Kindle Notes & Highlights
Noah always felt somewhat bad for lying about his “girlfriend” to his coworkers. It wasn’t that he was afraid of people knowing he was dating a guy; he just didn’t want anyone getting too interested in his dating life and finding out he was dating a vampire.
Noah froze. He was hyper-aware of the six other hunters in the van, listening to the conversation, and helpless outrage at the blatant invasion of his privacy welled up in his throat, making him want to scream. He forced himself to breathe, slowly. You might as well add that I’m pansexual while you’re at it, he thought bitterly.
Not that Noah had ever asked for, nor expected, “coddling”; he’d only asked for reasonable accommodations when he’d had a desk job, like being exempted from taking phone calls and being allowed to wear earbuds while he worked, since he found it difficult to read and write up reports in a crowded office environment unless he could drown out the conversations with music or stimmy sounds.
But that was the double bind with autism: people expected you to be either “too disabled” to do the job at all, or so “mildly disabled” that you should be held to the exact same standards as allistic—non-autistic—employees.
Unlike his exes, Jordan was patient with Noah’s quirks, while Noah didn’t think less of Jordan when his demons reared their heads.
“I haven’t read many comics, but I saw the recent movie. I think it was called Batman Begins? It was really good.”
When his mental health fell apart and he spent long nights curled up in his dorm room bed, staring at his phone, not sure if he wanted to call Elsie or Aunt Crystal because he would just be a bother and wondering, if his parents had still been alive, would they have understood?
“You’re not ‘people,’ you’re ‘very important people.’ You’re exempted, of course.”
His intuitive approach was to ask people why they were upset, but in the past, he’d accidentally angered people who thought either he was being nosy, or he should’ve already “known” why they were upset (by…reading their minds? He’d never understood that logic).
Basically, he sucked at dealing with people, and water was wet.
But the part that hurt him most was when people took his lack of social intuition as proof that he didn’t care about them, or he lacked empathy. He did care, and he had so much empathy that sometimes he actually wished he didn’t have it because it hurt so fucking much, but he just couldn’t seem to broadcast his feelings on his face or translate them into a form that other people could understand.
Noah’s definition of “casual and unobtrusive” meant initially trying to introduce the topic through a convoluted metaphor that only succeeded in confusing the hell out of them both. Finally, he lost his patience and just decided to ask directly.
Thanks to his hyper-empathy, he got easily depressed by sad stories, which was why he usually avoided the news like the plague.
People who pushed for genetic testing for autism with eugenic goals; people who would rather have their children die of preventable diseases than—even though the theory had been thoroughly debunked—possibly “develop” autism from vaccines. “People who think we lack some—some fundamental humanity—”
Being autistic didn’t make him a monster, but other people’s treatment of him made him feel like one. Ableism was death by a thousand cuts, the constant, relentless erosion of his self-esteem and sense of self-worth. And the subtle things were the most hurtful of all—the unconscious biases, the daily rejections by other people for being just not normal enough.
