When I Realized Pre-packaged Food Was For Me, My Entire Outlook On Life Changed.

When I realized pre-packaged food was for me, my entire outlook on life changed.

Let me explain.

I remember walking through the grocery store with my mother as a teen and her making a bitter comment about how everything had more packaging now. De-shelled hard boiled eggs in plastic, cut fruit, pre-portioned salads, all of it was "laziness" to her. She insisted people were getting lazier to the point where if my brother ate pizza from the fridge, she would chastise him for not heating it. She would say "you deserve warm pizza" as a way of saying you should do something the "right way" because it's worth doing.

This isn't because my mother had no concept of people with disabilities, she is disabled herself. However, in raising me, she taught me to hide that disability, to try to be on everyone else's level so we aren't seen as weaker. That laziness is worse than being disabled and there's simply no excuse for taking shortcuts. I don't think she intended to teach me this, but her own internalized ableism was so loud.

When I became an adult, I realized I hated cooking. The prep was tedious, I almost always have dishes in the sink, there's cleanup after, my back hurts, my eyes burn, it's too hot and in the beginning, I got overwhelmed to the point of crying. Leftovers were almost never eaten becuase heating them up (the "correct" way to eat them) was an extra step that made me not want to put the effort in. I thought I was lazy and felt ashamed when I wanted something to eat but couldn't bring myself to make it.

At some point, I finally said "I'm tired. I don't care how much packaging it is, I don't care how lazy it is, I'm going to get meal kits."

It was life-changing. Dinner takes 30 minutes to make. Everything is portioned. The directions are clear. I don't hate it anymore. I want salads in bags. I want eggs that don't take three steps to eat. It's not laziness, it's accessible! I don't have to make a meal, I can eat the raw vegetables, have pasta with butter, eat a granola bar! There's no right way to feed myself!

I made things SO HARD on myself because I wasn't acknowledging my disability or my depression and they didn't need to be hard! I didn't need to go around the store saying "is that really necessary?" Because it IS necessary for me! It's brilliant! It's so helpful!

Accessibility takes so many forms and overcoming internalized guilt for not being able-bodied or mentally well enough to handle tasks other handle easily is incredibly freeing. Obviously I'm lucky to be in the position to have this option avaliable to me, but I kept myself from it for far too long.

I do deserve warm pizza. I can have it delivered.

Video essays that make me go "oh, so you're like smart smart"

Elon Musk and Grimes: A Retrospective

Bo Burnham vs. Jeff Bezos

The Systemic Abuse of Celebrities

Lana Del Rey: the pitfalls of having a persona

we need to talk about Call Me By Your Name

MYTH OF THE AUTEUR: Stanley Kubrick vs David Lynch

In Search Of A Flat Earth

Envy

The Commodification of Black Athletes

The Lies Of The Lighthouse

The Green Knight: The Uncanny Horror of Masculinity

Max Payne, Kane & Lynch, and the Meaning of Ugly Games

Time Loop Nihilism

How Bisexuality Changed Video Games

The Golden Age of Horror Comics - Part 1 (Part 2)

Weighing the Value of Director's Cuts | Scanline

The True Horror Of Midsommar

a few more -

You're Wrong About Cyberpunk 2077 | An Overdue Critique (this is such great critique of both the game and the genre)

Disney's Fast Pass: A Complicated History

It Has Come To My Attention You Don't All Love BIRDS OF PREY

Adaptation.

The man who almost faked his way to a Nobel Prize

Music Theory and White Supremacy

Here's the YouTube playlist! ill be adding more but that's all so far pls like and reblog xoxo 💕

i am allowed to identify however i want.

each autistic person is allowed to identify however they want.

even if that identification have been used by ableist society to harm autistics.

because autistic individuals who identify THEMSELVES that way are not the problem.

—particular more marginalized members of the autistic community. because we have been pushed aside, ignored, and policed by the dominant, most visible members of the autistic community for so long.

as an apraxic semispeaking autistic of color with mid-high support needs, the language used by the online autistic community frequently does not include experiences like mine. sometimes they are not coined, defined, or used with us in mind.

we are allowed to identify however way we want without being accused of “just having internalized ableism.”

allistic neurotypical society forcibly reducing autistic people into “high functioning” and “low functioning” to either deny our access needs or take away our agency is the problem. THAT is what we are fighting against.

someone who grew up being labeled as “low functioning” who finds this term more accurate for themselves than any of the terms deemed more acceptable by the online autistic community, who does not use functioning labels on others who don’t identify as that, people like that are not the problem. they should not be your enemy.

psychiatry defining us only by our deficits and the burden we place on our family, education system, and the rest of society is the problem. them creating a moral hierarchy based off of that is the problem.

autistics who rather label themselves as “level 2” or “level 3” as per the DSM-5 rather than levels of support needs are not.

the same for those of us who still choose to call ourselves “moderate,” “severe,” or “profound.”

this is not the same as someone insisting on saying they have asperger’s even though they know the bloody, loaded, violent, and eugenic history behind the diagnosis. aspie supremacists refuse the term “autism” because they want to separate themselves from “those people”—those of us who are more visibly autistic, who have higher support needs, who are seen as more “severe” and thus “shameful.” they believe they are superior.

those of us marginalized autistics who choose to use these terms for ourselves: we are not pushing these labels onto other autistics who don’t want them. we are not saying these terms aren’t problematic when weaponized by the ableist institutions in our society. we are not saying we are superior than autistics who don’t label themselves like we do.

we are, however, asking the more visible members of the community to listen to us and uplift us instead of gatekeeping and debating with us about our own experiences—experiences they may not have even though they are also autistic.

dear the more visible members of the actually autistic community: you do not create these community narratives with the more marginalized autistics like us in mind, yet you deem them as the only acceptable terms that are allowed to be used. yet you insist on us using them. yet you police our language. you say autism is not a monolith, yet when we does not fit into your narrow understanding of what autism is—white, mostly verbal, late diagnosed, can live independently, low support needs, and so much more left unsaid—you ridicule us and see us as a stereotype, shameful, problematic, or simply does not exist.

will that really bring you liberation?

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tl;dr: semi/nonspeaking, high support needs, autistics of color, etc., marginalized autistics are allowed to identify however they want even if it conflicts with how the most visible members of the autistic community views autism.

you may also find this essay on my wordpress blog (linked) and my instagram (linked), please go support me!

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(note: language is really confusing for me. i am weirdly simultaneously hyperlexic. the way i write here is the most accessible way for me to write long paragraphs. i apologize for any accessibility issue, i tried to alleviate that by bolding important parts and including a tldr.)

fuck google docs so fucking much

i've just lost hundreds of docs and pdfs and i'm beyond pissed right now

they're all permanently gone

I never see people talk about having middle support needs. I am super smart and can mask really well. I can make friends easily and fend for myself for a few days. I can go places by myself and figure out when I need to leave. I can defend myself and make sure I'm not putting up with things I shouldn't. But I also can't shower bc of sensory issues and executive dysfunction and have regular meltdowns because I can't get comfortable enough to sleep. I have extreme difficulty talking about things that aren't special to me. I overstep constantly. I have trouble making my own food, I need it prepackaged or prepared. I can't do the dishes or the laundry unless I have an especially motivated day. I stay in bed for hours on end if I don't feel like I need to move. I can't drive or ride a bike. (TMI next) I can't tell when I need to use the bathroom and my executive dysfunction is bad enough anyway that I regularly end up peeing myself. But I'm still as independent as a 13 year old in a lot of other regards. It's really hard asking for "middle" support especially with things like this. I can function for the most part in public, but in private? Completely different.

For people who haven’t heard: this month, the DSM (diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders) are planning on updating the criteria for getting an autism diagnosis. On paper, this sounds like a good thing. It’s not.

The DSM is the handbook used by healthcare workers worldwide, for diagnosing mental disorders and the like. You may have read that the autistic diagnosis criteria is getting updated and, like many in the autistic community, hoped that this meant that it would be expanded, to make it easier for AFAB, transgender, and non-white people to be diagnosed (as it is notoriously hard for anyone except for white, cisgender men to obtain an autism diagnosis). However, they recently released a statement saying that they were not expanding the criteria, but were instead making it more ‘conservative’, as they feel autism is being ‘over-diagnosed’. (Which is, of course, bullshit for a whole plethora of reasons which I’m sure you’ve heard before.)

As-of my posting this, they have not released the official, updated criteria yet, so there is not much we can do right now. But there is one thing that we must agree upon: DO NOT SHAME PEOPLE FOR SELF-DIAGNOSING WITH AUTISM. Because obtaining an autism diagnosis is, quite literally, only getting harder.