coffee-alien

[coffee-alien]

15. A few things I've never tried, so I don't know if I could eat them or not. I have been called a picky eater.

I don't think allergies count, since it's not an issue with not liking the food.

Stealing this from the Allistics. Auties and Aspies what yall get

I keep seeing this going around every so often and all the allistics are like “lmao I got 2.5 I’m so picky 🤪” while my ass is out here with 22

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being autistic and having to participate in society is like being an actor who cant get off stage and cant stop performing

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the autistic feeling when any animal entering a social situation is a HUGE relief because it’s like ‘wow better greet this cat! oh.. sorry can’t talk! he needs my undivided attention.’

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All the links while googling are to help families dealing with an autistic person. There is so little information on how to deal as an autistic person yourself. When I googled about being a suicidal autistic person all I got was stats. When I looked into advise for after a diagnosis it was all about parents dealing with their child’s diagnosis. When I looked for help to cope it was all helplines and support for carers. Nothing makes me feel quite so helpless as to realise l am a problem to be dealt with not a person to help.

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Don't subject yourself to suffering because someone else thinks it shouldn't bother you.

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best autistic childhood memory: spinning super fast on a sit ‘n’ spin

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An autistic friend of mine just said this to me “The harder I work at communication the more people expect from me and the less they are willing to compromise.” and it is the most fucking heartbreaking thing I’ve heard.

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Is it normal for me to go almost completely silent whenever I'm at home? Whenever I'm at school I can be quite talkative and I'm never sure of when it's appropriate for me to speak or not so I'm very loud around friends but once I get home I mostly only talk whenever I've been spoken to and idk if that's normal or not for autistic people

It sounds normal to me, especially if you’re tired when you get home. After a long time of being social with friends, my talkative side is all used up. Once I get home, it’s time to rest. School is particularly exhausting for a lot of autistic people, so it makes sense to not have a lot of social energy after it’s over.

[coffee-alien]

the autistic ping

Look, we’re not actually narcissists

When you talk to us about an emotional issue

And we respond with a personal experience or anecdote

We’re not trying to make the conversation about ourselves.

Most times (at least with me), I have to find an experience within myself that is similar to what you’ve described

So I can furnish an appropriate emotional reaction to what you’re experiencing.

It’s sort of like when you ping an IP address to fix a faulty Wi-Fi connection.

It’s not personal, it’s just how I navigate Feelings™.

[coffee-alien]

I struggle a lot with this kind of thinking and am thankful to Contrapoints for giving it a name. When I’m in a bad mental state, it feels so much more natural to think negatively. Self-kindness feels wrong and foolish. Paradoxically, self-loathing and hopelessness can feel...emotionally satisfying(?) in a perverse way that I find difficult to make sense of. Anything that counters that mindset seems fake, despite knowing it’s unhealthy.

Resisting the urge to validate and fixate on those thoughts takes a lot of self-control.

Recently, youtuber Natalie Wynn brought up a great concept in her breakdown of why Incels believe the things they do– “masochistic epistemology.” She put it simply, “what hurts, is true.”

She said this in the context of how incels basically form parasocial death cults when they are ‘blackpilled.’ They come to believe that because they feel terrible about themselves right now, that feeling is objectively true and forever, and even the reality of how the ‘world really works’ and there’s no hope to change it, only to “LDR”. Which is, ‘lie down and rot’, a form of suicide baiting. What’s happened here is that otherwise genuine feelings of pain or insecurity have been validated maybe too much and have evolved into an entire worldview centered around affirmation of pain. And once pain-as-truth becomes social capital, the way people behave changes to maximize its growth and spread.

But I have to say? I feel like I have encountered versions of the very same behavior in my own spaces, on tumblr, on facebook, etc.:

There’s definitely forms of love-bombing that surround mental illness or depression support connections that shower you with confirmation and praise only as long as you reject any steps of managing mental illness, so long as it unstoppably dominates your life. Once you question someone else’s behavior or declare that you’re seeing a therapist or something all your new parasocial friends turn against you.

I’ve seen it in supposedly feminist spaces where women that are otherwise strangers to each other talk each other into hopelessness and heightened fear of sex and fear of other people in their life, especially male figures. Sometimes not even based in a specific personal experience, but instead just this collective ‘dark truth’ of womanhood. TERFs love to do this, and segue younger people into fear of trans women this way.

I’ve seen it happen a lot within lgbt+ spaces where someone’s personal despair about dysphoria, homophobia they face, not being able to find a partner or being judged by family or strangers, or even fear of violence, enters a feedback loop with other people they don’t actually know and don’t have any interests but their own consumption in mind amplifying it, forming these insular enclaves where fear is truth and everyone else is wrong because they don’t feel as terrible about being attracted to the same sex or for being trans as they should. Meanwhile no one struggling within this structure is actually getting the support or help they need, they’re just arguing about it and building cases for, when the mythical support does fall from the sky,  why they should get it first.

There’s mounds of discourse where people argue over how because that group couldn’t possibly live as terrible a reality as this group, their lived experience isn’t the order of the universe and therefore doesn’t deserve validity or attention at all. And to argue, inexperienced people fall into the trap of trying to artificially match the despair levels of their critics, or try to counter one black pill with their own black pill which will never be credible to outsiders, resulting in cringy disaster at all vectors. In the red-hot radioactive mess troll accounts prosper.

Which is not to say that all these situations are full of people as baseless as incels– some of them are living very difficult lives, but are using “masochistic epistemology“ as the internal logic of their world. And the effect of such an internal logic is extremely dark self-confirming biases in excess of what is necessary to communicate the dangers of their lives, or cope with hardship. And any similar person who goes off seeking friends who acknowledge their pain is going to find a black hole of people who’d otherwise be peers escalating that very pain in themselves and others in order to confirm it’s all real.

Natalie Wynn herself, a trans woman, struggled with the urge to go to 4chan’s /lgbt/ and wait for the most toxic and hopeless crowds there to rip her appearance apart even though it made very little logical sense. The people there shared the same insecurities as her, that they don’t pass, that people will despise them, and in some way hearing those insecurities confirmed rather than denied to her felt more like ‘the real truth’ or ‘what people really think’ than it did to hear praise and encouragement. Even if what they had to say wasn’t anywhere near an objective truth. 

The “pain is real” mindset is that hard to shake! It doesn’t matter if you’re smart, prepared to identify the phenomenon with philosophy education, intellectually aware that it’s bad for you. There is a self-harm impulse to ‘face reality’, but a very specific reality that confirms the bias of your pain or insecurity. The comfort zone of discomfort, in a way! It just wants you to not feel crazy for feeling those things and is willing to hurt you even more to prove you’re right about your environment or your life.

[coffee-alien]

INTP!

hey I’ve always wondered which MBTI types are most common with autistics and I’m super curious, so if you’re autistic reblog this with your MBTI personality type!! (self-dx welcome to reblog too!)

[coffee-alien]

Hobby: Going through the notes on popular posts and reporting the spambots

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Vaccines don’t cause autism.

Vaccines don’t cause autism.

Vaccines don’t cause autism.

Vaccines don’t cause autism.

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It used to make me mad that people would always headcannon the characters I related to as autistic.

Little did I know...

Please make more autistic headcanons to piss non-autistics who treats it like an insult, thank you for reading this. 💖

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over-explaining everything because you’re scared of not making sense or people thinking you’re stupid

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Yes! I love it. Hot shower is very nice and relaxing.

Are there other autistic people out there that like showering and find it soothing? So far all the posts I’ve seen are from people who really struggle with it.

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Oh god, I read the first sentence in my notifications and was prepared for something terrible and ableist. Thank you for the pleasant surprise. Good addition. Bless.

“Imagine having a child that refuses to hug you or even look you in the eyes”

Imagine being shamed, as a child, for not showing affection in a way that is unnatural or even painful for you. Imagine being forced, as a child, to show affection in a way that is unnatural or even painful for you. Imagine being told, as a child, that your ways of expressing affection weren’t good enough. Imagine being taught, as a child, to associate physical affection with pain and coercion.