You know how human beings, they aren't all the same yeah? We have diversity woven into us from the outset. Different ethnicities, different genders, different sexual orientations, different body types? Well we also have different brains and minds, different ways of thinking and being. Seems pretty basic, I know. But it is worth talking about.

ADHD stands for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Which is not the most useful descriptor, because the experience of ADHD does not tend to be one of a lack of attention, but rather an inability to force that attention onto things that it doesn’t want to attach to…..

These days I am thankful for the autistic rigidity that has prevented me from growing dependent on ChatGTP and its various contemporaries. Somewhere in the early days of large language models invading our feeds a corner of my mind said ‘LLM = bad’ and I haven’t been able to flip that switch off. I’ve used the technology twice, once to put a list of words into alphabetical order while removing any repetitions, and once to complete a god forsaken SWOT analysis for a business grant application. Aside from the acrid taste of compromise lingering on my lips, I confess it was easier than fighting my way through these menial tasks.

It is so easy to get caught up in the pace of our capital driven, productivity at all costs, extraction based society. That shit is toxic and malignant. It spreads its tendrils out into all the corners of your life and then tells you that something is wrong with you if you feel burnt out or run down. It demands conformity while screaming at you to be authentic and true to yourself. And in a desperate effort to fit into these expectations we twist ourselves into pretzels, contorting our very souls.

I want to dig into the internal tension between can and can’t. Not what others think about disability, or say about our capacity, and not what society says we should be able to do based on their assumptions about the jumble of letters we were handed by a human in a white coat.

I am talking about what you think about your capacity, and what you say to yourself when no one else is listening.

I am talking to you, the invisibly disabled human who is on the line dancing between a binary that you never signed up for, because it feels like all or nothing is the only option available to you.

Can or cannot. Do or do not, there is no try. All that yoda shit.