Have you ever been made to feel like the bad guy? Dr. bird has too. In this brief memoir, they reveal secrets about their life that they have kept hidden for over thirty years regarding compulsory heterosexuality, repressed/unexplored queernesses, and the late in life realization that -- turns out -- they're #actuallyautistic! Retold from their 33-year-old Dr. bird’s eye view, these extensively brave disclosures add one whole lifetime of flesh onto the U.S. body politic. This timely manuscript illuminates, historicizes, and contextualizes the f***ing fact that autism is not “just a trend” taking off just on TikTok recently, but that there are massive neuroqueer self-realizations happening worldwide in the algorithmic envirusment (environment + virus = envirusment). Dr. bird’s unmasked writing voice puts the “cut-the-shit” into “slice-of-life,” providing deep and raw disclosures of lifelong confusion, gaslighting, and struggles with family dysfunction, friendship loss, vulnerability, intimacy, sexual violence, and substance abuse. After extensive sharing, it’s time to grieve. They usher in a eulogy for their lifetimes that once were, by diagnosing how foundational U.S. ideas did and continue to dehumanize, sicken, disable, and deaden us. Then, they preach to the global choir about the single most connected time in history. Dr. bird has a lot more puns and trauma than answers, but in the end, recommends some liberatory antibodies for moving forward, far less miserably.
