Drage blant sauer

  Too often I feel the Cassandra. What I perceive as truth and lived experience fall on deaf ears. Professional deaf ears. It's not a new senario. The sterile walls of the doctor's office, filled with diplomas or an overview of the human body, either in musclewrapped or bare bones. Perhaps a skeleton in the corner. An office chair for the doctor, a chair for the patient. Some hierarchies never truly change. One doctor's office I was at, had a couch. I clutch my little list of points I wish to bring to her attention. Things I perhaps struggle with, perhaps feel overwhelm me, perhaps are silly little things. I trace a pebble soothingly. My mask stays in place. “I'm having some trouble with melancholy.” I say at last. One of several conditions on my list, the most common, I think. One comorbidity seldom arrives unchaperoned, and the melancholy has been a consistent for years. My own dreary dark dog, to borrow a phrase. Such a thing that is a constant day in and da...

  Autistic people as burdens has a long history. Described by the Austrian pediatrician Hans Asperger in 1944, his child charges were considered ‘unberable burden[s]’ (Slagstad 2019) to their respective families. Today, autistic individuals are bemoaned by the establishment for being unable to ‘pay taxes’ or ‘write poetry’ (Kile 2025), wretched souls incapable of attaining the benefits of capitalism. They are drains on society and as such must either be thinned or weeded out. Eugenic terms openly being tossed about. ASC must be eradicated wholly from the population, for the sake of the precious children and their overburdened care givers.   The term eugenics means good birth and is openly being discussed regarding autistic individuals, disguised in progressive language as being burdens on society and family. A disease present in the best of families. A tragedy.  An all too common refrain for those who know the tune. In her 2016 book, War on Autism , Anne McGuire ...

  Many have different versions for the future, both disabled and nondisabled. In my last post, I wrote of disabled grief. This week I'm less interested in loss and more in possibility. What does a future look like when it's built not dispite disability, but through it? For the disabled and neurodivergent populace, the mainstream version of the future doesn't include us. The futures we are offered are too often rooted in cure, correction and conformity. Stripped of disabled and other voices than those hale or rich. A neurodiverse and autistic view of the future relies neither on past nor present. Look to the past, and you see eugenics, pathologization, institutionalization and fear. Look to the present, and you see ignorance, pathologization, infantilization and budding awareness. Neither are wholly ideal, but neither are yardsticks to measure.  If we look to critical autism and neurodivergent scholars such as Luke Beardon and Dora Raymaker (in collaboration with Chris...

  Grief is a curious thing, universal to so many, yet claimed by none.   Yesterday, the 15th of May, marks the 77th year of the commemoration of al-Nakba ‘the Catastrophe’ of 1948. The event that saw the massacre and banishment of entire villages of the Palestinian people and still leaves gaping wounds and lasting scars. A day of mourning and rememberance, it made me think of grief. Who can demand the grief of others to be silent and not offend, either ethnic or disabled, when the world cares so little? The phrase disabled grief is perhaps paradoxical. How can grief be disabled? Or queer? Or ethnic? It is but a feeling, devoid of descriptive agency or claim. Who can claim grief as their own? I categorize disabled grief in this instance as the grief of a hypothetical past, not a marred present or bleak future. Perhaps stepping on several academic toes, even within my own field of study. Who claims to know grief, truly? As impossible as knowing the mind of a beetle or a ...