The two or three months I managed to get by on the reduced dose were enough to convince me: My psychiatrist is lying. I don’t need medication. I’m fine. I can beat this. Until, of course, I couldn’t.
ADD isn’t an end of the world big deal. It’s really, really not. But it is a deal, it’s a thing. It’s a disability. It puts you on a different default setting.
The world does its best to remove our autism from the mainstream narrative of life, hiding either it or us whenever possible. In the world of fiction, we often see these same attempts.
When it comes to writing, we have to be willing to examine, with suspicion, our own character creation and world-building.
Science fiction and fantasy tell us that anything can happen, and yet disabled people are often told that their narratives don’t fit into the genres.
Writing disability respectfully can be difficult, especially in the midst of large, seemingly contradictory conversations about representation. How should frustrated or concerned authors approach this?
A poster child, to me, is a child with a disability who is “shown off” as a way to generate funds, awareness, understanding, more funds. Mostly funds, in my experience.
A brief list of recommendations our contributors put together.
Blind characters seem to always go too far in either one direction or the other—either completely ruled by their disability, or completely unfazed. The truth is, I hate both, because neither is honest.
Perhaps “normal” behavior is best described as a “normative spectrum.”