A white skull with colorful lights and lines coming out of the mouth and the sawed off top. A safety pin spans an empty eye socket and an empty nose socket. Over the other eye is an infinity symbol held on as a dermal piercing. The infinity symbol is connected via chain to a nose piercing.

Practicing Our Art Makes Our Souls Grow

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We practice constructionism and actively engage in constructing things in the world.

constructionism = a theory that people build knowledge most effectively when they are actively engaged in constructing things in the world.

Our website is a continuous act of constructionism that includes music, lyrics, prose, poetry, photos, art, and craft from our community. With our art, we address ableismeugenics, exclusion, mental health, depression, dysphoria, behaviorism, abuse, chronic painchronic illnesstrauma, and death.

Our website is an outpouring of neurodivergent and disabled perspective, culture, and joy.

Made with agony and joy, this is our story of surviving, reframing, and finding like-minded misfits.

Header art: “Necroneuropunk” by Betsy Selvam is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0

A white skull with colorful lights and lines coming out of the mouth and the sawed off top. A safety pin spans an empty eye socket and an empty nose socket. Over the other eye is an infinity symbol held on as a dermal piercing. The infinity symbol is connected via chain to a nose piercing.
Necroneuropunk

Activists in the early campaign for AIDS awareness created a powerful slogan: “Silence=Death.” Silence about trauma also leads to death—the death of the soul.

van der Kolk, Bessel . The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (p. 234). Penguin Publishing Group.

Stimpunks rejects the good cripple mythos. We’re here for “the bitter cripple, the uninspirational cripple, the smoking cripple, the drinking cripple, the addict cripple, the cripple who hasn’t ‘tried everything’”.

Some people with disabilities call themselves “crips.” “Crip” used to be a mean word for disabled. It is short for “cripple.” But some disabled people call themselves “crips” on purpose. The word “crip” belongs to disabled people now.

Disability Visibility anthology (Plain language summary) – Disability Visibility Project

More art: “Sphere of Humanity: A Traverse Gift of Energetic Connectedness” by Heike Blakley is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

A blue humanoid with rainbow highlights holds a floating sphere in cupped hands.
Sphere of Humanity: A Traverse Gift of Energetic Connectedness

“The Sphere of Humanity” is a symbol of our community of neurodivergent and disabled people. It speaks both to our alienation due to our differences and to the fundamental and beautiful interdependence of all earthlings.

It is time to celebrate our interdependence!

Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. –Kurt Vonnegut

The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.

Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country