It’s like I can breathe again…

It’s like I can breathe again…

For autistic and other neurodivergent people, the month of April is a time of, well, it’s kind of like a double edged sword I suppose. It has opportunity and it has pain. There are things that are wonderful and their are things that are horrendous.

A number of advocates rename the month from Autism Awareness to Autism Bewareness. I don’t do that, I prefer to go another way I suppose but it is surely something I understand. I prefer to maintain a narrative of Autism Acceptance Month in contrast to the Awareness campaigns.

It’s a double edged sword because there are some great things done in regard to acceptance. Many blogs are written and some autistic voices are heard, but, unfortunately a lot of that is us preaching to the choir as it were.

The other side of the issue is that we are bombarded with so-called awareness. And this is where the Bewareness metaphor is highly appropriate. Language of suffering, vaccine injury, devastation, broken lives, trapped, and epidemic are rife. They are rife in the way they describe autistic lives. They are rife in telling a story that we are not really people but problems.

So, when May comes, and April is over it’s kind of like being able to breather again. It’s not perfect of course, because when you are autistic, and connected to other autistic people the subject of autism is never far from the surface. It’s always a regular topic of discussion.

But it is like being able to breathe again too, because, there is an almost seismic reduction in the quantity of Bewareness bullshit that is shoved in our faces.

We hear less about the latest miracle cure, the latest inspiration porn of the autistic kid asked to the prom by the high school cheer leader. The blue light bulbs are gone and the puzzle pieces are reduced.

We can breathe again, and, our message of acceptance is a little easier to get signal boosted than it is in April.

I guess I write this as much for my autistic tribe as I do myself, April is over for another year and we can breathe again, we can pop our head back up and advocate for ourselves with just a little bit more confidence that we won’t be shut down in the name of Bewareness.

We can breathe again, because, even though, we know we are nothing to Beware of, the month of April is pretty much a living hell for us.

So come with me autistic tribe, let’s hold our heads high and breathe deeply of the air that is the month of May and definitively not the month of April.

Forget Bewareness, embrace acceptance and celebration of neurodivergence, the very thing that has given this world we inhabit so much of its innovation over the centuries.

We know the truth, we know we’ve always been around. We know that we are different not less. We know all this, so let’s all breathe the air of that reality again.