ok so... hello. my name's klavier. i'm autistic, and day6 has been my special interest for about 6 months. if it's ok, i want to tell you about how this whole experience has been for me.

you are free to reply/reblog this thread, but don't qrt unless you're neurodivergent.

first, i want to share the irony of this whole thing: when it was all going down, i couldn't understand what he said wrong. his tweet about sarcasm - he called it a language? sarcasm isn't a language. so i assumed i'd misunderstood the tweet and ignored it.

when he responded to someone and said he was nd, i just got excited! bc jae is neurodivergent like me! i couldn't read the tone of his reply - that the person he was replying to was criticising him, that he was responding angrily. missed that. went over my head. bc i'm autistic.

so you can imagine how confused and terrified i was when suddenly everyone was furious at him. when he made the tweet about cancel trains i thought he was talking about the jyp thing from the other day at first, and then people were calling him ableist and i didn't know why.

once i'd figured out the full story, here was what i was upset about:
1. that he'd doubled down when people called him out, which made me feel like he didn't care about ppl like me.
2. that people were talking about unstanning/going ot4. that terrified me.

day6 is my special interest! i can't turn that off! if jae was going to be cancelled and people who listened to him branded ableist, was i going to be ableist for liking him still? was i a bad autistic person for not wanting to drop him immediately? for empathising with him?

i was scared to go on twitter because i react extremely emotionally to people criticising my interests. and the entire tl was criticising my interests.

i was upset at him but i was also - still am - upset at how aggressively some non-nd people came for him.

you are allowed to educate. you're allowed to be irritated or frustrated at him. but the people who were hurling abuse at him who weren't even nd themselves? that made me feel like you were using me and my struggles to attack something i care about. fuck you for that.

i decided to "accept" jae's twitter apology because it signalled that i could start to talk about jae again. not talking about my special interest was HARD. truthfully i was still hurt, the apology didn't feel like enough.

the truth is being nd on stan twitter sucks sometimes. there are times i need tone indicators and times they feel patronising. sometimes i have to do the internet equivalent of smiling and nodding because i'm too embarrassed to explain i don't get the joke/not sure it's a joke.

sometimes being nd in real life sucks, too. particularly at my job, which i got by disclosing my diagnosis and then reassuring them i wouldn't need any special accommodations besides being allowed to work part time.

so while this whole experience has been awful and stressful, i'm hopeful there'll be some good from it. people are examining their own ableism. i got to hear my kpop boy tell his audience of thousands about my daily lived experience and acknowledge my struggle. (yes, i cried.)

i need him to prove through his actions he means it now. and i need stan twitter to prove they actually care about neurodivergent people and not just about getting to cancel someone for being ableist.

thank you to the moots who were kind and understanding and let me rant in their inboxes and on priv. thanks to the people i saw leaving kind but firm comments under jae's tweets educating him - it wasn't something i felt safe enough to do myself.

i hope we all learn from this.