Riz on AuDHD, hEDS, and the Radical Art of Interdependence

Take care of yourself. CW: colonial boarding-school legacy, anti-Blackness, assimilation, ableism, medical gatekeeping, chronic pain, medical gaslighting, suicide, psychiatric incarceration, ableist abuse and harassment.

You can use the timestamps below with content warnings marked to skip potentially triggering content.

- Follow Riz https://linktr.ee/RCarthins

- Help Riz get their wheelchair accessible van! https://chuffed.org/project/rizwav

- Support the Queer! AuDHD! BIPOC! project at https://rewilding.cc/book

In this episode:

- 00:01:18: Meet Riz, an Afro-Indigenous, trans, Two-Spirit, radical yarn artist, wheelchair user, and mutual-aid organizer, who weaves fiber art into disability justice and collective care.

- 00:02:37: Learn how boarding school functioned as an assimilation machine for Indigenous and negatively-racialized kids like Riz. [CW: colonial boarding-school legacy, anti-Blackness, assimilation]

- 00:05:10: How perfectionism became a mask for Riz in elite, classist white institutions

- 00:08:00: How Riz got their college to pay for ADHD testing - and why their insurance later claimed they couldn’t cover ADHD anymore. [CW: ableism, medical gatekeeping]

- 00:09:14: Discover how Riz’s ADHD diagnosis opened the door to understanding autism and why bullying didn’t always register as bullying.

- 00:13:10: Learn how the athletic excellence expected of Black students came at the expense of Riz’s pain and chronic illness. [CW: chronic pain, medical gaslighting]

- 00:16:20: How institutional “care” became PR management when a classmate in crisis was expelled to protect the school’s image. [CW: suicide]

- 00:19:40: How speaking to campus counselors led to Riz’s unexpected psychiatric incarceration and a forced gap year from college. [CW: psychiatric incarceration]

- 00:22:03: How Riz navigated ADHD medication shortages and the inequities of medical access for disabled folks.

- 00:25:00: How Riz’s time in Cameroon and Tanzania revealed that “lateness” is a colonial construct — and how it reshaped their understanding of urgency and presence.

- 00:28:16: Why accommodations aren’t always guaranteed in grad school, especially when you’re up against abusive professors [CW: ableist abuse and harassment]

- 00:32:41: Learn how joy, fiber-arts therapy, and community care sustain Riz.

Support the Queer! AuDHD! BIPOC! project at https://rewilding.cc/book

#autistic #actuallyautistic #adhd #audhd #queeraudhdbipoc #audhdbipoc #qtibipoc #bipoc #neurodivergence #neurodiversity