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Reaching for nothing

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Hello my dear friends

My name is Hatem from the northern Gaza Strip

I support a family consisting of my young children and my mother

I am speaking to you today with pain squeezing my heart and sadness filling my heart for reaching this stage of misery and sadness ..

My house in the Shujaiya neighborhood in the northern Gaza Strip was completely destroyed, where my memories and the memories of my children were .. I fled as a displaced person to the southern Gaza Strip in Deir al-Balah in a miserable tent with my mother, children and wife ..

Hunger and deprivation have eaten away at my children and forced them to leave their school desks because of the war for the second year in a row

Our tent is miserable and needs to be renovated for the winter

I am turning to you asking for help and donations as much as you can to help me take care of our daily needs of food and medicine and to renovate our tent to protect us from the harsh winter cold ..

I also hope to collect enough money to be able to escape to Egypt as soon as the crossing opens

Despite my sadness and pain to ask for help, circumstances forced me to do so and all my hope is in you and everyone who sees my campaign to donate to me

I thank you from the heart

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My blorbos' phone probably has a plain-colored case full of stickers that have nothing to do with each other because the 3 of them have to share it, since they can't afford individual phones (they found the phone on the trash). The phone doesn't have much memory space because it's filled with pictures, mostly of one of them, but they have Instagram, a zen/cozy game/app (tea-time related maybe?) and an app for an "earn money" scheme. The screen is very broken, because they keep falling from high places and because they fight a lot over the phone and over other stuff, but the wallpaper is a selfie of the three of them because they love each other. The battery is very worn out, the charge doesn't last long and they don't have a place to charge, but the phone usually gets charged quite frequently by the command of a little boy they keep chasing, dreaming of stealing his pet hoping it will give them a better life.

i think we as a society need to use cell phones/laptops/cars/backpacks to flesh out characters

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I made a gen 5 style Friede.

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im about halfway through boards! wahoooo

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why he ate that

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I'm Kogan, an Explorer grunt in training. I usually do office work for them but sometimes I help in researches and theorization about Rakua and materials surrounding it.

Also, there's a whole segment of our group that is constantly failing because of a little girl and I'm here to gossip about it.

I've been wanting to make an explorer self-insert for a while.

Kogan comes from the Japanese word for tiger's eye.

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Tree roots following the pattern of concrete footpaths

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Autistic? Me?

1- Normal [2]

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Lilo & Stitch is a great example of a story that has no villains. It has antagonists, sure, but most of them are well-meaning. The worst person in the film is that little shit Myrtle, but she’s not in the film that much anyway.

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Dot's food character arc means A LOT to me. as someone on the autism spectrum who also struggles with ARFID, the fact that people accept her food struggles (including the social aspect of it) while also not giving up on helping her overcome them is just so good.

When Murdock got super happy because Dot ate something he did for the first time, I cried, literally. Many times I simply couldn't (and still can't sometimes) eat because of texture/flavor problem and when I get to eat something new my family is always cheerful. Many times the struggle made my family have to come up with strategies to make me eat something, like the secret donuts. I've never felt such a strong connection to any fictional character before.

Since today (as I'm writing this), is World Autism Awareness Day, I recommend reading this text, from Autism Self Advocacy Network about the basics of autism.

emotional about the dot food character arc

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I’m posting the ever-so-rare photo of myself alongside one of my characters based on my childhood because today is World Autism Acceptance Day, and I wanted to show my little corner of the internet who this particular autistic person is:  

I was officially diagnosed in February, at age 38 (I’m now 39). A lot of people thought I couldn’t be autistic.  Some people who know me in real life still don’t.  And until around 10 years ago, I didn’t think I could be either, because I was nothing like the stereotype media portrays. I was told that autistics lacked empathy (untrue), and never played make-believe (also often untrue) and only enjoyed STEM.  I was — and am — an empathetic artist -- and make believe?  I can spend days sketching finely bedecked bears brewing tea or carefully choosing the right words to weave tapestries of fiction — though perhaps my hyper focus was a bit of a red flag.  Even so, how could autism describe me?  I was a good student.  I got straight A's. I didn’t act out in class.  I can make eye contact…if I must.  And lots of girls hate having their hair brushed with an unholy passion, right?  Clearly I swim in sarcasm like a fish, so autism couldn't be why I was so anxious all the time, could it?

If someone had told me when I was younger what autism ACTUALLY is — instead of the nonsense I’d seen on screens — I would have seen myself in it.  I didn’t hear that autistics have sensory issues until I was in my mid-twenties, which is when I first began to really research autism symptoms, and I had almost all of them:  sensitivity to light, smells, fabrics, temperatures, textures, and certain touches, all of which make me feel anxious, I fidget (stim), I never know what the hell to do with my hands or where to look, I talk too little or too much, I have special interests, I have entire animated movies memorized shot-by-shot and can remember the first time and place I saw every movie I've ever seen but I often forget what I'm trying to say mid-sentence, I echo movies and tv shows (my husband and I have a whole repertoire of shared echolalias, making up about 20% of our conversations), I was in speech therapy as a kid, I have issues with dysnomia and verbal fluency, I toe-walk, I can't multitask to save my life, I like things just-so, I’m deeply introverted but not shy, I need to recover from all social interaction — even social interaction I enjoy — and I find stupid, every day things like grocery shopping, driving and making appointments overwhelming and intensely stressful, sometimes to the point where I struggle to speak.  It turns out, I am definitely autistic. My results weren't borderline. Not even close. And while these aren’t all of my challenges, and not everyone with these symptoms is autistic, it’s definitely something to look into if you present with all of these things at once. 

So why did it take me so long to get diagnosed? The same bias that exists in media threads through the medical community as well, and because I'm a woman who can discuss the weather while smiling on cue, few people thought I was worth looking into. Even after I was fairly certain I was autistic, receiving an official diagnosis in the US is unnecessarily difficult and expensive, and in my case, completely uncovered by my insurance.  It cost me over $4000, and I could only afford it because my husband makes more money than I do as a freelance illustrator — a job I fell into largely because it didn’t require in-person work; like many autists, I have been chronically underemployed and underpaid, in part due to physical illness in my twenties, which is a topic for another day.  But it shouldn’t be like this.  It shouldn’t be so hard for adults to receive diagnoses and it shouldn’t be so hard for people to see themselves in this condition to begin with due to misinformation and stereotypes. Like many issues in America, these barriers are even higher for marginalized groups with multiple intersectionalities. 

It’s commonly said that if you’ve met one autistic person, you’ve met one autistic person.  This is why it’s called a spectrum, not because there’s a linear progression of severity (someone who appears to have low support needs like myself might need more than it seems, and vice versa), but because every autistic person has their own strengths and weaknesses, challenges and experiences, opinions and needs.  No two people on the spectrum present in the same way.  And that’s a good thing!  No way of being autistic is inherently any better than any other, and even if someone on the spectrum struggles with things I don’t — or can do things I can’t — doesn’t make them more or less deserving of respect and human dignity.

But speaking solely for myself, the more I learn about autism, the happier I am to be autistic.  I struggle to find words and exert fine motor control, but my deep passion and fixation has made me good at art and storytelling anyway.  I find more joy watching dogs and studying leaf shapes on my walks than most people do in an entire day.  More often than not, the barriers I’ve faced weren’t due to my autism directly, but due to society being overly rigid about what it considers a valid way of existing.  My hope in writing this today is that maybe one person will realize that autism isn’t what they thought — and that being different is not the same as being less than. My hope with my fiction is to give autistic children mirrors with which to see themselves, and everyone else windows through which to see us as we actually are.

If you’re interested in learning more about autism or think you might be autistic, too, I recommend the Autism Self Advocacy Network  autisticadvocacy.org and the following books:

What I Mean When I Say I’m Autistic by Annie Kotowicz

We're Not Broken by Eric Garcia

Knowing Why edited by Elizabeth Bartmess

Unmasking Autism by Devon Price, PhD

Loud Hands edited by Julia Bascom

Neurotribes by Steve Silberman

(trigger warning: the latter two contain quite a lot of upsetting material involving institutionalized child abuse, but I think it’s important for people to know how often autistic children were — and are — abused simply for being neurodivergent).

Thanks for reading 💛

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Greetings bugs and worms!

This comic is a little different than what I usually do but I worked real hard on it—Maybe I'll make more infographic stuff in the future this ended up being fun. Hope you learned something new :)

If you are still curious and want to learn more about OCD, you can visit the International OCD Foundation's website. I also recommend this amazing TED ED video "Starving The Monster", which was my first introduction to the disorder and this video by John Green about his own experience with OCD.

The IOCDF's website can also help you find support groups, therapy, and has lots of online guides and resources as well if you or a loved one is struggling with the disorder. It is very comprehensive!

Reblog to teach your followers about OCD

(But also not reblogging doesn't make you evil, silly goose)

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The next arc in the anime has been announced, Terastal debut! (Curious that we don't see Friede and co., wonder if we'll see the RVT gang and the kids temporarily part ways, but with Cap looking after Liko in case the Explorers pop up.)

Also, Floragato and the Paldean E4 (and Grusha and Katy)! ���