THE FIRST BEAD

I sat your psych-ed tests
five times
at five, seven, thirteen, fifteen, eighteen.
As if repetition could rewrite me.
As if re-measuring my mind
might finally produce a different result.

Don’t you understand?
I cannot outrun what lives in my DNA.

You took my name
and replaced it with yours:
Autistic.
Willful.
Disabled.

You separated me from my friends,
assigned me to smaller rooms,
quieter corners,
special classes for special children.

You followed me everywhere—
standing over me,
behind me,
guiding my hands
to form picture-perfect letters.

I became
your finest neurotypical puppet,
strings pulled so skillfully
I almost forgot they were there.

There was no escape
from the dull world you built for me,
where curiosity was a sin,
where difference required repentance,
where dominant discourses
demanded obedience.

I read your research,
your case studies,
your clinical conclusions,
trying to make sense
of the chaos that swallowed my life.

I tried, unthinkingly,
to become you.

For a time
I accepted the roles you prescribed
because you taught me
your mind was superior,
mine a deviation,
a problem to be managed.

You educated me in ambition,
in normalization,
in the fine art of self-erasure.

Your fear became my curriculum.

But there is
nothing ordinary about me.

Today,
I do not worry about belonging.
I do not worry about fitting in.
I do not worry about being smart enough.

And it need not concern you
you have your own work to do.

When you are ready
to listen with open ears,
to learn with a mind rooted in curiosity
and a heart grounded in humility
rather than the arrogance of superiority,

we will walk new pathways
through familiar landscapes,
and thread the next beads together
not to measure deficiency,
but to build
a world that finally makes room
for all of us.

This poem is not simply personal memory.
It is testimony.

It tells the story of how autistic lives are shaped long before we understand what is happening: through observation, measurement, classification, and correction. Before we learn to write our own names, others write identities onto us. Before we learn belonging, we learn exclusion. Before we learn self-trust, we learn to doubt our own perceptions.

From the moment autism is named, power is already in motion. Classification is never neutral. To name is to define; to define is to control. Disability scholars Mitchell and Snyder describe disability as the “master trope of human disqualification”, the template through which societies learn how to assign inferiority. Once this template is established, it becomes easy to reproduce: some bodies and minds are framed as standard, others as deviant; some ways of being are legitimate, others in need of correction.

Over time, many autistic people become fluent in a world not built for us. We study facial expressions, timing, tone, and invisible social contracts. We learn to mask, to mimic, to perform competence. This is often praised as adaptability or resilience. But beneath the praise is a quieter truth: survival has required self-erasure. When authenticity leads to punishment or exclusion, performance becomes necessity rather than choice.

There are moments when resistance grows heavy. Moments when frustration rises and the invitation to accept the lesser-than position, to stop pushing against dominant narratives, feels almost merciful. It is exhausting to be reminded with regularity that one is different, read as not good enough. Marginalizing experiences carve grooves into the psyche. In times of distress, the mind slips back into familiar stories of inadequacy, even when another story has begun to form.

Disability, in this sense, is not only neurology or genetics. It is the cumulative effect of being misread, managed, corrected, excluded, and misunderstood. It is what happens when a world insists that one way of being human is the only legitimate way.

This is where neurodiversity enters, not as identity alone, but as ethical and political claim. Human minds vary. That variation is natural. Not tragic. Not broken. Not defective.

Once this truth is spoken aloud, it becomes disruptive. Because if autistic minds are not broken, normalization loses authority. If autistic communication is valid, social norms must expand. If sensory differences are legitimate, environments must adapt. Each shift redistributes power over whose voice counts, whose knowledge is trusted, whose way of being defines the human.

And redistribution of power is always met with resistance.

Martin Luther King Jr. understood this. Writing from Birmingham jail, he warned that the greatest barrier to justice was not hostility but the moderate who insists on patience, neutrality, and order while unjust systems remain intact. He taught that peace is not the absence of tension, but the presence of justice. That waiting for a “more convenient season” is simply another way of preserving inequality.

In conversations about autism, neutrality often sounds benevolent:

We support inclusion — as long as nothing essential changes.
We welcome autistic people — as long as they behave normally.
We take no position — we are neutral.

But neutrality in an unequal system is never neutral. It quietly protects the existing order. And the existing order has long required autistic people to adapt to it, rather than requiring the world to adapt to us.

Russell and Malhotra remind us that this demand to adapt is not only social but economic. They argue that disability is produced by capitalist structures that marginalize and oppress bodies and minds deemed “inferior,” excluding them both in nature and “in a competitive society.” When worth is tethered to productivity, speed, and efficiency, exclusion is reframed as practical necessity rather than ethical failure. Normalization becomes an economic project. The autistic body and mind are reshaped to serve systems never designed for them.

This is why neurodiversity cannot remain contained in clinics or classrooms. It reaches into education systems that reward certain learning styles, workplaces that privilege particular communication patterns, research agendas that prioritize cure over quality of life, and cultural narratives that equate competence with conformity.

It asks difficult questions:
Who defines normal?
Who benefits from that definition?
Who bears the cost?

And this is also why neurodiversity is fundamentally a human rights issue. The right to dignity. The right to participation. The right to education without segregation. The right to bodily autonomy. The right to communication in one’s own mode. The right to work without forced self-erasure. These are not acts of generosity granted by benevolent systems; they are obligations owed to human beings by virtue of their humanity.

When autistic people are required to mask to access safety, when support is contingent on compliance, when difference is pathologized rather than accommodated, rights are not simply unmet, they are violated. Inclusion is not charity. Accessibility is not kindness. They are the material expression of justice.

Martin Luther King Jr. understood that civil rights were never about asking politely for acceptance; they were about naming injustice and demanding structural change. In the same way, neurodiversity calls us to recognize that equitable participation for neurodivergent people is not a favour, it is a matter of rights long deferred.

King reminded us that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice,  but only when people place their hands upon it. Autistic self-advocacy, neurodivergent scholarship, peer-led supports, and refusal of deficit-based narratives are all ways of placing hands on that arc. They are acts of civil participation. Of reimagining who belongs in the category of fully human.

And this brings us to healing.

Healing—
I was introduced to a salamander once
that could regenerate new arms, legs,
a heart and a brain.
I want to do that too.
For the brilliance of healing
is that it does not ask us to forget past trauma
but rather acknowledge, reclaim,
and transform our relationship
to these events.

Healing is not curing autism.
Healing is repairing the wound of disqualification.
Healing is restoring self-trust after years of self-doubt.
Healing is reclaiming bodily autonomy after compliance.
Healing is learning that our perceptions were never wrong, only dismissed.

Like the salamander, we regenerate. We grow back what was cut away. Not into someone else, but into someone more fully ourselves.

And when we speak these truths aloud, we invite others to listen with open ears, to learn with curiosity rather than superiority, to walk new pathways through familiar landscapes, and to thread new beads together, not to measure deficiency, but to build a world that finally makes room for all of us.

As Martin Luther King Jr. said,
“The time is always right to do what is right.”

There is no neutral position in this work.
To claim neutrality is already to choose a side.

And the work of justice continues,
one bead at a time.