Melissa

“She's functioning - don't make that face, it's a perfectly appropriate medical term - she's functioning and I thought people might like to see that. She has it mild, Keedie. Like you."
"It's mild to you!" Keedie shouts and I flinch, not used to hearing her raise her voice. "It's mild to you and every other heartless soul in this village, Nina, it's not mild to me. It's not mild to Addie! It's mild to you because we make it so, at great personal cost!”
― Elle McNicoll, A Kind of Spark

“Despite what the words "attention deficit" imply, ADHD is not a deficit of attention, but rather a challenge of regulating it at will or on demand.”
― Jenara Nerenberg, Divergent Mind: Thriving in a World That Wasn't Designed for You

“One of the cruelest tricks our culture plays on autistic people is that it makes us strangers to ourselves. We grow up knowing we're different, but that difference is defined for us in terms of an absence of neurotypicality, not as the presence of another equally valid way of being.”
― Julia Bascom, Loud Hands: Autistic People, Speaking

“It's better to be open about who you really are, what you're really like, and be disliked by a few than it is to hide who you are and be tolerated by many.”
― Elle McNicoll, A Kind of Spark