I just wrote my obituary. It was suggested to me recently that in order to choose a direction in life, it's often necessary to figure out where you want to end up. So I wrote my NYT obit. I thought you guys might want to read it, and I would find it interesting to read y'alls as well.
July 28, 2072
JayEll, author, media magnate, and autism advocate, died Thursday evening in her home. She was 93. She is survived by her husband, her children, and five grandchildren.
JL's media company, Aut Nation, Inc, began in the mid-teens as a handful of personal blogs, aggregators, and static resource pages that were mainly directed at parents whose children fell on the autism spectrum. Over the next two decades, she successfully launched three monthly e-zines in succession to serve the wider ASD community. AutFamily came first, marking a sea change in the way autism has been defined in the mainstream media. Indistinguishable on the surface from other successful, family-oriented magazines of the day like Family Fun, Parenting, and Kiwi, AutFamily set itself apart by tossing out the standard "ages and stages" curriculum and giving parents the tools and support they needed to meet their children at whatever level seemed appropriate, regardless of age.
AutLife, first published as a quarterly in 2020, was the first national publication produced by and for individuals on the spectrum, and by 2025 its masthead read like a who's who of autistic thinkers and advocates of the day. The emergence of AutTeen a few years later successfully bridged the gap between AutFamily and AutLife. Many of today's top aut-rights advocates first found their voices as young adults writing for AutTeen's regular guest features. "The opportunity to write about my experiences transitioning to college as a teen with Asperger's was life-changing for me," says Aspie Autberger, an early contributor to AutTeen. "And I know that my work helped hundreds of other young adults with their transitions, too -- I have a file cabinet full of letters to prove it."
JL also published several lesser-known works in the field of Labor History, focusing on the administration of the Department of Labor's Women's Bureau in the mid-twentieth century. Her interest in women who advocated for labor rights seems to have influenced her choices as an activist for autism awareness.
JL first became an advocate after her own children were both diagnosed with autism in the late Aughts. She realized when they were young that their diagnosis would not keep them from success, but that unless autism became more widely understood, they would find doors closed to them nonetheless. She described in a 2051 interview how she began AutFamily out of a feeling of frustration with the mainstream parenting media's preoccupation with achievement and the pathologization of alternative forms of intelligence. "Every magazine I picked up told me that my kids were broken," she said. "But when I looked at what they were capable of, what their friends with ASD were capable of, what adults with ASD were doing in the world, I didn't see anything wrong. What I saw was an intelligence that we should foster, not because it is better than the standard way of thinking, but because only when we combine the two perspectives can we truly learn to see the world in all three dimensions."
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Topic: Write your own obituary (Read 6287 times)