Top Highlights

• Everyone has go-to tools that work more often for them and a couple tools they only use occasionally. And we all have days when nothing seems to work.
• About how sometimes, paradoxically, being functional means behaving in less (neuro)typical ways, so we can be more mentally healthy, happy, and generous humans for ourselves and for those we love.
• My policy is to use the language that an individual person prefers: “brain-holder’s choice,” I call it.
• But the bigger issue, for me, was that I didn’t feel I was “disabled enough” to claim that identity and the protections and accommodations that come with it. It took me a long time to understand that it was my internalized ableism telling me I “should” be able to do without them.
• She knew that these explanations would normalize her experience for them and help them understand that there are differences in how bodies work.