My Best Blog Posts Of 2023
This time last December, I wrote up my picks for my top ten blog posts here for the year ending. I’d written 75 posts that year. I’ve written 322 this year—more than I can process into another “top ten”. However, I did some browsing and have come up with what I consider my two best posts of 2023, followed by another twenty-five favorites in chronological order.
The top two
-
“What Is It Like To Be A Goat?”—My paean to the first of The Belmont Goats to die, just barely into the second month of the herd’s tenth anniversary, this is one of the best things I’ve written ever.
-
“The Australian Teen Drama That Saw Me”—On the recommendation of a podcast by and for autistics, I watched a series for which I’m definitely not the target market, and found myself in it.
The other twenty-five
-
“On Autistic Time”—Using an account of the “psychotic experience of time” to think about how I need narrative to keep from getting lost in a database.
-
“Toward Robust Defaults”—In which I reconceive autistic routines and habits as something more fundamental than how routines and habits are normatively used.
-
“The Actual, Underlying Autistic Disorder”—Another installment of me arguing that our autistic “deficits” actually are how we navigate the true impairment.
-
“I’m Here, And So Are You”—Looking backward as part of my continuing rediscovery of what it means to blog.
-
“The Continuous Bombardment And Repertoires Of Repair”—A lost post about autism, anxiety, and what “normal” people get to ignore.
-
“Lashed By The Bootstrap”—I talk about not being considered disabled despite being disabled, in part because of one of our social myths.
-
“Toward A Social-Relational Model Of Burnout?”—Not for the first time, I get grumpy about how burnout is discussed, as someone with the autistic variety.
-
“My Unified Field Theory Of Shutdown And Meltdown”—On the heels of watching Heartbreak High, I lay out my view of how the autistic concepts of overwhelm, overload, shutdown, and meltdown interrelate.
-
“I Trace Erratic Lines”—For the first time, I think, I detail the origins of the superhero I invented as a child, inspired by a mix of science and prog rock.
-
“The Price Of Being Surplus”—Neither for the first nor the last time, I get a bit cranky about the real but hidden costs of both disability and capitalism.
-
“‘Normalize Being Whole Persons’”—Inspired by another blogger, the start of my ongoing obsession with the idea of whole-personhood onine.
-
“Turns Out That ‘Inception’ Was What I Said It Was”—This is a cheap inclusion, but it’s important to me that I got to gloat more than a decade later that I’d been right all along.
-
“A Northern Remembrance”—The full story of how I came to describe a late, lamented Toronto band as having given me a metaphorical aneurysm.
-
“Unmapping The DSM To Remap Autism”—Part of my continuing suggestion that the pathologies of autism in fact are the things that hlep us cope with the actual pathology of autism.
-
“Sensorium Dysphoria And The Monotropic Tendency”—My full argument that autism is a sensory processing issue and that we mitigate it using strategies the DSM mistakenly pathologizes.
-
“The Commentary ‘The Oregonian’ Doesn’t Want You To Read”—The 600-word distillation of the latest round in my attempts to get disability benefits.
-
“The Mediocrity Of Whole-Personhood”—Continuing to develop the idea of being whole persons, through reclaiming the idea and identity of mediocrity.
-
“Wanton Disregard”—Every year, I seem to have at least one takedown post, and here I challenge a blogger’s views on “weaponizing empathy”.
-
“It’s Okay To Want To Remain An Ensign”—My love for Star Trek can’t keep me from wishing that it made room for a reclaimed mediocrity, even in Starfleet itself.
-
“Autism Research Might Be Missing The Forest For The RRBs”—Still more from me on the idea that we’ve managed to get the pathology of being autistic entirely wrong.
-
“When Autism Research Hides Camouflaging Behind The Mask Of Functioning”—Yet another installment of, “What the hell is going on in the world of autism research, anyway?”
-
“The Sexual Agnostic”—Having already come out as aromantic, I look at how aphantasia might play into my also being pretty agnostic on the idea of sex.
-
“Whither Adjustment?”—My look at the diagnostic language gap which exists because the DSM diagnosis only individuals and not the society in which they live.
-
“My Mediocre Midlife”—Wedged between my birthday and New Year’s depressions, I look at my life in its middle and how dark the future is likely to be.
-
“The Great Empathy Engine”—Riffing on another blogger’s phrase, I run with the idea of what blogging truly should be, if we do the work to let it.
As suggested above, I’ve two times each year I know in advance simply are doing to be “down” times: my birthday in October, when I started yer another exhausting trip around the sun, and New Year’s Day, the artificial line that for me always denotes having to brace for impact, because things always can get worse.
Much like last year, then, these two lists mainly serve as a kind of “I was here” and “I did this” and is as much a reminder to myself as to anyone else. However difficult things are, and threaten to continue to be, I existed in the world and I wrote my way through doing so. That’s the plan in front of me, too.
Finally, rather than wait until tomorrow to throw the switch on turn on comments, pings, and webmentions, as of this post that switch is thrown. As always, I reserve the right to reverse this decision at any given moment.
You can see the rules. They are the same ones I’ve used for years because of this: No fear, no hate, no thoughtless bullshit, and no nazis.