I can't really do mindful eating

• As I eat a bowl of oatmeal, chewing the kernels and getting it down to my stomach as fast as possible. My history has taught me if I take time to savor and let my stomach realize food is coming, I’m not gonna be able to get most of the meal into me.
• I distract myself with a show or water play or nature being silly. Watching paint dry is the prototypical boring activity, yet when one is fascinated by fluid dynamics and the chemistry behind physical processes, it can be as engaging as the most well constructed story.
• If this sounds confusing to you, you may not be autistic.
• Our brains are infinitely varied thanks to the way they develop combined with the biology it inherits. Every sense we experience is experienced on a vast spectrum, most often portrayed as a bell curve.
• That bell curve indicates how that trait manifests in our species and we often make the center area what society considers normal. Really, that center area is just the average, but every point on the chart is normal because it represents a human and their unique brain.
• Conflating average for normal has caused a lot of pain throughout history. I hear arguments about society not being able to support everyone, yet when we go back to how our species developed, it seems the effort we made at including everyone was more successful because that group had more knowledge resources to call on.
• I started this piece because I react strongly when I hear advice from people around food and eating without taking into account the wide variety of bodies, which include our brains, that interact with these reactions.
• Food can be many things. In order to consume enough to function on a day-to-day basis I need to consider it an energy source that I just need to get into my system. I have times I get to enjoy food for flavor or experience, there are times I’ve savored a dish knowing how much care was taken in preparing it or tasting memories from the flavors; that doesn’t mean every meal needs to be so intense.
• The interactions each person has with this world needs to be considered and respected. The more we learn about our species and genetics and such, the more we realize that the mutations that arise from different lines interacting are key to our species adapting to the environment we live in. This evolutionary process isn’t ending and so anyone trying to limit the amount of variety we have in our genetic pool, like those trying to cure people like me with an autistic body, the brain being a part of the body, are harming not just us but all of humanity.