IT’S NOT OFTEN THAT I FEEL SEEN BY BRIAN TYRRELL Brian is a queer and disabled illustrator, writer, and all round creator based in Edinburgh. He runs your favourite local indie publishing imprint, Dungeons on a Dime (doad.co.uk), and you can find his games around the world in all good bookstores.
The conversations I see about folk like me love to revel in the negative: trauma from my childhood, the loss of vital spaces that I need to thrive in society, and a government that repeatedly proves it doesn’t care about me. Mainstream media likes to pity me rather than see me as a real person. They only condescend to focus on stories like mine when they can be commercialised. Talking about being autistic is difficult. I have to decipher my own thoughts about it, skimming the murky waters of shame, anxiety and rage to try and find what I think I believe to be true. There’s no ‘Autism 101’ class in high school. My parents, my colleagues, even other neurodivergent friends are still struggling to find the language to talk about it all. If this feels familiar, it’s because it is. Marginalised communities experience many different, often incomparable problems. However, one common root is an inability to talk about them, and be heard when we do. The spaces where this language would normally sprout and find usage are hard to find and harder to access. What’s worse, when we do create the words we need, they’re often appropriated out of context, and commodified.
Community through Storytelling Since we first had campfires, humans have been telling stories. Communities love to tell stories—they fascinate us. We raise them up as examples (to strive towards or to rally against). We tell them to preserve our history, and to share our skills. Stories can teach us a great deal about what was important to the community that wrote them (or acted, or sang, or filmed them). They help us comprehend things we didn’t think were possible. Lightning and fire, castles in the sky, tablets on spaceships, being reborn into a new body. These things weren’t possible, but then we started telling stories where they were, and they were so inspiring that we had to make them real.
Time and Place When you tell your own story in front of a huge audience, you can feel compelled to redact the messy details. It’s not the same as having a natter in your kitchen with the kettle on when there’s the cold shadow of judgement leering over you. Masking and code-switching are essential; they keep you safe. But they’re also exhausting. So, when
