Autism

My evaluation recommended home and community based services in 2011. Nobody told me. I found out fifteen years later, when a woman sat in my room and said the sentence that had been written down all along.

I bought a chew tool because I kept catching myself chewing my fingers. It turned out the need went deeper than a habit. The nursing home took away most of my sensory input, and my body found another way to get it.

An audiogame is spatial audio by definition. For a brain that can’t parse sound location, that’s a wall, not a ramp. Text games are a real medium, and for some of us they’re the only games that work.

The gap between what I know I’m capable of and what my brain will let me do. About executive dysfunction, initiation, and the feeling that your own mind is working against you.

The existing word prediction tools don’t work with NVDA. So I built my own add-on that predicts words using n-gram analysis, announces them through NVDA’s speech engine, and works inside the screen reader instead of against it.

A school for the blind sorted kids into teams by cognitive ability. Team 5 was college-track. Team 6 was group home track. I was Team 5. When I asked for Team 6, they said no.

My family built a vocabulary for what it’s actually like to live in my body. Systems have their own vocabulary, and none of it has room for mucus-y days, whooshy nights, or the dog who saw the version of me that was actually there.

I’m grieving the realization that the independent future people imagined for me wasn’t based on my actual support needs. It was based on what they could see, what they wanted to believe, and what systems are willing to recognize.