle throughout human history. I just think that if we have access to information and communication on this scale, we can change it. That's why I'm recording, so we can put this out there. We can plant the seeds. I don't think we're going to change it in 10 years, but I think we can change it in 100.
