“When I confessed that I was scared I’d be the weird kid, they cracked up. ‘No, you’re not the weird kid,’ they all told me. ‘I’m the weird kid.’ One swore that he spent his childhood wearing a cape. Another said he used to carry a dictionary around for reading — and personal protection.
”Peopling is hard. Peopling with strangers is harder. When you’re neurodivergent, every social situation can feel like a slow-moving catastrophe of missed cues and faux pas. As my husband and I stepped into the hotel for the Horror Writers Association’s annual StokerCon gathering, disaster seemed to loom. I faced three days of intense peopling. Surely, I would screw it up somehow.
The head of the Horror Writers Association, John Edward Lawson, understands this all too well. “As a person with CPTSD, severe depression, and, who is also a parent of someone on the autism spectrum, I am intimately familiar with the challenges faced when navigating a society engineered against your needs,” he says.
I hadn’t expected shouting, which is usually my first impulse and usually ends with a side-eye and a dismissal of over-enthusiasm. But StokerCon went farther than simply tolerating our social quirks. The HWA planned carefully to accommodate its neurodiverse members. Though we had panels all day, people were vocal about becoming burnt out with too much peopling; they took breaks, and no one felt ashamed about it.
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