Cover Image - Autistic Identity, With Terra Vance | Spectrumly Speaking Ep. 128

Autistic Identity, with Terra Vance | Spectrumly Speaking ep. 128

 

Spectrumly Speaking is also available on: Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | SoundCloud

 

IN THIS EPISODE:

(AUDIO – 47 minutes) In this episode, hosts Haley Moss and Dr. Lori Butts speak with Terra Vance.  Terra Vance is an industrial and organizational psychology consultant and founder and CEO of NeuroClastic, Inc. Her passions are in the intersections of social justice, equity, literature, Truth, and science. Neuroclastic is a collective of Autistic people responsive to the evolving needs and trajectory of the Autistic community.

For more about Neuroclastic: neuroclastic.com

 

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Spectrumly Speaking is the podcast dedicated to women on the autism spectrum, produced by Different Brains®. Every other week, join our hosts Haley Moss (an autism self-advocate, attorney, artist, and author) and Dr. Lori Butts (a licensed clinical and forensic psychologist, and licensed attorney) as they discuss topics and news stories, share personal stories, and interview some of the most fascinating voices from the autism community.


Spectrumly Speaking is the podcast dedicated to women on the autism spectrum, produced by Different Brains®. Every other week, join our hosts Haley Moss (an autism self-advocate, attorney, artist, and author) and Dr. Lori Butts (a licensed clinical and forensic psychologist, and licensed attorney) as they discuss topics and news stories, share personal stories, and interview some of the most fascinating voices from the autism community.

For more about Haley, check out her website: haleymoss.net And look for her on Twitter: twitter.com/haleymossart For more about Dr. Butts, check out her website: cfiexperts.com

Have a question or story for us? E-mail us at SpectrumlySpeaking@gmail.com

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION:    

 

HALEY MOSS (HM):  

Hello, and welcome to Spectrumly Speaking. I’m Haley Moss – an attorney, author, advocate. And I’m autistic. I am so lucky because I have the greatest co host that anybody can possibly have here at Spectrumly. And I’m joined here by her today, the one and only…

DR LORI BUTTS (LB):  

Dr. Lori Butts. I’m a psychologist and an attorney. You’re the best Haley, thank you so much. I needed that today.

HM:  

Everybody deserves a pep up every single day. So I’m glad that I can hopefully bring a little bit of joy into your day and hopefully into our listeners as well. How’s everything going?

LB:  

Good, a little hectic today. How about you?

HM:  

I also feel that kind of hectic vibe going on.

LB:  

Is there a way for you to manage that?

HM:  

Trying to carve out time to take care of myself and hopefully going on a good vacation in May?

LB:  

Perfect. Those are two great things good. Sounds perfect. 

HM:  

I’m still thinking about what kind of vacation I would like to go on. Assuming things of course, feel safe. And I have the time but that’s on my brain is I’m already thinking about vacation mode.

LB:  

Oh, great. That’s a good. That’s that’s something to look forward to. 

HM:  

That’s great. What about you? 

LB:  

Um, you know, just say multimo plugging along in this in the continuing Zoom world.

HM:  

My entire life is still on Zoom. I’m okay with it, though, because I’ve had to travel twice during the last month. And I think you and I had a long discussion about my stress over going to Alaska once upon a time. So as much as we complain about zoom after going through things like that. I’m very glad that Zoom exists.

LB:  

Yeah, I’m very grateful for it. 

HM:  

Makes things a lot easier. And also having all sorts of cool virtual technology means that we get to meet really amazing people.

LB:  

Absolutely. Like today’s guest.

HM:  

Exactly. Are you ready?

LB:  

I’m really ready. Yes.

HM:  

Today we are welcoming Terra Vance. Terra is an industrial and organizational psychology consultant, and founder and CEO of neuro clastic Inc. Her passions are at the intersections of social justice, equity, literature, truth, and science. Welcome to the show, Terra.

TERRA VANCE (TV):  

Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. It is an

HM:  

absolute pleasure to have you. I know before we got started today, I was talking about how I’ve been following you and your work for a while. And it’s really cool to just actually get to just chat.

TV:  

Yeah it’s very different, isn’t it to be, you know, to only interact with someone via text and then to have a live interchange? 

HM:  

It really is different. And honestly, it gets me really excited. So just to kind of catch up our listeners, and folks who might be reading the transcripts as well. Can you share with everybody how you became involved in the neurodivergent community?

TV:  

Sure. So I had a funny story, I was writing a book, a novel, and my husband is autistic. I knew that as soon as we started dating, like I figured that out on date one. But I was thrilled with that, because I always felt like I was way more honest than most people. And I really love knowing what someone is thinking, not worrying that they’re going to be passive aggressive, because I never could handle those things. But I just had this totally wrong idea about what it means to be autistic. And I didn’t see myself in, in like the DSM criteria so much. So I just didn’t know that I was as well. And I wrote this novel, and I had some sensitivity readers, and one of them was a local friend who’s autistic. And when she read it, I asked her could she tell which character was autistic? And she said, What you mean they all are? And I was like, What? No, yes, they’re all very, very artistic. And she sent me to some things that showed more like the the non gendered actually artistic blogs and things, what it looks like in women, and what artistic people have to say about themselves and I was like, wow, whoa. So I took some online quizzes and I was just way up there like triple the the European Probably autistic numbers on those online indicators. And I had a psych appointment for ADHD, like two weeks from that day or a week and a half. And I went in with this giant binder full of information. And I was prepared to fight and be like, Look, I’m totally autistic. And when I said it to my psych, he said, Oh, I know. And I was like, you do? He was like, yeah, it’s in your chart. So apparently, I was diagnosed at the same time as I was diagnosed for ADHD in 2006. But nobody told me they only told me about the ADHD. So yeah, I have been diagnosed for 11 years before anybody told me.

LB:  

Did you have a conversation with them about about that? That’s, that’s interesting. 

TV:  

The first doctor had retired. I actually love that one. But that doctor was super like anti putting people in a box. He would always say, you know, diagnoses are more like tools to get you what you need, then, then static things that you definitely always fit into, especially things like mood and personality disorders. He was like, you’ll get diagnoses for things if you need the medicine or the therapy. So I understand, I couldn’t even be angry at him or have a confrontation with him about why it was a bad idea because he had retired. So a bad idea not to tell me, because I have a lot of trauma and those 11 years that I feel, had I understood who I was I could have avoided. But that right, but that was my story. So weeks later, I started interacting with the artistic community online. And it didn’t go well. I tried to jump in too fast. And a few months after that, we started a blog that is now Neuroclastic, it just me and a few friends it grew so quickly. 

LB:  

Can you tell us what Neuroclastic is and how you came to find that — obviously, that’s how you found it.

TV:  

So there, when I first tried to enter the Autistic community, I did not know that there was controversy about the word Asperger’s. That was just what I had been told, was in my chart. And so I introduced myself that way. That was what my husband had as a name for himself. And this was years ago. But it just so happened to be around the same time as that book came out about Asperger and his involvement with — and I had only seen Neurotribes that have painted him very favorably. And so I introduced myself as Aspie, not knowing and I got kicked out of eight groups in a row. And I ended up in this one group, where I just kind of stayed for a while. And we started a blog, some other people in that group, because I had been writing for Psych Central. They invited me after I wrote them a complaint about some of their authors being extremely ableist. To write for them. And so was getting this massive traffic and I, I felt it was wrong. Because I was new. I didn’t know anything I was learning from friends who didn’t have traffic. So I thought, well, let’s funnel that traffic to a blog that has multiple authors. And that way, we can spread this privilege out some and especially since all the advocates that I had seen in the community who were high profile or white people. And so the friends who started the blog with me and we were ethnically and racially diverse and also not just from the US or UK. And it started to grow other people loved it. They started asking to join and you know, things grew until we now have we’re now a nonprofit. it, we have maybe 600 contributors. And from six different continents, we’re still focused mostly on underrepresented voices, non speakers, people from outside the US and UK, elders, young people. Black, Brown and indigenous populations. And so yeah, we we do great. And we still are mostly a publication, but we’ve started branching out into other areas of advocacy.

HM:  

That is really exciting just learning more about what you’ve been trying to accomplish and what you have accomplished with neuro plastic. And with that in mind, since it sounds like you truly do have a diverse coalition, and I know plenty of folks who have cited neuro plastic as a place that they’ve received great autism education, what would you hope that other autism organizations learn from the Neuroclastic model?

TV:  

I, we have a very purposeful, like a privilege forwarding model. People often think that our contributors are the, quote, high functioning window. And when I say people, I mean outside of the artistic community. So like the broader autism, community experts and things, I think that our contributors are, are like these shiny, high functioning, you know, wealthy and academically oriented folk. But what, what they can’t see is that we are the people they call severe. Not all of us, you know, but that’s motor planning differences. That’s something that most people don’t know anything about that I wish that they would learn. And we take the contributors who have high profile, high privilege, and kind of forward that to people who should be heard, who needs to be heard, you have amazing things to contribute. And we try to pair people and time things in ways that get people’s attention outside of just listening to the same dominant narratives, you know, and I wish that other people would do the same. We give, we use editors, people act like they’re erasing autistic voices to give them editors. But, and we give writing support.

But people don’t usually do that, for Autistics, they do it for everyone else, I mean, in the broader world, but they don’t do that for autistic people. But that’s how that’s how most people end up published, you know, with editors and supports. And so we, we take what people were really good at, and we pair pair people and give them space and room to contribute the ways that they enjoy. And then we, if somebody is great at art, and another person is great at words, we’ll we’ll ask the Great words person to, to write some image descriptions for the artists who, who might be amazing at art, but have a hard time with, with the language of describing things. And so we just, we just give room for people to fill in with what they’re great at. And we don’t do deadlines. We don’t have any pressure and you know, it’s life changing for someone to be published author and it gives people you know, things to put on resumes and I wish that the rest of the world would take some notes from our process because it is it really works. We don’t have conflict. No one is ever wronged inherently for being able to contribute and it just works out really well. And I wish that other people would learn from that model and adopt it

LB:  

is that how your work as an industrial and organizational psychology consultant kind of fits into all this?

TV:  

It is exactly how yes, in IO Psych we we focus on working with systems, right large groups of people or even at the societal level and structures. And it is not hard actually to restructure things where you don’t have This privilege hierarchy, and that takes leadership that is horizontal and not vertical. So your leaders are doing more service. And that’s more behind the scenes. And so when people go and look at neuro classic, they can’t tell initially who, who’s, you know, kind of the admins with the, with the editing privileges and who is someone who doesn’t have a home who lives in a park or coucher, surfing, or a person who’s 14 years old and nonspeaking, or someone who lives in a assisted living facility, they can’t tell. And our contributors get asked to be on podcasts and, and to consult with hospital systems and all kinds of things because everyone seems equally important on our team. And that’s, and they are, they absolutely are, we feel that way, genuinely. And it’s very easy to do. And I don’t know why more people don’t do it. There’s just that we live in a culture that’s not very collective, and is super individualistic and competitive. And that’s just not us.

HM:  

I mean, that’s so important to think about is that we are collective rather than just an individuals, we’re stronger together. And we have far more to offer as a community, I love that. That’s what Neuroclastic really seems to be about is that community and that you are supporting each other, I just have nothing but admiration for you and what you’re doing, and kind of to wrap that thought up: So you’re talking about how you have this collectivist approach to things and how your background in industrial and organizational psychology comes into that it should all types of organizations. So whether it’s corporate, whether it’s nonprofit, how should they be doing these things to to basically, recognize neurodiversity, and rethink the norms that they’ve been using, which seem to be pretty individualistic, from what you’re sharing?

TV:  

Yeah, autistic people, and other neurodivergent people, but especially autistic people, they don’t learn and pick up skills on the same timeline. And they have this, they have a different process for becoming expert at things, they often come in far more expert than most people. Because when we love something, we tend to consume all the information about it. But we never get to show what we’re able to do. Because we’re constantly trying to catch up on the things that we’re not great at. Because of executive dysfunctioning, right, I can’t multitask. And most Autistics can’t, we get in a tunnel, and we stay in it. And if you ask us to, you know, file these five papers here in and, you know, do this and this and this task. We’re not ever going to be able to show you what we can do, because we’re constantly catching up on the things that somebody else who does have executive functioning can do for us. And so what employers and professors and everyone need to understand is autistic people often do things very thoroughly and deeply. And they don’t do well with interruptions. And task initiation, let them get started and leave them alone. Let them take the amount of time they need, and then marvel at what they can do. And, you know, as a, I used to be a teacher, and I could not keep up anymore. It was amazing.

At first, I taught the same class five times in a row. And by the second class in a day, I had every example and the book memorized, because that’s just my thing that that artistic memory. I know that not all autistic people can do that. But that’s what I did. So I would have everything memorized, but I forgot. I can’t have no sense of time passing. So I forgot that, that I had faculty meetings all the way up until 10 minutes after they started or, you know, I didn’t turn in the paperwork or do the data collection that they wanted on time ever. And that was always a struggle that just every year teachers got we’re expected to do more and more especially in that as ABA and behaviorism became more systemic, that school started adopting. And so we had to collect all this data and it just became it. My kids love me my test scores, my kids test scores were through the roof, I got investigated constantly for cheating, because they didn’t believe that my kids could be doing so well. And it was because I was autistic. And I just understood not having great executive functioning I didn’t, I kept pens and pencils and paper, my classroom, I didn’t penalize people for forgetting things, because I forget things. I always thought that that was awful to punish people for forgetting their homework or whatever. Because I got a troll over those things all the time. And I didn’t do it on purpose. I was already trying harder than everyone else. And, yeah, I wish that people would stop trying to make autistic people be the kind of person who can switch tasks every few minutes. Because when we’re not that, and that will be like, the massive first step.

You know, once we start getting into a class, the bell rings, and scares us to death because we start all easily and loud noises. And then we go to a whole new subject, and we’re just not wired that way. So yeah, I wish that they would give us a structure that works for us. And that just doesn’t exist. And employers are totally missing out. Because everything in society is based on, you know, 80% to 90%, depending on what study you read of employee success as far as being able to climb the ladder in in your field is based on what they call emotional intelligence. But really what that that means when you break it down is how well you can navigate privilege hierarchies, and play the role. It doesn’t have anything to do with your skills, your knowledge, your education, your work ethic, your integrity, none of that matters as much as your ability to perform hierarchy. And that’s never going to work for us. And that also stifles progress. So yeah, that’s my soapbox lecture for today.

HM:  

I appreciate your soapbox. And when you’re talking about the type of autistic person, you’re I’m just sitting here nodding along to every single thing you say. So please don’t apologize about the soapbox, because I’m listening to your soapbox and like yep.

TV:  

Couldn’t you do amazing things if they just got out of your way and let you do the things that you’re wired to do?

HM:  

Exactly. And I think about that, especially when I was in my very first law job, I would always get put on things you thought I was staring stereotypically wired to do, and not the things I was actually wired to do best. And all of my effort would go to like proving that I deserve to be there and trying to be good at the thing that I was, I was pegged to be good at, and it was really a lot of pressure and a me unhappy.

TV:  

Miserable, right? And had they just left me alone, to do the things that like when I first started my, my boss was amazing. He probably was artistic to the principal of the school. He heeded Mike roles, rolls, likes people to do things. He really appreciated doing things differently outside the box kind of thinking, Yes. And he also was very into social justice. And I have never, I’m never sure if it’s how autistic I am. Or my poverty background. Because I grew up in Southern West Virginia, in a coal camp. You know, I’m Romani mostly and indigenous, and I still have transient family members who live in like Yardsale encampments, and flea market. tarp, encampments, and vans and sell antiques and things because I just come from a totally different world and I never knew if people could like smell the poverty culture on me, so to speak, and and just knew that I wasn’t a fit for that professional world. Or if it was that I was wired differently. But I haven’t been a fit but this boss was great. Like he appreciated those things, my kids I taught in the poorest school district in the state, it served the largest housing community and people call it the projects in in the eastern seaboard, and but my kids knew me, they got me, they understood me. And I think it’s because we came from that generational poverty together. So we had different values that just jailed. But I have not ever had another boss who appreciated those things. And that was a shame, because I was the one who the kids. I mean, they call me mom all the time. I never asked anyone to do that. But it was just, they treated me like I was a rock star, if they saw me in public, they would just run and scream, and they were so happy that it liked her other teachers, but I, it was that disconnect of, in, in poverty, culture being real, is a values. So people speak very bluntly, there, they show big emotions. You know, when you’ve made somebody angry, and poverty cultures, but it’s different, you know, that they call that not being emotionally intelligent, as you go up the privilege hierarchy, where you’re able to pretend that nothing is wrong and agree with everyone who also has privilege all the time. So even if you don’t feel those values, and, and you’re different, as long as you can not make waves, you can you can climb that hierarchy. And that, that just means that we never have any change, I actually think that empathy is what people call empathy is what maintains all hierarchies and, and privilege.

HM:  

That’s a really interesting thought. And just listening to you even talking about poverty culture, it also kind of is a great transition. And when you’re talking about your identities as well, I love that you wrote a piece last year about autistic identity development. And you found a difference between non autistic socially constructed identities and autistic experientially constructed identities. And it sounds like that’s kind of you’re starting to talk a little bit about some of the things I feel like you’ve mentioned, but can you tell us more about those differences, too?

TV:  

Yes, I actually think that there’s one and only one thing that is consistent among all autistic people, that that defines what it means to be autistic. And of course, autistic people are free to disagree with me, and that’s fine. And if they don’t agree, then that means I’m wrong, and that’s fine. But so far, pretty much everyone has agreed that that my theory is, it feels right to them. So what I think that autism actually is, is not our sensory issues. We often have those but not always, it’s not motor planning. It’s not these spiky skill areas where we’re really good at some things and we’re really bad at others, those things happen to a lot of us, but they’re not uniform. I actually think the one thing that defines autism is how our identity is constructed, is different from non autistic people. Identity is largely defined as where a person is on their social intersections, how similar or different they are. So if you have a person who is sis het, and black and Christian, and a wife and a mother, right, so how similar or different they are from other Christians, how similar or different they are from other black people, how similar and different from other middle class people or parents, those things make their identity. And that doesn’t mean that they don’t have interests and experiences that impact who they are in their perceptions. But their identity is kind of contingent on where they lie in their social intersections. And so their instincts are to protect theirs social intersections. I don’t think autistic identity is constructed the same way I think autistic Identity — while we do have social intersections, an autistic person can also be black, a Christian, a parent, sis het, middle class, we can have the same social identities. But I don’t think that who we see ourselves as is a person who sits on those intersections.

I think that we see ourselves as the sum of our passions and experiences and values instead. And so that person may be — in the article I use EMT, and that’s my brother, he’s an EMT. And ever since he was a young child, he was obsessed with emergency vehicles, and especially fire trucks and ambulances. And that’s always been his whole identity. And so he wants to talk about that to people, when he makes an analogy, it always comes back to something related to firefighting. In fact, when he described autism to someone, he said that he was — most people are a sedan, and he’s a fire truck. And he said, a sedan can run errands, it can go on vacation and back, it’s good on gas, a fire truck, it can’t make tight corners, it’s not good for errands, you can never find a parking spot, you don’t take it to the post office every day. And it’s terrible suspension, you run over a quarter, and you can tell if it’s on heads or tails. And it takes forever to get up to speed. He said, But you would really be we will be in a bad place in society if we didn’t have some fire trucks here and there. And that was a perfect example. But that’s his whole identity. He has nothing. None of his social intersections define him, like his passions. And so I think that’s why therapies are so sinister, too, because they try to socialize us to have those social identities and to deny what what will be your core sales. So we grow up, not knowing who we are, because we’ve had all of our passions extinguished.

LB:  

That’s such a great visual that your brother I that, like, that’s such a great story. I really got everything from that that was. And I do think that there’s, I mean, I hope that there is a push to hear what you’re saying and to support. I mean, certainly I’m biased, because it’s what we talk a lot about here on Spectrum really is supporting people’s passions and their true identities and things like that. And I do think that that there’s, there’s at least, you know, there’s a movement, you know, too, and people are hearing, neurotypical people are hearing that more and more and more, but I do think that’s going to take time.

TV:  

And I want also for autistic people to know, you know, autistic people, if you ask non Autistics who they are, and this is what I asked, well over 10,000 people this question over a span of several years, and I even joined groups where it was unlikely that autistic people would be a part of those groups. military wives and, and wives of pastors, those two groups just there. There’s probably not a lot of artistic people in those groups. And it’s not that they can’t be a military wife or a wife of a pastor, but it’s just that they probably wouldn’t see that as a group they would want to join because I don’t think that they have a social identity of that relies on that social intersection. Right? So I asked non autistic people and autistic people who are you? And autistic people would start by saying the love justice and fairness they’re honest. So they start with their values or they will talk about something they’re really into, or a pit. I love cats. They would often say that is definitely not a social intersection. Um, non autistic people almost always started with their relationship status. They’re a wife or husband they’re a dad or grandpa, Grandfather grandmother or their jobs and their career intersections which you can be a career can be essential intersection or a passion, depending on your perception.

But if you’re in that career, and you don’t see it as a social intersection, you only see it as a passion, you’re going to have constant conflict with your co workers who mostly see it as a social intersection. Because they’re maintaining the health of that social intersection, while you’re trying to improve the problems and not maintain the status quo. Because the status quo keeps you healthy. If your identity is a social intersection, and you’re happy where you are in that status quo, that’s never going to be us. So I wish that autistic people would understand that they do not have to know who they are, because they author themselves for the rest of their lives. They’re always going to be authoring their identity, they’re fluid, they respond to things, they grow their identity, instead of being this fixed social position where they try to grow their social status. They’re growing their expertise, if you want to know who you are, just chase what you love. It’s that simple. You become the things that you immerse yourself in, you become the values that you that you, you know, that are dear to you, the more that you chase them. And so I just tell autistic people, if you want to know who you are, just start doing the things you love. And you’ll become, you’ll grow with those, you’ll fit the shape of the containers that you want to fit, not the ones that society says you have to fit.

HM:  

I think that makes a lot of sense. And it also for at least for me brings up questions when you do see autistic people who do seem to construct their social identity in the same way as most non autistic people how much that even goes into things like autistic masking, and camouflaging and things like that, to which I find really interesting to think about. So I think that you definitely are on to something and an extra nuance in there too.

TV:  

I think we hate ourselves when we do that, though. It’s soul crushing. And I’ve tried to you know, I’ve tried to be the social intersections and with gender to I don’t understand gender or feel any relationship to it. I am genderqueer I can’t get closer to a definition than that. Because like I said, I don’t really feel any relationship to gender. But there was a time in my life that I just started doing what other a fab people women were doing, dressing the way they did, and you know, getting my nails done and, and keeping up with my appearance using name brands, and it did change everything around mega easier. Once I started looking and sounding and acting like other women, I was reading Cosmo magazines, and it was talking about what women like and what women are. And I’m like, really?

HM:  

I used to do that too. I did that as teenager, my magazine of choice then was Seventeen.

TV:  

Yeah, and all those things and like I said, I never knew if I was so different because of poverty culture, and and growing up in a coal camp in the backwoods. It’s really like a totally different country. What I didn’t know what it was, I never knew if I was straight or gay. I didn’t know if I was trans or not if I just hated being a woman because I didn’t like the things that people say women do. But I just I just really needed to define myself. I did have it much easier, but I hated myself. You know, I was being sought after by men and dating once I started acting like other women and wearing high heels and that wasn’t happy. I was I was successful in that. But I was miserable. I didn’t know who I was. And I was just constantly trying to become everyone else. I didn’t know what masking was. And that was kind of that novel that my friend read who said these people were all autistic. I was like, No no, she can’t be autistic. Look at how great she is at being like everyone else even though she knows she’s just putting on an act. Oh my friend was like you really don’t know what to look at these sites and and I did and it was mindblowing but we need community so badly. And so that’s just what Neuroclastic is focused on. It’s just building that community. So we can learn, there’s no language out there in the world to describe us, we have to do it ourselves. And we can’t do it. By just being friends with the same upper middle class, you know, 50, white people who have always been the face of Autistic Self Advocacy. Because those experiences are very different from people in South America, or people from where I’m from, or people who are not white people, it’s just going to be so very different. So we have to be a community that actually does what the rest of the world has failed to do. And that’s include everyone. And so we’ve been extremely purposeful, about the end, it’s easy, and it’s amazing. We just, we brought on the most amazing person, and I can’t wait for the world to meet him. We have a new position called achieve decolonizing officer. And Jude Olubodun is our chief decolonizing officer, we’re so excited about that.

HM:  

I’m excited for you. And I think that is all such wonderful news and a great way to celebrate and also end this conversation, since it’s such a hopeful note, especially talking about community and moving towards that decolonization point. And just to make sure that our listeners are on the same page, how can they follow what you’re doing, and also what Neuroclastic is up to?

TV:  

So Neuroclastic.com is our website. And you find us on any social media at Neuroclastic, we have the same name everywhere. And that’s, that’s like the word neuro plastic, but a C instead of a P. And it means breaking your brain, because that’s what we do will blow your mind in a good way. But we have different personalities on all social media. So their Instagram and our Facebook pages are by far the most interactive, they have the visuals. And Facebook is easier to share the content and interact with with your communities. And so we have the we have the biggest presence on Facebook, just because it the format of it is community building, I think more even if you hate the, the corporation, it does do well to build community if you use it right. And so follow us on these social media mediums. And you know, we do live streams, we respond to what the community talks about and, and has questions about and says, Wow, I didn’t know about this, can you tell me more and so you start making more content. And we commissioned more people to write about these things. And we are very purposeful to make sure that you people don’t go unrepresented. And so if you feel like it intersection or experience that you have is not represented, just let us know. And we’ll, we might even hire you to create some content so other people in your intersections can feel represented and be a part of a community that you might have felt left out of before. So yeah, find us fleas and and interact with us, especially non autistic people. You don’t want to be the person who finds us too late.

HM:  

Yeah, as I think I love that you’re saying that too about not finding resources too late because resources should be for everybody at any stage of your learning.

TV:  

Yeah, and a lot of people do find us too late. And they have lost contact with their children. Their children have gone no contact, or their children are no longer alive. And that’s really sad. But it happens a lot. We hear from parents, a lot of adults who really wish they have found us earlier. Now there is a place that you can find right now and do that before it’s too late. Because we really do want to help and we’re also a lot more gentle to the audience then some places.

HM:  

That’s important too is to just ease people into it but also not be afraid to tough love them at the same time. 

TV:  

Yeah, I mean, we will tough love you in a very strong way if you try to advocate against communication rights, that is a big one for us. So that is your one landmine that you can step on. You will probably feel the wrath. But otherwise, we’re super gentle and we’re very happy to have

HM:  

you. Yes. And building community I think is such a wonderful note to end our episode on. So please check out everything that Terra is up to and that Neuroclastic is doing, do interact with them on their website, as well as all major social media. For the rest of us. Be sure to check out differentbrains.org and check out their Twitter and Instagram at DiffBrains and they’re also on Facebook. If you’re looking for me, you can find me at haleymoss.com or also on all major social media happy to help get you resources happy to talk to you and keep this conversation moving in the right direction.

LB:  

I can be found at CFIexperts.com. And please be sure to subscribe and rate us on iTunes and don’t hesitate to send questions to spectrumlyspeaking@gmail.com. Let’s keep the conversation going.

Spectrumly Speaking is the podcast dedicated to women on the autism spectrum, produced by Different Brains®. Every other week, join our hosts Haley Moss (an autism self-advocate, attorney, artist, and author) and Dr. Lori Butts (a licensed clinical and forensic psychologist, and licensed attorney) as they discuss topics and news stories, share personal stories, and interview some of the most fascinating voices from the autism community.