Queerly Autistic

You are important to us because you are Leia Organa. But you are more important to me because you are Carrie Fisher. 

I have a strange and wonderful and terrible and contentious relationship with this time of year. 

I realised it was okay to work with what I have, rather than trying to work with what other people expected me to have.

Quiet carriages are absolutely a lifeline for disabled people like myself. Some days they are the only reason I have the emotional energy to succeed at work.

The definition of success seems to depend very much on the frame that you’re looking at it through. And the frame of my ‘success’ is the neurotypical gaze. 

My brain is juggling so many things, and if you throw something else at me without warning, the likelihood is that I’m going to miss it altogether or drop it before its first rotation is complete. 

His phone call to the charity was shared as a courageous exposé. I had to stop watching after three minutes because I was on the edge of a memory-scarred panic attack. 

The horrible cough-and-cold mixture is the ultimate magnification of all the things that push those sensory overload buttons in my brain. 

These characters were my very own line-up of autistic headcanons. And I identified more with them than I did with the very few characters who were written as ‘autistic’ from the beginning.

My journey is my journey alone- but I hope that there are some elements of what I have learned that can help.