The first issue of our zine!

Contributors: Noam Audrid, WeHadABondingMoment, Char, turiya km, mk zariel, Anonymous

 

Poster Child

Noun - /ˈpoʊ.stɚ ˌtʃaɪld/

 

a person or thing that is seen as a typical example of something

a child with a particular illness or disability whose picture is on posters to raise money to help children who have the same illness or disability (Cambridge Dictionary)

 

Perhaps this does not sound so bad - neurodivergent people serving as an emblem for neurodiversity advocacy. However, the broader cultural context behind the precise meaning of a poster child gives meaning beyond what Cambridge Dictionary tells us. I am a firm believer that semantics should never be the focus of arguments - after all words are just capsules for meaning. That doesn’t mean words aren’t important and don’t affect people, but if you truly want to understand a person, understand their culture first.

 

The cultural narrative of a poster child is one that dehumanizes and rips the power of a minority group away from it, and places it in the hands of, at best - well meaning allies - and at worst, people who will use our struggles for their own societal advancement. Our modern society has many performative aspects to advocacy and acknowledgement of minority groups. That doesn’t mean advocacy is fundamentally insincere, but institutions that perpetuate rainbow capitalism and the like are the kind of thing I am talking about.

 

This is not something that can happen. When the struggles and humanization of a minority group because governed by convenience for privileged people’s agendas, we fade away and suddenly we are seen as nothing but that blonde-haired, blue and teary-eyed young cis boy asking you for a donation while his mother talks about how she “loves her son but hates his autism.”

 

Our experience is something to reclaim. We shouldn’t have to reclaim it - it should have been ours from the start, but unfortunately we have always been the one the extra work falls to.

 

Young people have always occupied a cultural frontier, which is why it is so vital we make our voices heard. We’re much more than just “special” children. 

 

Similarly, art serves an important function in human society. It bridges the gap between emotion, creativity, and fills voids that typical verbal communication can never occupy.

 

So what is NYAC and what is this zine? This is the first zine published by NYAC (Neurodivergent Young Artists’ Collective.) When I created NYAC, my goal was to display the experience of young neurodivergent people in a self-defined manner through creative mediums.

 

We’re not relying on the DSM. This means no more "3 levels of autism." No more "autism is a linear spectrum" and not even "autism can be described with a radial diagram." I'm talking about synaesthetic expressions of neurodivergence, three-dimensional models of interwoven traits, abstract representations of the neurodivergent experience, anything that conveys who and what we are through our own existence.

 

This project is a quest to describe neurodivergence as completely self-defined. To exist outside of relativism and spread our perspective not through formulizations of deficits and strengths relative to neurotypicals, but through our pure unfiltered experience of the world.

 

This project’s aim is an abounding compilation of the joys of the neurodivergent experience and the depths that we can sink to when not allowed to exist as our undiluted selves.

 

This means intersectionality, melting the borders between one neurotype and all the other discrete categories of neurotype, and weaving together a story of authenticity informed by the struggles of other minority groups.

 

Our first anthology zine, “Not Your Poster Child” is an expression of precisely that. In it you will find unconventional expressions of young neurodivergent joy and pain, love and loss, anger at the system, and community and self-exploration.

 

Who are we? We are a community of autistic freaks and lifelong procrastinators, tortured poets and kooky artists, queer rebels and hand-flappers. We build more than model trains. We hyperfixate and infodump about our special interests. We screech in joy and we scream from pain into the void hoping anyone will hear us. 

 

Some of us curl up in a ball in response to sensory stimuli, and some of us seek it out in a quest-like fashion. We think in words, we think in pictures. We think too much and sometimes we don’t think at all. We’re composed of mentally ill teenagers, struggling intellectuals, and trans anarchists. 

 

We’re language nerds, and history nerds, and art nerds, and theater nerds - sci-fi and fantasy nerds, and science nerds; music nerds, math nerds, psychology nerds, philosophy nerds. We’re the burnt out gifted kids and we’re the kids who got tired of a neurotypical mask plastered onto our faces and clawed it off until our fingers bled (metaphorically) and we are also the kids that still live in a bubble, too scared to escape it. Some of us don’t know what we’re doing with our lives and some of us know exactly. 

 

We will reject your fallacy of “you’re just kids - you won’t change the world.” If we help just one neurodivergent person feel accepted and understood, we will have fulfilled our mission. Change takes time. Change requires small and large acts of resistance alike. Shining with the light of a trillion neurodivergent photons in this one zine can be a start.

 

To neurotypicals reading this, you might think you know us, but you probably don’t. It is our hope that this zine will provide a glimpse into our view of the world. Do not infantilize us, or dehumanize us - seek to understand us. We are not your poster child.

 

Noam Audrid