There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from being told you need to be more flexible by someone who has never once had to negotiate their own existence with their nervous system.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. About the word itself. Flexible. How cheerfully it gets thrown around. How it’s always aimed at the person who is already bending.
For most of my life, I understood flexibility as something I owed the world. Owed workplaces, owed social situations, owed people who found my needs inconvenient. I could be spontaneous if I tried hard enough. I could handle last-minute changes if I just loosened up. I could push through, adapt, recover faster. Flexibility was something neurotypical people had in abundance and I needed to somehow manufacture more of it, even though my reserves were always running low.
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