30 Days of Autism Acceptance: 2
April 2nd: Post your redinstead photos today. Alternatively, you could talk about what autistic pride/autism acceptance month means to you.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. For me, at least recently, acceptance has meant personal acceptance. I spent time after my diagnosis getting to know my autistic self, and what I found was that a lot of my autistic traits and tendencies were labelled by me as “bad” or “undesirable”. I had learned to mask for so long that I wasn’t sure where I ended and the mask began, so I had to work for a long time to figure out who I was.
And then the next step was acceptance. Accepting those traits as traits, not character defects that I needed to overcome. I’m not inherently a bad person, a stupid, lazy, or selfish person, but these were all ways I was labeling myself for decades.
After acceptance comes pride, I think. I’m almost there. Maybe by April of 2022.