I expected to miss the classroom when I retired. I expected to miss the rhythm of September, the smell of new textbooks, the particular chaos of 28 teenagers discovering The Great Gatsby for the first time. What I did not expect was to sit down one Tuesday morning with my tea and realize that a very large number of people I had genuinely liked... had quietly disappeared from my life.
Leyton's mother stated, 'None of the boys in that school accepted him. They told him they would never accept him for the way he spoke. He was a sassy speaker, more feminine - not the 'hard boy' type. This wasn't going on for just a little while.'
Developmental disabilities are actually quite common. In the United States, about 1 in 6 children has a developmental disability (CDC, 2024). Intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) are a group of neurodevelopmental conditions usually present at birth that affect the trajectory of a person's physical, intellectual, and/or emotional development (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2021). Conditions such as Down Syndrome, Autism, Fragile X, Cerebral Palsy, and others are examples of intellectual or developmental disabilities.
Fandom is first and foremost a community. It has a shared lexicon that includes in-jokes and rapidly evolving language that would be difficult to keep up with from the outside. Like any community, it has norms and values and standards of behavior. Fandom is also a marginalized community.
People say it takes a village to do difficult things: raise a child, sustain a community, build a barn. But we don't often talk a lot about what it takes to be a villager. What does it mean to not just be in a community, but to help create one? Priya Parker, author of The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters, says the key is to put yourself out there, even if it's scary.
If you're someone who rejoices at self-serve checkouts, automated banking, or online shopping-and I'll admit, I tick two out of three of these boxes-have you ever stopped to think about how taxing these shifts might be on the incidental social interactions we have with others? Recently, while reading Why Brains Need Friends: The Neuroscience of Social Connection-And Why We All Need More, I realised just how much these incidental social opportunities are diminishing.
