April 4, 2026
The problem of “productivity”
“…Mulan, perceived as inferior through dint of her female body, could be seen to have experienced ableism,” writes Amanda Leduc in her book Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space, a book that I wanted to connect with more than I did.
“In the film, she overcomes others’ perceptions of her as unworthy by proving that she is, indeed, just as good or even better than any man who has enlisted in the army alongside her—in short, she triumphs not by getting others to recognize that her own different body is just as valuable as the next, but by making her body fit a constructed idea of what it means to be productive and valuable in society. She is not valuable until she is the same as everyone else.”
I have to admit I was somewhat caught off-guard to find the nature of the stigma against Mulan in this chapter characterized as one of a deficit of productivity.
Mulan’s body isn’t “different” in any unique or particular way; it’s female. She isn’t disabled, in the movie, in any widely recognized sense of the word (which isn’t to say that ableism isn’t a component of sexism). The problem Mulan faces in her quest to aid her country and save her father isn’t one of an expectation of productivity she can’t meet; it’s gender essentialism. She seeks to enter a role that’s traditionally proscribed for women.
And this dissonance, I realized, mirrors something about disability rights and liberation rhetoric that has felt very alienating to me in recent years: the amount of focus on “productivity”—on external pressure to be more productive, on guilt and internalized shame for not being more productive, on the pressure to do things or to give your time and energy “for capitalism”—as a primary driver of existential guilt or internalized ableism.
What I’m not saying is that this isn’t a problem, that it doesn’t exist, or that other people’s feelings about it aren’t warranted.
But it just doesn’t describe the shape of the problem for me.
I don’t actually care what capitalism supposedly wants from me. In fact, capitalism doesn’t want anything from me; it’s not a conscious entity, it doesn’t have goals, and my disabilities wouldn’t be obviated if capitalism collapsed tomorrow. And I don’t really have much respect for other people’s or corporate entities’ expectations of “productivity” from me. I’m not invested in those opinions. They’re not the source of my frustration with myself or my limitations.
It’s that there is so much more that I want to be able to do. It’s that there’s so much more that I dearly wish I had the time or energy or workspace or bandwidth or freedom from inertia for.
It’s the real grief of multipotentiality, that there literally just isn’t the combination of time and mental bandwidth for me to do the stage managing I want to do and the writing I want to do and be the artist I would want to have been and the environmentalist I would like to have been. I look at the literary accomplishment of someone like Rebecca Solnit, and it’s not that I feel guilty about my own productivity or whatever, it’s that I’m jealous of that kind of ability to organize thought and language. I look at Robert A. Caro’s body of work and it’s not my own “productivity” that I mourn or feel guilty over. It’s that I want to be able to do that. It’s admiration and jealousy and want. I want to be able to do things I will probably never get to and it has nothing to do with some abstract commitment to “productivity.” It’s that I want more skill, I want more space and time to do art, I want to be able to put everything in my head on paper, it’s that I like making things.
It’s that I want my life to leave a mark, and that for all that I like to talk about life being long, actually, it’s also so short. It goes so fast.
It’s that listening to Josh Ritter, or reading something like the Locked Tomb or Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell or the Starless Sea, I’m just blown away by the level of craft involved. Watching Ilia Malinin skate, I desperately want to be able to do anything with that much physical joy.
It’s that I’m frustrated that the same cognitive profile that in many ways has fitted me for the career I have, is also, in others, going to starkly limit its scope.
I appreciate just being, just existing, I do. I love lingering over a cup of coffee on a sunny morning, I love just walking in the woods without a destination in mind, I love sitting around and reading on rainy days. I love staying in bed when it’s nasty outside. I love taking train rides just because. I think we should have a universal basic income! I think people should be entitled to the basic components of a decent quality of life in a country that has the money to easily enable that.
But I love doing things; I love making things. I love bringing things into being in the world. I love watching a script turn into a full production and knowing I helped make that happen in an incredibly material way.
I’m not ashamed or embarrassed by the fact that I haven’t published twenty books; I do a difficult and specialized job well and I’m proud of it. If I were less constrained by the need to earn a living, yes, it’s true, I’d have more time and energy for other artistic pursuits.
But I love writing and sometimes, also, I just wish I had more of an ability to shake the world by the shoulders going ISN’T THIS THE MOST FASCINATING THING YOU’VE EVER HEARD OF??? ISN’T IT???
I feel what Katherine May describes in her recent post, “The Roaring.”
“I am rattling my cage, grasping at the bars of my own constraints – my own slow motion – and trying to break my way out. There is so, so much to do in this life, so many ideas, so many ways I could help. I feel like I do so little. I am so slow. I get slower with age. My capacity does not match my desire.”
And I see this lamenting about the obligations to productivity and I just wonder—but don’t you want anything for yourself? Don’t you have ambitions? Isn’t there anything you want to do because it would make you proud?
And if the answer is “yes” but that that thing feels out of reach because of your disabilities, then I don’t actually think the answer is just to sever yourself from your desire or drive or to somehow make yourself believe that “you only feel guilty because capitalism,” or that it’s only internalized ableism if you value your ability to do a job you like or to be frustrated at not being able to do things you wish you could. It’s not just to never mourn for what you might not be able to do whether you want to or not.
Because neurodiversity and disability acceptance doesn’t just mean only ever feeling awesome about our disabilities; it means we’re just as entitled to the full range of human emotion and experience as non-autistic or non-disabled people. And that can include frustration and impatience with the gap between our capability and desire.
I think it’s okay to find ways that you can do things that matter to you. I think it’s okay to want with no easy answers.
February 27, 2026
New poem out!
I’m very, very happy to have a poem in the Emerging Writers section of the latest issue of Rhizomag, out this week!
My piece, “Reflect,” is here. Entire issue here!
Thank you for reading!
February 26, 2026
Between the storms
The Upper West Side skyline from the North Meadow ballfields, between our last snowstorm and this one.
February 13, 2026
Hope, and grief, and Mamdani’s victory
I finally got around to listening to this conversation between Heather Cox Richardson and Zohran Mamdani, which I’d had bookmarked since before Christmas (when he was still Mayor-elect Mamdani), in which he talks in part about winning back voters in districts that had swung the hardest for Trump in the 2024 election by rejecting politics as usual and ignoring the advice of consultants and pollsters in favor of listening to people about the real obstacles in their real lives and returning a feeling of agency about the future to them in designing solutions.
And it worked!
And I’m glad it worked. I’m glad he won. I’m glad we have evidence that voters respond to this kind of respect for their real lives. I’m glad we have politicians out there who are gifted at this and who are doing it.
(Don’t mistake me; I have no illusions that this means we can or even should be electing Democratic Socialists everywhere in the country; that’s not what this is about.)
It leaves me–I won’t say relieved–but a little more hopeful about the 2026 and 2028 elections, if this is something that other Democrats can take to heart and emulate.
And I still don’t know that I’ll ever get over it that that many people were able to listen to Trump’s openly racist, fascist, authoritarian rhetoric, and still decide to put their family and friends and country on the line for the price of eggs, as they say.
I’m glad people are showing themselves capable of making better choices and believing that government can be better. And I still don’t think I’ll be able to look at most of them the same way again for the rest of my life, and I don’t know what to do about it.
Even if Democrats manage to sweep the House and Senate in 2026 and the White House in 2028, I don’t know that I’ll be able to get over what a lot of people told us about who they really are.
January 31, 2026
Hatred
Some time ago now, a handful of other friends and bloggers and I founded We Are Like Your Child, a group blog in which we wrote realistically and non-tragically about our challenges as autistic and disabled people both as children and adults, and about our coping mechanisms, adaptations, and creative problem-solving. This was in response to absolutely chronic accusations that neurodiversity advocates avoided talking about these issues in order not to tarnish our “positive” messaging about autism and avoid stigma, having heard from many parents that they genuinely wanted places where we’d talk more about daily realities and challenges, and we ourselves feeling frustrated at how many of the higher-profile books about finding success as an autistic person which had come out at the time still emphasized success according to neurotypical and non-disabled standards.
The title was an overt reference to a frequent refrain from autism warrior parents and curebies to autistic self-advocates at the time:
“You’re not like my child.”
We had a relatively small following compared to outlets like The Thinking Person’s Guide to Autism, Diary of a Mom, or Parenting Autistic Children With Love and Acceptance, but feedback was generally good—parents who read it tended to say it was a useful resource for them, which was what we’d hoped for. It also made it convenient to just respond with a link every time we saw someone in a comment thread going “Isn’t there a place for this?” There were other personal blogs, too, older than ours, by both non-autistic parents (and occasionally autistic ones) and autistic people where the focus was not about painting autism as all sugar and spice but about not propagating hatred and dehumanization and where autistic adults did not necessarily feel obligated to expose their or their children’s most intimate challenges to the world as a condition of writing about autism at all. It was very much not that this writing didn’t exist, although the WALYC writers did commit to being a little bit more vulnerable, in the service of our stated purpose, than we tended to be on our personal blogs.
I do think the social media environment has changed in the last 10-15 years, and not all for the better, especially given the rise of ultra-short form and video-based platforms, to the point that even I find a great deal of the autism-related content that’s readily available to be shallow and far too highly sanitized to be relatable. I sympathize, on one level, with protests that a lot of the autism influencer content out there right now doesn’t have anything to do with their children’s actual lives. Most of it doesn’t really have anything to do with mine.
And so, in comment threads in which autistic people are, once again, trying to refute the central premise of “I love my child but I hate his autism,” or pleading with parents not to use hateful language about autism because of the consequences that view has had for autistic people, and once again the reply will be “But can’t we acknowledge that not everything about autism is ideal all of the time…?” It’s not all your fault, but I do wonder whether you’ve looked beyond the social media algorithms and read a book or a blog by an autistic self-advocate, because there is actually not a shortage of writing in the world about how difficult and frustrating autism can be.
Or is it that what you really want is someplace that will not just be unvarnished, but will validate you in your hatred of autism, where you won’t be seriously challenged to question and examine those feelings and their impacts on you and your child?
And I started wondering something else, which is maybe related to still widespread misconceptions about what neurodiversity means, that it is about making autism out not to be a disability but a personal quirk, that it’s fine for low-support needs or “level 1” autistic people, but autistic people like your child, or the children you teach, or the children you know, need a cure, but… Do you think that we work so hard to warn you away from hatred of autism because we don’t have any experience of that hatred?
Well, we do.
I can’t speak so much for the autistic people a generation or so younger than me at this point, but among my own generation, probably most of us have hated autism. We have hated being autistic. We have hated ourselves. We have hated being the way we are.
At one point in time, I talked to other people most days who hated their autism.
It’s because we do know what hatred of autism is like, not because we don’t, that we beg you not to go down that road. To stop and turn back if you already have. Because we have been there. We do know what’s at the other end.
(The author of the piece linked above would go on to die by suicide.)
There was even a moment in which I thought, “Well, we should write something.” That we should get a few people to write about the experience of hatred of autism, plainly and openly and sincerely like we did on We Are Like Your Child. (There was a period of time in which the autistic community responded to almost any issue that exploded into the social media sphere with a flashblog.)
And then I thought, no. This is not yours. This is something you do not get to demand from us. The vast majority of our available writing is already laced with the consequences of hatred of autism, and the self-hate that we had systematically instilled growing up.
And this time, that’s all we really need you to know about this.
Yes, you do have a right to your feelings. Many of them are quite understandable in light of what the widespread, pervasive cultural narratives about disability and autism still are.
But I actually don’t think it’s too much to ask, given precisely that history, that you find a way to work through them that doesn’t have soul-destroying and deadly consequences for autistic people, including for children like yours.
January 20, 2026
Morning snow
From our snow storm earlier this weekend. I didn’t have much time before work but I managed to get out for a brief walk in the park.
January 13, 2026
“Cognitive rigidity” and autistic people’s sense of justice
In the wake of the publication of his 2015 book NeuroTribes, author Steve Silberman frequently and memorably referred to a “strong sense of justice” as being so commonly noted among autistic people that it was “practically diagnostic.” In the years since, this observation (in which Silberman was not alone, but among its more prominent proponents) has transmuted into a conception of “justice sensitivity” as an inherent feature of autism itself, or as an innate character trait of autistic people.
I think there’s a lot to criticize in this idea of “justice sensitivity” as an inherent feature of autism rather than just common among autistic people, from the risks of portraying people of any neurology as inherently more moral, to the implication that autistic people are immune to prejudice or racism or incapable of acting unjustly ourselves.
However, I’m also becoming concerned with the narrative taking hold among some of the autistic community that says that autistic justice sensitivity is entirely a fabrication, or that it’s actually nothing more than a manifestation of our cognitive rigidity.
While I think it’s obviously a mistake to frame it as an essential feature or neurological trait of autism, I don’t think it’s either of those things, either, and in writing it off completely, I think we’re making the mistake of considering autistic people only collections of autistic traits, of neurological deficits, and not as people, who have personal histories, experiences, memories, characters, temperaments, values, feelings, or even the capacity for awareness of wrong done to ourselves and others.
I don’t believe “justice sensitivity” is an inherent trait of autism; I also don’t believe that it’s just our cognitive “rigidity.”
I think it’s one possible set of responses to our environments and experiences that we as humans are capable of having, one way in which our personal values can develop in response to our own histories and experiences and the way they interact with our predisposition to certain cognitive traits, personalities, and temperaments.
You know, like real people’s do.
And I suspect it’s one that we may be somewhat more likely to have than non-autistic people or people without some kind of history of marginalization, because of the ways our experiences differ from theirs from our earliest childhoods, and the interaction of these experiences with traits that are documented aspects of autism.
We’re subjected to absolutely rampant injustice compared to non-autistic children. We’re subjected to lower standards in healthcare and medical research. We can be deprived of our basic needs on the whim of an authority figure much more easily than non-autistic or non-disabled people can be. We’re often disbelieved about our most basic needs, our abilities and inabilities, our discomfort, our physical pain—to the point that one research study on pain reactivity in autistic vs. non-autistic children cautioned in its conclusion that “Clinical care practice and hypotheses regarding underlying mechanisms need to assume that children with autism are sensitive to pain.”
It has been considered perfectly acceptable to electric-shock autistic children into behavioral compliance within my adult lifetime, and while cities and states in the U.S. progressively ban conversion therapy on LGBTQ+ minors as ineffective and unacceptably damaging, effectively the same therapy developed by the same people is still considered the “gold standard” for treatment of autistic children.
We have feelings. We have empathy. “Strong pattern recognition” might be an oversimplification, but there is documentation of patterns of perceptual functioning in autistic people that are enhanced compared to those of non-autistic people in some respects, and other research has suggested we display more moral consistency across contexts, including in response to strangers and even when costly to ourselves. We’re also often noted for having longer and more detailed early memories, so we may well remember these experiences more vividly and with more specificity on average.
I also wonder about whether we might be less susceptible to just-world fallacies than non-autistic and non-disabled people on average. We have more reason to know that people in positions of social power or authority can do terrible things to you for no real reason than most people do.
Why would it be even a little bit surprising, given all this, that we might be particularly easily sensitized to witnessing injustice against others, on average?
I hate seeing other people mistreated just for being who they are, or just because someone else decided they could, because I know how that feels. I have since I was a tiny child. It is physically painful. I’m not capable of looking at rank injustice or abuse and just going “That’s fine,” or “That’s got nothing to do with me.”
This probably has to do with my experiences as an autistic person, as well as other things about me as a human in a complex interplay of reactions over time.
Almost just like a real person.
It’s not even like justice sensitivity only occurs among autistic people. Why does anyone become a civil rights activist, anyway? Lots of non-autistic people have looked at the injustice of the world and decided they could not simply tolerate it, whether they’re directly impacted or not. Why does anyone decide to work with or on behalf of a group of people they themselves don’t belong to? Why does anyone dedicate their life, or even give it, for the cause of justice?
Is it just their rigidity when a non-autistic person does it? Or is it a complex response to personal experiences, early perceptions of the world, having witnessed injury against someone they cared about, religious or spiritual convictions, the influence of role models, and other factors that all contribute to the formation of deep feelings about what justice requires?
I think there’s a serious danger in deciding that justice sensitivity in autistic people is “just our rigidity” of shoring up still-rampant prejudices that almost anything autistic people do is just a mechanistic imitation of non-autistic capabilities. (Non-autistic people have actual strengths, for instance, while we have splinter skills.) Where it’s fake whenever we do it. We could never genuinely identify with real people experiencing injustice. We don’t have real thoughts or feelings, because nothing that happens to us matters. We’re just walking embodiments of autistic deficits, after all, not conscious, complicated beings being affected by the things that happen to us in complex ways over time.
(///sarcasm)
I think we should critique the idea of autistic people as possessing some kind of essential superiority in moral perception, and that this is a topic that deserves more critical study; I think it could reveal a lot about autistic vs. non-autistic experiences of empathy, identification with those we perceive as different from ourselves, marginalization, ethical consistency, unpredictability, and social hierarchy. I’m curious about how culturally bound this phenomenon may be.
But there’s a real danger in setting up a standard in which autistic people’s powerful moral perceptions or identification with others can never be seen as meaningful or genuine, in which even our objection to our own dehumanization and mistreatment can never be considered credible, because that’s “just our rigidity.”
January 7, 2026
Sound tracks
For the start of the new year, I decided to put a dent in my long movie watch list while I still have my evenings free, and started off with Rabbit Trap, an intimate little folk horror starring Dev Patel from just last year, followed by Touch the Sound, a 2004 documentary about Deaf percussionist Evelyn Glennie… and I can’t get over the resonance of these two passages about what it means to have a physical relationship with sound:
“Everything will be let go, in the same way that all your music will disappear, but yet no sound is lost. They live on, but what happens to them, I actually don’t know. It’s the equivalent of a life.”
-Evelyn Glennie, Touch the Sound
*
“What happens when a sound dies? Where does it go?”
“I don’t think a sound is ever alive to begin with. It’s the vibration of an event. The invisible shadow of an energy exchange. Sound is memory. carved into the air. It’s a ghost. Just a scared, lost creature, desperate for somewhere to hide, if only for a moment, before it fades away. And when you hear a sound, you become its home. your body is the house that it haunts.”
-Darcy Davenport, Rabbit Trap
(Side note, but you might enjoy Rabbit Trap if you also liked Dev Patel’s other movie The Green Knight, or horror movie The Strings from a few years ago.)
December 24, 2025
Last dusk
From my last evening walk in NYC for the year, right after the snowfall a few days ago.
Chavisory's Notebook 