Hello Every Body,
If you don't have autistic people in your life, you are really missing out. (Don't worry, you almost certainly do and just don't know it yet.) Atticus showing me how he sees the world has been shocking and then liberating. It was shocking to me how much of what we do as social norms are really just all of us playing pretend about something together, and liberating once I realized I didn't have to play along.
Autistic people, speaking very broadly, are described as literal thinkers who often miss subtext and social cues. I tend to think of autistic people as justice lovers who take people at their word. It's not their fault that so many of our words are lies and social niceties we don't actually mean.
We live in a world where we are expected to pretend things are true that aren't, and aren't true that are. We have to pretend that bodies don't have needs as we work through lunches and bathroom breaks. We have to pretend that bodies don't get injured as we shrug off a "bad back." We have to pretend that negative feelings are abnormal and pathologize the people who are just responding logically to a world on the brink. We have to pretend that being healthy is a reward for good behavior, that sickness is earned through bad behavior, and that individual responsibility over health is even possible.
After all these years as Atti's mom I often joke that I have a "subtext babelfish" in my ear. A babelfish, if you're unfamiliar with The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, is a fictional little fish that space travelers would put in their ear to translate all the languages in the galaxy into their own. I feel like I have a babelfish in my ear that translates all the unsaid things we communicate into words I can explain to Atticus. "See, Atti, when they asked 'How are you?' they didn't actually want to hear about my day, they were just saying that instead of hello." Once I started translating subtext I kept having the same realization, "you know, it doesn't actually make sense that we do that."
You know diets don't work. Come on. You know. Even Oprah can't do it. But we keep pretending and plunking down more money for more and more desperate cures. You know fitness and thinness aren't correlated. You've seen fat athletes. You've seen thin sick people. You know how hard you've tried to make your body into something society would approve of, and you know how that's gone for you. But as long as we play along with the big game of pretend Power wants us to, all that divergent evidence we have buries us in shame and nothing gets solved. As long as we believe that Power is right, any life experience we have that says different must be because we are bad or crazy. When really, we can just stop listening to Power.
We don't have to keep playing the same games. We can make up new ones that align with the realities we're living and give our bodies and our communities the support they need.
If you haven't voted yet, I hope you'll think about the world we're all building together and make your choices. | 
