What is care to you? What are your care lineages? What were you taught about care growing up? What roles did you play? What kind of roles do you fall into when you give or receive care now? What do you need in order to receive care well? To give care well? What new skills do you want to learn around giving/receiving care? What do you want to

Autistic long-form overlaps with another maligned form, sometimes known as “infodumping.”

If you can’t sue because you don’t have papers or money, you’re shit out of luck if the law is the only way to get what you want.

Here’s what I’ve come up with, a list of some distinct disabled qualities I witness showing up in crip mutual aid work:

In the end, of fucking course, I Zoomed in because another disabled person flew to the conference with a projector in their backpack, other disabled people of course knew how to do Zoom and made sure it happened—but all the normals eyed us aghast, like we were doing some kind of obscure ritual. Four months later, I was laugh-crying in crip bitter

“The Risks: Know Them, Avoid Them,”34 a crucial piece of early popular research by epidemiologist Erin Bronage about aerosol transmission)

Where is your disabled existence/experience at right now? What’s new? What are you learning, amazed by? What is kicking your ass? What are you bored by?

In writing this book, even after Care Work’s unexpected success, I wanted to stay in that disabled space of not knowing what the hell I’m doing, but just … doing it. I wanted to stay in a disabled writing space of messiness, uncertainty, and not being an expert. Who the hell am I anyway? Not the one voice, not an academic, not an expert. Just a

This could just be sad, and it is—the corporate ableist refusal to let access stay. But it’s also a remembrance: nothing has to be the way it is. Access is created, it gets taken away/destroyed, but it can be created again.