I’m starting to think the path of least resistance and the road to hell are the same thing. With what is going on in Palestine and my own country’s various issues, the vast majority of which stem from white supremacist ideology, I’m happily putting a stake through the heart of my palatability.

I’ve never been a people pleaser. To be a people pleaser, you have to actually please people, and when you were born weird and slightly arrogant, that doesn’t come easily. Typically, people pleasers will blend in with whomever they’re around, letting go of their edges and corners until they’re palatable. At this point in my life, I’ve decided to grow out my points.

At 32, I’m tired of making myself smaller to make other people comfortable. I got a taste of this in college as the student who always raised their hand and received dirty looks and snide remarks from my classmates. Frankly, I didn’t care. The eye-rollers were assholes, so I ignored them. Unfortunately, going to a very neurotypical-staffed grad program and then an abysmal job market eroded my “I don’t give a shit about other people’s opinions of me” attitude. Pretending I was normal (or masking, as we say in the neurodivergent world) sucks. It’s soul-sucking and wrong to the point that I burnt myself out playing normal. When I finally gave up and told my students that I’m autistic and queer and acted more myself, I ended up having a much better relationship with them. A weight had been lifted, and there was no going back if I could help it.

On the writing front, I’ve been far less willing to blend. I saw a post back in October where a new author was worrying that their audience might not align with their political views, so they decided to just not say anything. The knee-jerk reaction I had to the cowardice dripping from the post made me set my phone down. My first thought was, “Oof, I guess you’re white, cis, straight, and Christian.” Only someone whose identity aligns with the political “norm” would have such a shitty take. I used to be upset when I received homophobic reviews on my first few books. At this point, I smear so much queerness and neurodivergence across my books and online posts that someone would have to purposely ignore it to not see it. If you’re conservative and reading my books, you’re probably hate-reading, and I still have your money in my pocket, so *shrug* go ahead and leave a review that lures in queer readers.

Art is political. What we do or don’t include, who we do or don’t portray and how all gives a glimpse into our politics. If you want to sanitize your work to make it palatable for everyone, there is no chance that you’re creating anything worthwhile. Is it worth it to hack off your edges to make a few more bucks?

While I may not be immediately clocked as queer or nonbinary in the wild, I still stick out as a mask-wearer. I’m immunosuppressed, but even if I wasn’t, the science says we should avoid the plague at all costs if we want to maintain our and our loved one’s health. Masking is community care, and if you’re someone who feels strongly about racial equality or disability justice, you should be masking. You can’t be an ally to communities of color and not mask when they are more likely to have worse outcomes than white people. I don’t care if it’s weird or people think it’s over the top. It’s no skin off my nose to put a mask on when I’m at work or the store. It’s the least I can do.

I’d like it if everyone could take a look at themselves and figure out what parts of themselves they’ve been sanding off to make themselves more palatable and why. Obviously, if you’re in an unsafe situation, you should do what you have to in order to preserve your life/sanity, but for those of us able to step out of line or march to our own beat, we should stop trying to be palatable.

Being palatable is blending in, being palatable means not making waves, being palatable allows genocides to unfold, whether they be of queer people, Palestinian people, disabled people, and I’m not about that life.