I don’t love giving personal information on here, because I don’t want this blog to be used against me when I’m looking for a job, but I do have to give away one thing for this post: I got autism—autism and ADHD to be specific. Shocking, I know, how a girl who’s really into science and has a blog on neocities has autism—I guess I’m just a living stereotype.

I got a late diagnosis last year, and so I’m finally learning the tricks of the trade—wearing headphones almost all the time, letting myself make weird noises when I’m alone, and not forcing myself to socially overexert. It’s been great knowing how to help myself! The problem is that a lot of the information is given to parents for kids who have autism.

Look, if you’re a parent raising an autistic kid, good on you. If you’re not into all the eugenics at Autism Speaks and whatever the Simons Foundation is up to, I’m sure you’re doing great, but I’m an adult—I need information that’s for me, directed at me. Somehow, you fucking parents have taken up the web—the [tubes][tubes] have been clogged—and now I can only read about how to manage an autistic kid—and most of it all for is for young kids, like 5–6 years old, and only a fraction of it is for teenagers.

Autistic people like me hate being infantilized, and this is just one aspect of it: as though none of us can take care of ourselves, we need to learn everything from guides written for parents and caregivers—a lot of these guides are from Autism Speaks and other various shitty eugenics organizations.

This doesn’t mean that some autistic people don’t need caregivers—a lot do, and a lot don’t. For those of us that don’t, we need information directed at self-care.

So I propose this: the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network could run a website with easy to find information about autism written by autistic people, peer-reviewed, and available on the web. I know that the ASAN has books on their website, but those take quite a while to get through fully—what I’m talking about is a dedicated website about this stuff.