Spent the last hour writing something that might become a blog post, but it's becoming clear that I have to rethink the way I'm living my life within the context of the disability aspect of my neurodivergence.

My brother is legally blind. To my mind, he's disabled. I have witnessed first-hand the difficulties he's faced due to a world that doesn't account for low-vision people. It felt like considering myself disabled was appropriation.

It's one of the reasons I internally rejected the idea of autism-as-a-disability, even though it's RIGHT THERE in the definition.

But the world is also largely built on neurotypical assumptions & "requirements"; to navigate a neurotypical world as a neurodivergent person means that I have to pay a spoon tax just to get by (which leans into the social model of disability).

As an autistic person, part of my disability is that I have less spoons to start with, and many things have a higher spoon cost for me - and *everything* has a spoon cost.

However, I've come to realise that stealing spoons from future me also has a *physical* cost, just like it does for chronically ill folks, but I think we autistic folks are frequently unaware of that until too late.

Interoception is the awareness of what's going on within our bodies. Chronically ill folks need to pay a lot of attention to their interoception, just to get through the day.

We autistic folks, however, frequently have major issues with proprioception and interoception. Our poor proprioception results in our "clumsiness" and motor skills issues.

Amongst other things, our poor interoception means that we register pain differently to neurotypical folks.

However, on top of this, I think that because we can't sense what's going on in our bodies in the same way as neurotypicals, we can borrow future spoons without feeling the physical cost, until it suddenly overwhelms us.

That's why I've been wiped out so many weekends. I've stolen all of Allie's Saturday spoons, and sometimes her Sunday spoons too.

I have to start looking more closely at my life, and look at my "fixed spoon costs", and stop trying to live like they're not there.

It's time for me to accept that while my disability is different to that of my brother, I too have a disability.