When oppressed people fail to recognize that we are targeted on a systematic level, and instead only understand our lives and the choices we make thr… - Devon Price

Quite frequently, the traits that inconvenience or weird out neurotypical people are the very same ones that define who we are and help keep us safe. When we stop taking an outsider's perspective of our own disability and instead center our own perspectives and needs, this becomes clear. It's not actually a bad thing that we are spirited, loud, intense, principled, or strange. These traits are merely inconvenient to systems designed by abled people that don't take our unique way of being into account. But the more we work to normalize our neurotype, and the more we loudly, proudly take ownership of our Autistic identities, the more institutions will be forced to change to accommodate us and others who have been repeatedly shut out.

Masking is a state of exclusion forced onto us from the outside...We only get the opportunity to take our masks off when we realize other ways of being exist.

[For] most autistic people, we get the message from a really young age that we need to tone it down – that it's weird to be too excited and too enlivened by the things that we care about, which is so sad (2022)