I updated “Cognitive diversity exists for a reason.” with selections from “Neoliberal Eugenics 1: Selective Abortion – Leslie’s Blog”.

Professor Robert Sapolsky has hypothesized that conditions such as OCD, schizophrenia, and epilepsy have been selected for due to potentially massive contributions to religious, spiritual, and philosophical thought. Go check out his lecture, link in the description. In fact, I recommend his whole Stanford lecture series if you have any interest in Human Behavioral Biology. Basically: maybe a little bit of schizophrenia can actually be advantageous if you’re in the right society for it. And no, neither Professor Sapolsky nor I are saying you have to be “crazy” to believe in religion. Ugh, the C word. There are many well-studied advantages to religious thought and experience. Carl Jung, in fact, said that he would have diagnosed himself with schizophrenia though he channeled his experiences into his work on the collective unconscious, and received great spiritual comfort from his hallucinations. You can read about these experiences and experiments in The Red Book, though I personally haven’t read it so I don’t know if it’s any good. Due to migraine, I often have visual hallucinations which are entirely harmless and, sometimes, maybe even a little fun.

Neurologist Oliver Sacks, who also experienced these sorts of migraines, wrote in his book Hallucinations:

“To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation; we need to see overall patterns in our lives. We need hope, the sense of a future. And we need freedom (or at least the illusion of freedom) to get beyond ourselves, whether with telescopes and microscopes and our ever-burgeoning technology or in states of mind which allow us to travel to other worlds, to transcend our immediate surroundings. We need detachment of this sort as much as we need engagement in our lives.”

― Oliver Sacks, Hallucinations

And no, autism is not the next step in human evolution. Stop that. That’s not how evolution works, autism has always been around we’re just now recognizing and diagnosing it.

Source: Neoliberal Eugenics 1: Selective Abortion – Leslie’s Blog

Mood: Healthcare is almost universally ignorant of the disability and neurodiversity communities. The lack is deeply unprofessional and an indictment of healthcare training and education.

Further mood: Hey, educators. Y’all too. The collective ignorance and ableism is gobsmacking.

I’m vaguely recalling a paper I wrote in my junior year of high school called something like “Ambiguity in a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court: Twain’s Mental Dichotomy”. I wish I had a copy of it so I could peer into adolescent me and see what writing indulgences I still carry to this day. For one, long titles with colons.

Mood: Making a living today requires a full stack hustle I’ve never been up to. Few are up to it, and not for long enough, and not without a team that centers care. The cost of relentless hustle is everything that matters most. If you’re lucky, you amass enough social and economic capital to survive the inevitable burnout and the formation of a new adaptive persona. I’m one of the lucky ones with some time to figure out what the hell comes next.

Conversations with my teenagers:

Me, through door to teenager’s room, which has not opened in some time: Do you need parenting?

Teenager: No!

I worked hard to reach this point. Drinking a seasonal beer and enjoying. Next milestone: teenagers who can drive to the gas station and get me chips while they still think driving is liberating and fun rather than another damn chore that involves navigating other assholes. That honeymoon period was short for me, so I better get my chips while I can.

Lest I lean too heavily on teenager tropes, we also have conversations about: everything. Their increasing independence sure is nice, though, and cause for celebration whether I get chips or not.

I updated “Principled, Pedantic, Non-compliant Canary” with a selection from “I Overcame My Autism and All I Got Was This Lousy Anxiety Disorder: A Memoir”.

Imagine that you have a neurodevelopmental disability that gives you some challenges with social skills and possibly the occasional rigid adherence to things like truth and fairness. Chances are good that you’ve been explicitly and implicitly told that you are pedantic, rude, blunt and not considerate enough of others’ points of views for your whole life.

Source: I Overcame My Autism and All I Got Was This Lousy Anxiety Disorder: A Memoir: Kurchak, Sarah: 9781771622462: Amazon.com: Books

“People who realise they’re autistic in adulthood often describe a process of ‘reframing’. Past events look different seen through an autism lens. Reconsidering the life I’d already lived was a step along my journey to becoming more autistic. #ActuallyAutistic #identity”

Yes! On reframing:

And if having these different viewpoints within my study was important, understanding the perspectives and experiences of autistic children and adults in particular was essential. Time and again I found that issues aired say, by teachers, would be completely reframed when the autistic adults discussed the same points.

Source: Wood, Rebecca. Inclusive Education for Autistic Children . Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Kindle Edition.