#autisticwriters — Public Fediverse posts

The Fediverse Is A Countercultural Garden

https://www.yourautisticlife.com/2026/07/26/the-fediverse-is-a-countercultural-garden/

Five Years In Remission

I entered remission five years ago on February 11th 2021.

It’s been a wild ride, to say the least.

Ultimately, everybody’s journey through cancer is their own. If you’re a cancer survivor too, your journey is not my journey, and my journey is not your journey, no matter how similar they may be. Some people never make it through. A sobering thought.

A cancer diagnosis is often a gut punch, but my diagnosis came as a relief to me. Prior to it, I had been slowly dying for months, but I did not know why or have a plan to deal with this slow death. My PCNS lymphoma diagnosis not only told me why I was dying, but it provided me with a plan: first chemo and then a stem cell transplant.

So I underwent treatment. After two rounds of chemo, the tumor was gone from my brain. After five rounds, I was declared to be in remission. Its now been five years since I entered remission, and my latest MRI, done in January of this year, indicates that my brain is still free from cancer. If I had gotten this disease 35 years ago, I would not have been so lucky. I would have died, pure and simple. Medicine has advanced.

After the chemo, I had a stem cell transplant. They extracted stem cells from my body, kept them in storage, destroyed my immune system, and finally they reinjected my stem cells so that I could rebuild my immune system. My entire treatment happened at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, and yet, I never caught this disease.

It’s been a wild ride, I tell you!

My cancer was not the cause of my divorce, but it was a catalyst. My ex-wife and I had already been seeing a marriage counselor a good two years before my cancer showed up. After my treatment, I just did not see myself enduring through this marriage if nothing changed. I tried to change things, but it was in vain. So my ex-wife and I divorced. It is not what I would have wanted, but it was the way forward.

As we were discussing the divorce, I figured that there was no longer any reason for me to hide from the world the fact that I’m not straight, but pansexual. I knew since my teenage years that I wasn’t straight, and even told my wife before we got married that I was bisexual. That’s the only term that I knew at the time, but I prefer to call myself pansexual. Gender or its absence is just no obstacle when it comes to my desire to get intimate with someone else.

Besides being pansexual, I’m also polyamorous. Provided that I’m kept aware of my partners’ intimate encounters with other people, I don’t get jealous if they have those encounters. What gets to me is if I feel neglect. I suppose I might also get angry if a partner of mine hid their encounters with someone else, but this, to my knowledge, has not happened.

I also discovered BDSM, and that I am a Dom. I was always generous in bed, but BDSM allows me to optimize this generosity.

Then I realized that I’m autistic. The signs were present from infancy, but everybody treated me as neurotypical, so I thought that I was neurotypical. My ex-wife has ADHD, but we never discussed neurodivergence in our household. We both imagined that the other perceived the world in the same way we did. This is woefully incorrect, but we didn’t know any better.

I also realized that I’m nonbinary. The surest way to generate dysphoria in me is to insist that I should behave or not behave this or that way because I’m “a man.” At best, I’ll find the idea amusing. At worst, it will generate anger. At any rate, in retrospect, this is another element that caused friction between my ex-wife and me. She thought she had married “a man,” but she did not.

If my cancer had not happened, how much of this self-realization would have happened? I’m not sure. I was pretending to be a neurotypical man in a straight, monogamous, vanilla marriage. I think I could have gone on pretending for more years.

It’s been a wild ride, and I don’t think the ride is over just yet.

Yvonne Rorrer Declares Herself Ethically Non-Monogamous

Good for her, and for those of us who are also into ethical non-monogamy.

I have never heard of Yvonne Rorrer until Stephen Colbert talked about her on The Late Show last night. I know she is a Democrat, but I don’t know more about her political positions. At any rate, it is a good thing that she declared herself ethically non-monogamous in a statement. I’m not saying that she came out because I got from a Huffington Post article that she was already out.

Colbert talked about her as a swinger. Mainstream media often does such a piss-poor job at reporting about things they do not understand that I was wondering whether swinger was her expression, or whether the journalists jumped the gun, and assumed. The Huffington Post article I link to above confirms it is her expression.

Ethical non-monogamy is a large umbrella term. Swinging falls under this umbrella, and so does polyamory. (I am polyamorous.) In all cases, of ethical non-monogamy, the assumption is that everyone involved knows what is going on. Ethically non-monogamous people do not hide one relationship from another.

One thing irritated me in Colbert’s talk about Rorrer. It came across to me as mononormative. Colbert said,

She might be one of those people who thinks everybody wants to hear about their thing.

😩 Why did he need to go there? Why?

Colbert, like the majority of our population, monogamous, and straight. People will assume, correctly, those two characteristics about him. When people run into someone like me, or like Rorrer, they make the same assumptions, and they are wrong. We are both ethically non-monogamous. I am because I’m polyamorous. Rorrer is because she is a swinger. I’m moreover not straight, because I’m pansexual. I don’t know about Rorrer’s sexual orientation.

We do not talk about our ethical non-monogamy because we think that everybody wants to hear about it. We talk about it to normalize it, and because some people will benefit from it. In a world where monogamous people are in the majority, we who are ethically non-monogamous are assumed to be monogamous too. That is, until we tell people otherwise.

I’m open, too, about all kinds of things. I cannot count the number of times when, after being open about being pansexual, polyamorous, or autistic, I had a nice chat with someone else who was in a similar situation. This discussion would not have happened if I had not been open about my identity.

Please do not assume that when someone is in a minority group that, when they are being open about their identity, their intent is to shove their business into your face.

#AutisticWriters #EthicalNonMonogamy #polyamory #SexualMinorities #StephenColbert #swinging #TheLateShow #YourAutisticLife #YvonneRorrer

I was dumped yesterday. I wish I had used Flushed, and used their predumping feature.

:holdthepain:

#AutisticWriters #dating #Flushed #dumped #predumping #comedy

https://youtu.be/_iYJId8ENjk

The Conservatives Justices Part of SCOTUS are Sophomoric Idiots

Yep, we’re fucked.

I chose my words carefully with that title. Their “reasoning” for the decision granting absolute powers to presidents is equivalent to the work of a confused college sophomore. I knew right away that this decision couldn’t be good for us, but I decided to hold my tongue for a while.

I have now listened to the Serious Trouble podcast, by defense attorney Ken White:

https://www.serioustrouble.show/p/donald-trump-wins-the-immunity-idol

And to LegalEagle’s take on the matter:

https://youtu.be/MXQ43yyJvgs?si=5UFYjvQlvXlPnHwt

We’re fucked indeed.

I invite you to listen to both. I knew the decision was a bad one, but I had no grasped just how sophomoric it is. So sophomoric that I now have no qualms saying that the conservative majority is in the pocket of the GOP and Trump. There is no other plausible explanation for such a turd of an opinion.

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These so-called “textualists” are in fact cherry-pickers. They assert that the Constitution does not say anything about presidential immunity. This is true, on its face, but also misleading. The framers of the constitutions did bestow immunity explicitly elsewhere in the Speech or Debate Clause of the constitution. If they remained silent about the president, that’s because they did not want to give the president immunity.

This is textual analysis 101. To insist otherwise is to ignore the very text of the Constitution and intellectually dishonest. I’ve done textual analysis as part of my master’s and my Ph.D. This type of shitty logic would not be tolerated there, but it is tolerated among the conservative justices, because it is a means to an end.

The court’s decision is utterly vague about how the lower courts should interpret any of it. If I were a lower court judge, I’d play dumb with the lack of guidelines that SCOTUS has provided, and give a ruling that will most likely be appealed to SCOTUS. Let them deal with the bloody mess they created.

This is sophomoric.

#AutisticWriters #CherryPicking #idiots #SCOTUS #sophomoric #textualism #USLaw #YourAutisticLife

https://www.yourautisticlife.com/2024/07/05/the-conservatives-justices-part-of-scotus-are-sophomoric-idiots/