I realize that there’s a lot going on right now that doesn’t fit anywhere in my comfort zone. It has made me outrageously uncomfortable. Through it all, I have taken solace in the fact that I have taken chances I don’t think I would have ever taken.

I’m not a big fan of moving out of my comfort zone. I eat my candy a specific way, groups of two or three every time. I eat Chipotle as a burrito turned upside down made in a bowl with a knife and a fork. Even the concept of writing usually had me putting out one article a month.

Nowadays my comfort zone is radically uncomfortable. I write up articles almost weekly and have just started doing it by speech like I’m doing right now. I recorded myself doing video for an autism conference. I gave out a quote that was featured in the Washington Post. I did my first podcast. (Just in case you were wondering, I still eat my candy and Chipotle the same way. I’m not a monster.)

I want to clarify that I everything I have previously mentioned was outside of MY comfort zone. Sometimes I do things and they’re not big wins. Some fill me with regret. Sometimes all I can take away from some experiences is that I tried. Some days I think I did great and I failed horribly. Other times I think I did horrible and did great. A lot of times I look calm and I’m internally screaming.

So maybe someone has something that is daunting or terrifying that they must do in this vastly shifting world. From me, I offer nothing but support. I continue to stand by an old saying: Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.

• Gaia loves making senses
  Core ideas within Buddhist and Daoist spiritual traditions are reflective of the commonalities found across many human scale indigenous cultures. A compassionate frame of love as vulnerable mutual knowing is compatible with a panpsychic relational philosophy. Everyone wants their experience to be taken seriously. We are embodied spirits, compelled to make sense of this world, and we can only do so in good company.
• Autistic human animals – a factor in cultural metamorphosis
  Autistic culture is a world of infinite diversity beyond the neuronormative imagination. Every Autistic relationship is unique, and many of us are traumatised. We need appropriate tools to invest in deeply understanding each other. Cultural metamorphosis requires radically reframing everything we understand about cultural adaptivity in terms of co-creating ecologies of care.
• The ability to relate deeply is the inability to conduct transactional busyness
  Underneath the surface of internalised ableism, no one wants to be seen and heard by many. Everyone prefers to be understood and loved deeply by a few, and everyone wants to love and help. Continuous dialogues about commitments make life sacred. This is the experience of life as a process of becoming.
• The inability to think hierarchically is the ability to think and live relationally
  Many Autistic people have great difficulties to think of the world in hierarchical ways. From what we know about our evolutionary path as humans, this is a reflection of innate human collaborative cultural capabilities in combination with a much reduced capacity for maintaining cognitive dissonance on an ongoing basis, which in turn can be traced to uncommon sensitivity profiles that fall outside the bell curve of hypernormativity.
• Healing – Resisting internalised ableism
  In the Western Educated Industrialised Rich Democratic (WEIRD) world we live in what philosopher Guy Debord described as The Society of the Spectacle. The reality presented to us via the media and public social media has been engineered to fit the exacting standards of Homo Economicus®. All the people alive today in Westernised countries, i.e. all the people in WEIRD countries and in the countries aspiring to WEIRD standards, have been born into The WEIRD Spectacle of internalised ableism. 

• About
• Latest Posts

Follow me

Emmanuel

Voiceover Artist and Writer at Freelancing

I am an Atlanta native and I found out that I was autistic with ADHD at age 27. I write/do voice work for a living and an individual self-advocate. I am a former employee of Ventures ATL and a graduate of Dunwoody High School, the Life Behavior Consulting PEERS program, the LEAP program of Eaton Academy, GSU's GaLEND and My Voice, My Participation, My Board. If you like my work, you could buy me a coffee.

Follow me

Latest posts by Emmanuel (see all)

• Poetry: AuDHD - November 9, 2022
• A Letter of Support - July 14, 2022
• The Performance of April and Autism Awareness Month - April 27, 2022