You Know What, Shoutout To The Neurodivergent People With "scary" Symptoms.

when the autism is being an actual mental health problem instead of making me obsess over fictional characters again:

[Image ID: A white background with black text with red shadows "Intrusive thoughts can" (can being all red text) "and will" (will being in all red text) "be about anything." The next points are bulleted out in a list in black text. "There is NO limit to what they can be about whatsoever. They WILL be about things you don't want them to be about by DEFINITION. NO topic is evil or weird enough to be exempt. NONE. NO LINE IS DRAWN. THE SUBCONSCIOUS DOES NOT STOP. It MAY make you uncomfortable to hear about and that DOES NOT give you an excuse to be fucking ableist about it. They cannot be controlled, you cannot expect people to try. They are NOT indicative of someone's true wishes or feelings. REPREMINANDING SOMEONE FOR HAVING THE "WRONG" INTRUSIVE THOUGHTS WILL ONLY MAKE THEM WORSE, ESPECIALLY FOR SOMEONE WITH OBSESSIVE-COMPULSIVE DISORDER. Lastly, in large black text at the bottom of the image is big red text that reads "YOU ARE NOT BETTER THAN SOMEONE WITH INTRUSIVE THOUGHTS YOU FIND GROSS OR MORALLY REPREHENSIBLE. YOU ARE NOT BETTER THAN SOMEONE WHOSE INTRUSIVE THOUGHTS DO NOT MAKE SENSE TO YOU, EVEN IF YOU EXPERIENCE INTRUSIVE THOUGHTS OF YOUR OWN. IT IS A SYMPTOM THAT CAUSES ENOUGH SUFFERING ON ITS OWN. DON'T JOIN IT." End ID]

For this Disability Pride Month, I saw a post that was shittybad and it made me angry. So have this

There are no disabilities which are raised above ableism. The person in the wheelchair, the autistic person, the person with schizophrenia and the person with an invisible chronic illness may all experience society's ableism in different ways, but none of them can expect to avoid it. So the "you wouldn't say X to Y" advocacy needs to retire yesterday. They say all kinds of ableist shit to all of us and it's time to try out some actual solidarity instead of arguing about who has it slightly worse

Captions shouldn't be censored. If the video says fuck or cum or cunt the captions should say the fucking word.

its rather annoying to me how its so normal to demonize people that get angry and bitter because of trauma instead of sad. its such a normal reaction to get angry because something bad happens to you but theres so many people that have such tight views of "good victims" that you have anything other than depression or anxiety or smth or turn bitter and theyre like. Your honor, kill them with rocks

"Oh you talk to yourself! That's unhealthy!"

UGHHHHH NO ITS NOT SHUT UPPPPPP. I'm tired of people acting like it's a bad thing! I talk to myself because what ELSE am I supposed to down with all this energy??? I talk to myself because it makes me feel like I'm releasing energy! ITS A GOOD THING and actually BENEFITS ME. And I only do it when I'm alone anyways, so who CARES.

DESTIGMATIZE TALKING TO YOURSELF.

[Image ID: A black screened meme with Bugs Bunny in a tuxedo with his arms crossed over him, white text reading "I wish all people with disabilities that aren't talked about as much a very pleasant evening"] [Image ID 2: A black screened meme with Bugs Bunny in a tuxedo with his arms crossed over him, white text reading "I wish all people with chronic vertigo and/or any other condition that may cause one to be dizzy a very pleasant evening"]

Happy disability pride month

therapists saying you're surprisingly self aware is like being called a pleasure to have in class for adults

dear fellow career driven spoonie,

you’re not a failure, you’re sick.

you were putting just as much effort forward before you were sick as you are now, you just have less energy to use so the results aren’t as exciting. it’s not complacency if you’re putting forward an effort.

it’s normal for your work life to suffer when your personal life does. you’re not a robot, you’re still a person, it’s unrealistic of you to expect yourself to be able to compartmentalize your symptoms at work. your body doesn’t care where you are or who’s time you’re on and it’s okay.

if all you can do is maintain your responsibilities, that is enough. you are probably not going to get fired if all you’re doing is what’s on your job description. it’s okay that you can’t put anything extra forward to grow. you’re growing in other ways right now.

even if you lose your job, you’re still not a failure. you’re not defined by the fruits of your labor, but by the substance of your heart and you are still that same career driven person who worked so hard in that position in the first place.

the reason why you’re successful isn’t because of what you’ve done, but who you are. take pride in your talent, motivation, knowledge, intelligence, and grit. that’s where your value lies.

Writing Accessibility PSA

Please avoid using long strings of characters as line breaks in your writing - these are not screen reader/TTS friendly!

Every ‘°’ will be read as ‘degree’ - can you imagine how long it takes to read out a string of 25? Let alone more complicated combinations of characters (eg. imagine listening to TTS read out ~*~ |°| ~*~ multiple times per line break)?

A good rule of thumb is to stick with short, 2-3 character line breaks (eg. I don’t find — or *** too egregious to listen to). Your readers can tell there’s been a scene change whether you use two or twenty em-dashes, but if you use twenty, some of us might have to listen for 30 seconds to read the next scene. If you’re more concerned about aesthetics, you can insert an image of your aesthetically pleasing line break with alt text simply reading ‘line break’ for accessibility.

Don’t feel bad if this is something you’ve never thought about before - now you know better and can make your writing more accessible moving forward!

I would like to invite any other screenreader users to add their own thoughts or preferences to this post. We’re not a monolith and there’s a variety to how different softwares interact with repeating character strings and images with alt text, so there’s bound to be some conflicting opinions on what I’ve suggested above. Let’s try to make the stories we share accessible for everyone :]