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.
The pain of being the butt of someone else’s joke comes back to me whenever I read fiction that depicts characters on the autism spectrum who repeatedly take idioms and other expressions literally, or fail to understand the double meaning of words in embarrassing ways.
We take a moment to look back at our favorite posts and reads of the year, and to look ahead to the substantial changes 2017 will bring at Disability in Kidlit.
It’s clear that many people, including pre-diagnosis me, don’t know much about hypermobility; this only makes the need for representation more necessary.
Masturbation (and sexuality in general), particularly for girls, is widely stigmatized. But on top of that stigma, I had this body that was utterly different from the bodies around me. It was different and therefore wrong.
I can feel their eyes on me. They’re all staring, judging.
I’ve never written fiction about living with Crohn’s, and to be honest, I’ve never wanted to. Perhaps because I still feel what I felt for years growing up: that nobody wants to hear about my annoying, humiliating misery. Yet I know, intellectually, that this is a shame, because there should be more characters in YA literature who live with chronic illnesses like IBD.
If you looked at me as a teenager, particularly during my freshman year in high school, I would not have stood out from my peers. If you looked closer at my dominant right hand, though, you’d see there was a significant problem.
What is it like to grow up with dyscalculia? And how might a character experience it?
A mistake I see a lot of writers who write about disability make is asking only one person for help. I’ve heard so many people say things like, “I have a cousin who is blind, and she read the book and said it was good at portraying blindness.”