Disabled Community Megathread from June 30, 2025 to July 13, 2025

If you carry one thing with you today, let it be this: you are beautiful, you matter, and you are loved.

As always, we ask that in order to participate in the weekly megathread, one self-identifies as some form of disabled, which is broadly defined in the community sidebar:

"Disability" is an umbrella term which encompasses physical disabilities, emotional/psychiatric disabilities, neurodivergence, intellectual/developmental disabilities, sensory disabilities, invisible disabilities, and more. You do not have to have an official diagnosis to consider yourself disabled.

Mask up, love one another, and stay alive for one more week.

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257 comments

Hey folks. I've never posted in here, so this is a long one. I 'qualify' medically, but I've always been very resistant to self-identifying with my disabilities. I asked my parents to stop posting "I love my autistic child" junk on Facebook back in the day, even though they were well meaning.
I'm strongly aware of how they influenced my past and current behaviors, what overwhelms me and why, and things like that. But the resistance to the identification is still there.
I've had some pretty hard falling out with friends recently in part due to my own overzealous nature when it comes to relatively minor injustices, which is a quirk of my condition. I essentially called them out for all playing a new game that directly funds horse racing/animal cruelty and was given a lecture about how tired they are of virtue signaling in response. As a vegan poster, that was the last straw in a sequence of other events.
So I guess I'm trying to break out if that resistance and see if I would be actually be better off interacting with other ND individuals.
Has anyone else experienced this resistance and have suggestions/readings on how to get over it?
I think it used to come from childhood trauma. That my life till now would have been fine if I just had been born 'normal,' that I wouldn't have to dwell on every awkward interaction, that I wouldn't have been so arrogant in college or caused my parents so much grief, etc. A lot of self blame, regret, and self-isolating to protect myself and feeling others were better off away from me too.
I get that a lot of that now is a societal construction problem, not necessarily an individualized one.
I don't think I feel that way anymore, but I do still get residual feelings in situations like my most recent one, where my own behavior damages my social relationships, at least insofar as the group dynamic is concerned.
I'm not sure where the current feelings stem from if not the same thing.
Tldr; is there a book for people who (previously) hated themselves/their condition and so rejected communities and labels that might have helped?
Alternatively, something to help temper or more effectively harness injustice sensitivity/righteous anger?
- im autistic and am basically only friends with autistic people with like, one or two exceptions. i find talking to non-autistic people generally frustrating, and even those im close to I get pretty constantly frustrated that they don't tell me things or assume things i didn't intend.
  as for the injustice sensitivity, it really drives me nuts too and is probably why i am drawn to leftist causes. generally i just vent about it to one of my autistic friends to get it out of my system and disengage when i feel myself getting bothered otherwise. but i'm kinda a people pleaser so i don't have trouble disengaging
  also read unmasking autism that one's good
  
  Appreciate the response. I think that's part of my issue is that I only really had one group of friends, so I didn't have separate people I could vent to, others to play games with, etc and kind of compartmentalize that. Definitely a lot of unintended meaning going around.
  I do plan to start reading that book, it's already on my ereader.
  
  the person i vent to is also in the friend group, we've just accepted we both have the type of autism that makes us rly petty and bitchy over nothing so we keep it to ourselves in dms lol
  but i definitely recommend having more than one friend group in case one implodes. i have two that serve different purposes personally, one that's more supportive and one that's more silly. if you go into neurodivergent spaces and are aggressively friendly things tend to work out, or at least it did for me
- Welcome in! I'm gonna try and respond as best I can, please let me know if at any point I'm unclear or come off in a negative way.
  
  Hopefully that's not too ramble-y, and I hope that answered some of your questions.
  
  I'm a very verbose rambler, so no worries there. I've spoilered my replies too to make it a little less long.
  
  Thank you for your response, I learned a couple of things just from you sharing and I appreciate it! A lot of what you said really resonates with a lot of my own experiences.

257 comments