When my mom asked me how I felt about creating this list, I told her that it made me feel “incrementally more powerful”.
Category: Better Day
Me, Not You
This is a short essay that was part of an assignment in my online course, Grammar & Composition, which I’m taking via the Virtual Access Academy, a program within the Optimal Access non-profit organization. Getting lost in my head is something I struggle with every single day. I am autistic, meaning that my habits, communication,…
Learning to Spell: Piecing Myself Together
The year spent working on the letterboard with my mom has been the best year of my life. I have allowed myself to be known. I have also gotten to know my mother as well. Before this journey began, I was locked up inside my head, looking for a way to show the world I…
How I Learned to Break Out of My Shell: an Autistic Boy’s Perspective on Communication
I learned to communicate on a letter board this year and it has changed my life in immeasurable ways. A letter board is a plastic stencil board with the alphabet on it that I touch to spell out my thoughts. Before this year, I was locked inside. I couldn’t express myself at all. I didn’t…
2021 is the Year I’m Getting to Know My 13 Year Old Son
TL;DR. My autistic son can now communicate with us while using a stenciled “letter board”. But we’re not at a Lifetime movie happy ending quite yet. Some people learned how to bake bread or grow their own food during the pandemic. Having given up city life to launch a farm in 2014, I had already…
Awareness
Another Autism Awareness month is upon us. And for some reason, I feel duty-bound to gather together the scraps of life lessons I’m stumbled across during the past year. Autism is for Life. Each time I am required to submit a form or show up to an office and display my son for the purposes…
What I’ve Gained & Lost: Autism Awareness and Acceptance
So I clearly can’t speak for my son. I’m not even going to try. And since I have no idea what he thinks, other than when he is happy, sad, sleepy, hungry, or angry in a general sort of way, I am putting everything that follows within a bracket: I am not attempting to speak for…
Surviving the Middle of Nowhere
We’re not actually in the middle of nowhere. That’s just what it feels like to our friends in DC. We’re actually only about 65 miles from our old house, and can be back on Capitol Hill in about an hour and 15 minutes. See? Not that far. (But just far enough to flee to, should…
For a Good Time, Call Us. Our Standards are Pretty Low.
Lately, it has occurred to me to that we don’t give a shit about much, and that is a good thing. Of course, we shower, keep the house clean, and pay our bills. We feed our children and tell them that we love them. We schedule the right doctors’ appointments and react appropriately to serious…
The Stories We Tell Ourselves
So if I told you that we went to an outdoor pool, hit some water slides and a lazy river, and followed it up with a dinner at Ruby Tuesdays and a family movie, you’d probably categorize that as a pretty good day, right? In reality, the day went more like this: We waited as…