Susan and I don’t want life to be too interesting. The bland normalcy with which we began 2025 was nice. So… things got interesting. Leigh chose to have back surgery to correct her scoliosis. Leigh had to have staples in her scalp after falling and hitting her head at school,…
Category: Advocacy
Posts on advocacy, including organizations and public policy.
Life is rarely perfect, but it can be blandly normal. I admit that 2024 wasn’t easy. It ended badly. At least it wasn’t quite like how eventful 2023 was, with an ICU visit I’d rather not repeat. For now, I am attempting to accept the bland normalcy of life in…
Because I want to contribute to our family, I value work. Even if I weren’t married with children, I would want to be employed and take care of myself financially. However, the emotional need to be productive often runs up against my physical limitations. If I could earn a living sitting…
Autistics often find themselves judged in the workplace not by their knowledge and skills, but by how well they perform “normalcy” in an office. To appear other than how they are, the Autistics must mask, as in putting on their happy worker faces and mimicking the “neurotypical” people around them,…
Work-from-home (WFH) during the COVID-19 pandemic was the greatest accommodation for differences ever offered. For those of us with physical differences and Neurodiverse minds, the WFH years allowed us to recharge and work whenever we were personally most productive. We did 40 hours or more of work weekly, but not…
Friends and colleagues often include symbols and acronyms (and symbolic acronyms) within their social media profiles. These letterforms represent shared and self-selected identities. None of them “feel” quite right to me. That’s not a new issue for me, as I have written many times about my ambivalence regarding labels and…
Offering excuses for not keeping up with The Autistic Me frustrates me, but life has a tendency to get in the way of personal projects. I failed to release podcast episodes for most of 2024. I blamed an overloaded teaching schedule and a two- to three-hour commute (each way, 115…
Podcast 0114; Season 7, Episode 7; 17 May 2024 Recorded 14 May 2024 About the Film Ezra The film Ezra follows Max Bernal (Bobby Cannavale), a stand-up comedian living with his father (Robert De Niro), while struggling to co-parent his autistic son Ezra (introducing William Fitzgerald) with his ex-wife (Rose…
Podcast 0113; Season 7, Episode 6; 17 May 2024 Note: Originally recorded 14 June 2023 About Bliss Road: In this sometimes funny, often devastating memoir, Martha Engber describes the arduous journey toward discovering the invisible roadblock that ran her life off course: her psychological distress is the result of being…
Podcast 0112; Season 7, Episode 5; 3 March 2024 Note: Recorded 7 June 2023 Originally Scheduled for September 2023 From “Caregiver Chronicles” website: “Caregiver Chronicles” is the story of one caregiver’s personal and professional journey as a caregiver. The host, Sarah Stelmach-Brown, was a Certified Nursing Assistant for 17 years.…