Here's to all the kids who were born with non-default settings; to all you who put the effort in to figure yourselves out.

You're amazing and deserve to be celebrated.

I'm glad you're here 💝

Unclench your jaw.

Relax your brow.

Go get a drink of water.

See if you've taken your meds

Eat something.

Doesn't matter what you look like right now, i think you look amazing.

Because you do.

You're a wonderful person.

And have this. 🫂🖤 you did great today. You made it through

Autistic unmasking isn’t “letting everything out.”

It’s the slow & challenging work of stopping self-erasure.

Unmasking means learning which environments cost us our health and which ones allow us to stay.

If unmasking looks messy, that’s because the mask was holding everything together.

RE: the last retoot. We need to talk about Luddites.

Your whole life you have been fed a pack of lies about the Luddites. They were not technophobes.

The Luddites were activists, guerillas, saboteurs, a labor movement which did not shy away from action; breaking certain machines that the wealthy were using to kill their livelihoods (lowering wages, worsened working conditions, inferior products), and in some cases stealing their art. Their machine-breaking brought about the Perceval’s Frame Work Bill which enacted a death penalty for machine breaking. A. Death. Penalty.

They were not scared of new technology, the common use of the name now, many were machine operators. They were scared of starvation. Some of them lost their lives at the hand of the govt while fighting back.

This was not a case of the automobile supplanting the horse and buggy, (true, there was some reluctance to change, but that was not the gist) this was the wealthy slowly killing off a class of workers for profit (while working them to death) through loss of livelihood or, if that didn't work, the death penalty.

Agree or disagree with the methods, the Luddites were hard core. Not sniveling technophobes.

This one is for the allies. Please boost to get wider reach.

I know you're upset about what's going on. Me too. And, like me, I bet you frequently have that feeling of wanting to throw your hands up and say, "But what can I do about it?"

Let me give you one of the most powerful tools you can use to help fight bigotry. And it's a tool that only you can use, because any marginalized person who uses it will be seen as aggrieved and immediately discounted.

What is this amazing tool? I call it

Dude. Not cool.

This phrase. Commit it to memory (or something like it that's more in character for you). Use it when someone around you is being a bigot. It's not an angry phrase, it's more one you deliver with bafflement, like you're confused the bigot just said what they said.

Simple social disapproval, particularly coming from peers, friends, or coworkers at the same level, is powerful. We all want to belong. Clearly but subtly voicing your disapproval (it has to be clearly understood by the bigot, for this to work) makes a real difference.

For it to really be effective, we need everyone to be doing it. If every bigot out there always caught shade every time they said some bigoted thing, they would stop doing it. So spread the word.

Use this simple tool to tap into millions of years of evolutionary social training.

Racism? Dude, not cool.
Misogyny? Dude, not cool.
Homophobia? Dude, not cool.

It works. It's low-risk (please don't use it if it feels dangerous to do so, though). It can change the world.