#< look into it because it is wildly undiagnosed

[just-another-annoying-artist]

When I was 14 I was diagnosed with imbalanced hormones (later discovered to be PMDD, I recommend looking into it). Because of this, I had completely random period cycles, incredibly painful cramps, and my mood swings were violent. I was either manically happy or horrifically depressed within the span of a few minutes. My doctor prescribed me the pill, explaining that it would balance out my hormones and regulate my period.

One day at school, my pills fell out of my bag and my friends asked about it. I said it was the pill. They all looked at me like I just said the most scandalous secret. The one thing about that interaction that sticks with me though is that one friend said: “but aren’t you a lesbian?” I was so shocked by the question that I literally had no idea how to respond other than huh???????? And they said the pill was only for girls who don’t want to get pregnant. I got irrationally upset about it and kind of just. Shut down after it. I knew I wasn’t going around having sex on the daily, but just saying I took the pilk was enough for them to make that conclusion.

This is why I think they should explain the other purposes of the pill during health talks/lessons. It’s actually common for people to be on the pill for reasons other than pregnancy. I think about how embarrassing that interaction was every time I take my pill and hope no other child/teen has to go through that experience.

"People shouldn't post about how the contraceptive pill can be prescribed for non-contraceptive reasons because it's sex negative" feels like a take that can only come from people who don't realise just how young some people end up being prescribed the pill

Like, fine, you, person in your twenties, might be comfortable being like "this is the pill I take to fuck without getting pregnant", but I don't think it's sex negative for a thirteen-year-old who has been prescribed it for debilitating period pain to not want to have to hide their medication from their classmates on an overnight school trip because their classmates think that the only reason anyone would take it is that they're sexually active

[danielnelsen]

there’s so much i wanna do this week/month/etc but i’m just too sick, i have no energy, i can’t sleep, i’m constantly nauseous and headachey and on the verge of a migraine, i’m stressed and irritable and impatient and panicky…….how tf did i survive nearly 5 years of high school untreated if i can’t even manage this when i don’t have any major obligations rn

[livwritesstuff]

Aaaannddddd another ask because I’m Insatiable and you’ve enabled me (ily ❤️) AND because I’m Terminally Online and have been fully consumed by the brainrot.

ANYWAYS I saw this and immediately thought of Steddie. Would they? Who would instigate it? How would the other respond? Who would win?

This is so funny because Hazel would 100% show this to Eddie and be like "Dad, you should so try this on Pop," and Eddie loves to mess with Steve so he's obviously game for it.

Later that same day, Eddie waits for the dryer to go off on the load of laundry Steve's been working on, and then when Steve goes to grab it, he follows him.

"First one to move has to fold everything," he says once he's got a hold on half of the pile of laundry in Steve's arms.

Steve just looks at him for a second and then he's like, "You fucking idiot."

Eddie: Huh?

Steve: You are literally the poster adult for undiagnosed ADHD.

Steve: And I was about to go fold all this voluntarily.

And in the three seconds it took Steve to say that, Eddie had already forgotten what they were doing, so he throws his hands up to gesticulate wildly through his own self-defense.

Eddie: Hey, that's — oh shit.

Steve drops the rest of the clothes, steps over the pile, and says, "Lots of socks in this one. Have fun."

(He kisses Eddie on the cheek as he leaves, because he's not a total monster).

[sapphia]

we need to talk about grian. “alliances in the life series never last” no, your alliances in the life series never last because you don’t want them to. i’m so tired of this bitch making her own destiny and then pulling a surprised pikachu face when the natural consequences of her actions eventuate. grian really spent this season rushing jimmy and joel headlong to their deaths AND helping the only other person likely to beat them there survive, and then he’s surprised when he’s left without a team? the team he tried to kick jimmy out a few episodes ago for literally no reason? he couldn’t sabotage it easily so he just went the old fashioned way of general recklessness.

grian spent his entire first season chained to scar, complaining the whole time of course, humming and haa-ing about what his alliance would be after he died and went yellow. they were literally several episodes in with an entire life built together and he was like “remember this is just until i’m yellow. then i’m off to find a new alliance lol”. as they settle into their long-term stronghold in their sand-monopoly, totally threatening to leave scar alone and in a situation where he’d have to defend the entire desert on his red life. then when grian didn’t go to yellow until really late in the game and their closest allies had died so he couldn’t switch teams anyway, he ends up sticking with scar and actually winning together with him (though he takes the solo win and kills scar in pvp).

then in double life he like… decides he wants to be soulmates with bigb for some reason even though soulmates are chosen at random? like he literally sees bigb running around the mountainside while looking for his soulmate and is like “i wish he was my soulmate😍” and then decides he will be and is disappointed that they aren’t. and then is even more disappointed when he finds out his soulmate is scar, even though they’re good friends and work well together and literally won last time they played together and scar has improved massively at the game since then. (not that grian noticed that at all for the entire season they were paired together. literally he said in limited life “now that i’m not partnered with scar he’s actually dangerous.” BABE. YOU WON TOGETHER IN THE FIRST SEASON. LAST SEASON HE WATERBUCKET-CLUTCHED 100 BLOCKS DOWN FROM RIGHT NEXT TO YOU. HE’S BEEN DANGEROUS TO PEOPLE THIS ENTIRE TIME. YOU’VE JUST BEEN ON HIS SIDE SO HE’S NEVER BEEN THAT DANGEROUS TO YOU).

so yeah then he spends the whole series being “secret soulmates” with bigb for no reason other than he’s annoyed he’s paired with scar/not paired with bigb. in the game with randomly-generated partners. his game with randomly-generated partners.

and even now he had an alliance with scar’s team lined up perfectly. his closest allies on the server and his teammates all dying. note that they weren’t actually dead yet. grian had already given up on his team while they were still alive and kicking. but anyway, he decides he needs a new team and he has a set of very close allies right there. but no, he literally would rather go make an alliance with the singular mortal enemy of his just-dead teammate rather than put himself on the same team as scar again. because alliances and friendships mean nothing here, right? etho and bdubz are out there fighting to roleplay together season after season, scott is giving up lives to someone he partnered with back in season 1 and he and cleo have basically decided they vibe so well together they’ll be bffs through all of time, and ties are creating the same approximate polycule they form in literally every season. but heaven forbid grian has to acknowledge he and scar have spent more time together than apart in this series.

grian thinks alliances break up quickly because he has wildly unstable relationships with literally everyone on the server. he’s the undiagnosed nd girl being like “man, people suck :(”. no girl, you suck at people. you have a condition. get help.

[ed-recovery-affirmations]

What made you want to recover. I have anorexia and I don't want to recover I just want to get worse and worse until I'm sick enough. I'm in forced recovery but faking it as I just want to starve is there any reason to recover?

Hello anon, this is a difficult question to answer because for me, personally, it wasn't any one thing that made me want to recover. The truth is that when I started, I didn't understand the long-term effects of what I was doing to myself. I sort of knew about them, but the importance of being thin had been stressed to me all of my life and so I was in a self-destructive place where I was willing to make that choice again and again and risk throwing away my health for thinness. That's pretty fucked up, true, but again, I didn't understand the full extent of the damage I might be doing to myself.

I think it's also worth mentioning that I had an undiagnosed chronic illness and some trauma that I was quietly sitting on because I doubted my own perspective and my ability to access real help for these things. Because of this, I didn't have a frame of reference for mental and physical wellness, because I hadn't felt mentally or physically well for a very long time. Even now, looking back at symptoms I was experiencing, it is hard to know if I was experiencing these things due to my eating disorder or something else. I think it was all cumulative damage, to be honest. The eating disorder didn't help.

But looking back, I think I actually had an eating disorder long before I "decided" to start restricting food. I remember going through a growth spurt during puberty around age twelve and being hungry all the time, but we frequently had the kind of foods people call "junk food" in the house because that's what my parents bought. So that's what I ate a lot of, constantly, and my mother was constantly remarking on it in a negative way and trying to stop me. I have a very complicated relationship with my mother, and she raised me with a complicated relationship to food and body image. I remember doing fucked-up things like sneaking food into the bathroom with me so I could eat snacks in the shower unobserved, or hiding snacks under my bed, and just absolutely gorging on food at other times while knowing I was eating way past the point of being full and not knowing why I wanted to. So I officially decided to start restricting when I was fifteen, but the truth is that I had a fucked up relationship with food way earlier than that.

When I was nearing my seventeenth birthday, I experienced a breakdown in health due to chronic illness. I was suffering terribly. At the time I had this hippie friend who believed everything could be cured with the right diet and supplements. As I mentioned before, I was raised in a household where we didn't fully understand proper nutrition, and I had been raised eating a lot of low-nutrition meals. Because I had a stronger relationship with this friend than with my family, I bought into the mindset that if I got the right nutrients, I would be cured. And, in my mind, I had to get as many of those nutrients as possible as quickly as possible, so I immediately turned back to bingeing. But I was bingeing on a lot of high-nutrient hippie foods, so I didn't see a problem with this. I didn't understand that my relationship to the food wasn't fixed. I wasn't enjoying it, I was gorging on it, and between meals I was desperately anticipating the time I could gorge again. And because it was hippie food, I thought that this would cure me.

The thing was, after over a year of severe restriction, my GI system was wildly unprepared to handle the level of food-stuffing I was about to put it through - even though it was super-healthy hippie food. So I actually got sicker, experiencing the symptoms that come along with suddenly eating real portions after restriction. This led to me alternating between not understanding why the food wasn't working to cure me, to not understanding why I felt so addicted to eating. And this kick-started a violent binge-restrict cycle where I'd force myself to go hungry until certain times a day, at which point I'd unleash myself upon food and be unable to stop. Then I'd restrict again the next day to make up for it, get increasingly desperate for food, and you see the pattern. The binge-restrict cycle is so real.

So I was super trapped in that life and I wanted out. I knew I wanted to get out long before I actually started getting out. Because every time I binged, my immediate response was to hate myself and restrict. That was all I knew. By the time I even started to make a bit of progress on breaking that pattern, I had achieved enough real healing to understand that my restriction days had been a part of what led me down this hellish path and I didn't want to go back to that. To tell you the truth, in order to truly stay away from it - because I'll be real, I do get tempted to go back to restriction from time to time - I have to remind myself that while restricting feels like it would save me, it would only be a stepping stone back into that horrible pattern that kept me so sick and felt impossible to break. And I have to choose wanting better for myself.

Now, your story may not look like mine. So I'm not sure your motivation will end up looking like mine. But what do you need for yourself in order to want better for yourself?

You say you want to do this until you are sick enough. Can I just ask you to take a moment to ask yourself, what do you think is "sick enough?" Would you really stop when you got there, or would you just keep moving the goalpost until your body gave out? Because if you're stuck thinking "I have to do this till I'm sick enough" then believe me - you are sick enough. Your struggle counts. You don't have to wait until the damage is irreversible.

Because the thing is, when you start experiencing long-term sickness as a result - GI disorders, internal organ failure, etc - your suffering will be out of your control. Eating disorders feel like you're taking control, but you're not. And as someone who suffered with chronic illness for years, let me tell you, you don't want "sick enough." I can't tell you for sure what you do want, but allow me to take a guess. Maybe you want the validation that comes from being sick enough. Maybe you want to showcase how awful it got because you want people to care, to be concerned, to validate you. You want indisputable proof that you are well and truly fucked up, that you truly were hurt by whatever it is that hurt you.

The fact is, even some people who are sick enough to be on death's door, from some chronic illness or another, never get that validation or support. Our system is fucked up like that. But understanding that also means you don't have to wait for someone else to validate how hard you struggled and how much you've suffered. You're already sick enough. You don't have to wait for it to get worse in order to deserve better. So what do you need? What do you need in order to affirm to yourself that what you've been through is real? What do you need in order to feel you deserve to get better for real? What do you need in order to keep seeking out that desire to heal even when you're triggered as hell and struggling and forget all the breakthroughs you had once made and all you want to do is say "fuck it then, I'll self-destruct" because that's addicting in its own way?

I hope you're able to seek those answers in your treatment, anon. I hope you're able to affirm to yourself that you deserve to be more well than this, and to love yourself enough to fight for it?

[slityourthroatandeattiligetsick]

Taberu facts 3, because mod was bored

-It trusts Shark more than other people not just because he was the first person to treat it like a human after its parents pretty much abandoned it, but also subconsciously because he has sharp teeth and therefore looks like them

-wholeheartedly believes it doesn't count as human

-it age regresses to around 6-10, always when it's alone though- it doesn't trust anyone to see it at its most vulnerable

-wildly confused by Niku's feelings for it

-barely remembers its life before the basement, its parents included

-still occasionally hallucinates them, though

-terrified of being left alone in the dark again, has to sleep with a nightlight or actively in someone's arms

-probably has undiagnosed DPD (dependent personality disorder)

-can neither read nor write, but can do very basic math

-fucking loves doing math

-confused by the concept of gender. It/its probably aren't the pronouns it would use if it actually understood itself, but that's what everyone calls it and that's what it's used to

-does have a phone. does not know how to use it

@paintedgrilledcheese @myluckymoon @city-of-c0rpses

[marbles-for-breakfast]

So, I kept hearing people talk about transabled and other transid people, and I didn’t know what that was, so I decided to look it up. I feel like I didn’t get a real definition of some identities, and I still have some questions.

All of the people I see calling themselves transautistic are literally just undiagnosed autistic ppl. Which like, me too. I get it. I don’t get the label though.

Still, at the end of the day, I don’t care what labels ppl use for themselves when it’s something like this. If transautistic feels more true to yourself than undiagnosed autistic, go ahead. I’m not gonna throw a fit about it. But here are my current thoughts/opinions. I’m certainly not about to die on this hill and actually, I’d really like to hear other ppls opinions about this.

(TL;DR: What is the difference between transautistic and cisautistic and why do you find the terms useful?)

So, isn’t being trans (and I’m not trans so correct me if I’m wrong), isn’t it about being assigned something at birth that you come to realize isn’t who you are? I feel like ppl don’t get assigned allistic/autistic in the same way. Like yeah, I think ppl always assumed I was allistic, but it’s not something I was told in the same way I was told I was a girl. I can certainly see it being kind of a similar feeling/journey in some way (both involve realizing who you are and stuff), but ultimately I don’t think the transautistic label would be useful to most people with that experience. Though obviously that’s just my opinion, and I only just learned about this label for the first time.

The experience described seems like an experience that would be shared by most people who realize they’re autistic sometime after childhood. Are we all transautistic, or is it something more specific than that?

I also just feel like the word transautistic gives the wrong impression of what people actually mean. I mean, trans implies a transition, right? The root literally means “across”. And while I could maybe see coming into an understanding of yourself and your autism being described as a transition, it just seems like such a different thing to me.

I also really don’t see the use in distinguishing between transautistic and cisautistic people in the first place, at least with this language. Although maybe that’s partially because I don’t really understand what the difference is. But if it’s a diagnosis thing, that really doesn’t make any sense to me. If you get diagnosed do you become cis? Cause that seems backwards. If there is a change, shouldn’t you be changing into the identity that means “across”? And if it’s about when you found out you were autistic, how does a prefix meaning “same side” describe learning about your identity as a child? I get that words are often more than the sum of their parts, but going from the concept of identifying with the gender you were assigned at birth to the concept of being diagnosed with autism as a child instead of as an adult seems like a really big linguistic leap to me.

But again, I didn’t see an actual definition anywhere, so maybe I’m wildly misinterpreting all this. If you’re transautistic and have the desire/patience to explain some of this to me, that’d be really cool. I’m sure you guys get a lot of people asking things in bad faith and I hope it’s clear that I really am trying to understand, and even if I might personally think the label is unnecessary, I do not for a minute doubt your experiences with autism. Feel free to rb or message me if you want. And this isn’t something I’m dying to learn either, I just saw posts complaining about transid and stuff and I figured I should probably learn what that is since I keep seeing ppl mention it. But yeah, at the end of the day, if you’re autistic, you’re autistic.

[fromkenari]

Look, I get that Tumblr likes to self-diagnose, but there's this whole thing where people throw around personality disorders as an insult that just grates on me. Yes, vent about someone all you want, but when you start putting a personality disorder on this person, exactly what are you trying to accomplish? No, a personality disorder is not an excuse for any toxic behavior (even though toxic behavior is a symptom!). Still, it's also a medical diagnosis, and at some point, you need to realize that this person is doing this because they are ill. There is no "give them a pill, and it goes away" for personality disorders, so why, why do you act like it's so simple for them to say, not make everything about themselves (narcissist), or not be a possessive person with wildly different opinions given what mood they're in (borderline.) Undiagnosed and untreated personality disorders are literally not solvable with pills or chastizing the person, so why do you continue to do it and expect different results? Set boundaries and realize that they cannot control it without help. Also, maybe you should stop using a mental illness as an insult.

[oh-hush-its-perfect]

this is me officially asking you to infodump/ramble/anything about quinn :)

QUINN AHHHHHHHH MY BELOVED

so so so Quinn is the main character of the third (?) graphic novel in a series I plan to create that takes place in my hometown. Each story has a supernatural twist to it, but with Quinn's story in particular, the twist isn't revealed until Act 7 out of 8 (I could hypothetically make it a more typical three-act story, but the acts would have wildly different lengths if I did.) Feel free to guess what the twist might be having read this whole description!

It's worth noting that I originally conceived this story as a film. It's entirely written as a script; all I have to do is actually draw the panels for the graphic novel. Anyway, if I had decided to make it a film, it would be about an hour and a half long, approximately.

Enough about the actual story. What about Quinn?

So Quinn [Last Name Confidential] is a junior at [High School Name Confidential], and boy, does he have a reputation! Quinn has very apparent undiagnosed ADHD and behavioral problems. I wrote the biggest chunk of the story right after I received my own ADHD diagnosis and I wanted to write a protagonist who thought like me. He's also partially inspired by Holden Caufield from Catcher in the Rye, since I had just read that book when I started writing— and personally, I adored it. One of my favorite classics. I do know it's not everyone's cup of tea, and if you walked away from CITR resenting Holden, a) did we read the same book? and b) Quinn also probably won't be your cup of tea. He's aggressive, he's directionless, and he feels like no one in the world understands him— least of all his family.

His parents are upper-middle class folks with good upbringings (and family histories on both sides of people mysteriously going missing?). His siblings are both on scholarships going to prestigious colleges— his brother has a scholarship for football and his sister has an academic full ride. If it weren't for Quinn, the family would be perfect.

But Quinn! Like I said, major behavioral issues. The inciting incident of the story is Quinn throwing a terracotta pot at another student's head (he does miss, though, because he has terrible aim). He has a criminal record because of his tendency to shoplift candy bars from convenience stores. He only has one friend— and that single friend is his complete opposite. But all this isn't to say that Quinn isn't smart or talented. He's extremely smart and talented, actually, but has a hard time committing to tasks. Like, y'know, me, he has a really hard time doing laundry because he feels the need to check every single tag before he sorts his clothes. He does enjoy repetitive, simple tasks, though, like pulling weeds or other garden chores.

Some other fun facts about him:

He has a GIANT sweet tooth and loves sweets and milk and cream

He has a hard time making choices when given open-ended questions

He thrives in nature

He has very little sense of time

He has a bit of an obsession with counting things

He's left-handed!

On the side of his left hand, there's a white birthmark stretching from his wrist to the knuckle of his pinkie

He's pansexual and doesn't have a super strong relationship with his gender

He is also extremely oblivious and can't tell when people are hitting on him

At the beginning of the story, he looks kind of ugly— not because he is, but because he wears his bangs in front of his eyes so, like, half his face is covered and because he only wears black or other muted, desaturated colors.

His eyes are BRIGHT green

He is a white American, but about 75% of his ancestors were Irish.

He's got black hair and pale, clear skin.

He really looks good in jewel tones (vivid, bright colors) but almost never wears them.

He gets jealous easily

Remember that best friend I mentioned earlier? Quinn is a little in love.

If you're curious, please send more questions about him, his story, or any of my other stories to either this account or my art account, @zodapopz!!

[catboybiologist]

As Slavs and, my family were low priority targets for the Nazis in Europe- but targets all the same. I have relatives I never met because they died in German prisons, and others that survived, but clearly had severe undiagnosed PTSD based on the stories I've heard of them. It's a grey area of whether they can be considered "Holocaust victims", and I don't want to claim, that, but I do want to explain my perspective.

I think the cognitive dissonance on people's minds is that trans and queer people at large weren't a "big part" of the Holocaust. Mostly because they're simply a small part of the population. Yet to the cishet populace at large, it's so easy to just handwave away the queer experience under the Nazis. But it is so, so important to acknowledge ALL victims of the Holocaust. Why? Well, Palestine is a perfect example. Recognizing the Holocaust as a comprehensive genocide, that anyone can get swept up in, and anyone could be a victim of, allows us to actually analyze and consider other genocides in the future and call them what they are.

It's also worth noting that each target had subtlety different rhetoric used against them. It's not a one and done "this is what the Holocaust looked like, watch out for this one thing!" It was a subtle, creeping cancer of rhetoric that leeched in from multiple angles, using multiple tactics.

A couple generations later, and my generic American whiteness has overridden any racial or national identity that could ever get me persecuted. But then I had to ruin all that by being wildly queer. So it all comes back to being applicable to me again, and I can't help but thinking back to the different ways that the Nazis used to persecute different groups.

Of course I still don't know what it's like to be persecuted based on my ethnicity or religion, and I hope I'm not speaking out of turn because of that. I hope my point is clear though, this is a bit of an unfocused morning ramble.

It should be a bigger scandal that J.K. Rowling is threatening to sue small accounts for accurately calling her a Holocaust denier. So glad the Streisand effect exists. Now we can all rebuke her reprehensible views more than ever.

[kopivie]

here i am, steadily becoming more and more vulnerable with the very same person i tried to convince myself to hate.

at some point, i blamed violet for my eating disorder. we were pretty stupid kids -- the two of us improperly diagnosed (or completely undiagnosed altogether) and just interacting with each other and the world the only way we knew how. i distinctly recall him commenting more than once on the way i would eat certain things.

i suppose they were compulsive habits that i hadn't realized i was doing. i would do things like nibble at chips or brush the stray crumbs off of chicken fingers to eat last. those are the only things i can remember... but then he'd also comment on the fact that i was soft. not fat, just... soft. i wasn't a fat kid by any means, but... little things like that... they stick.

i became aware – too aware. i started eating while he wasn't looking; turning down his offer to buy me my favorite snacks despite both of us knowing i didn't eat lunch that day; i'd even go so far as to completely stop eating when i met his eyes at lunch.

(he always messages me while i'm posting about him, jesus--)

that behavior snowballed into something so wildly out of control. my rapidly fluctuating weight and fear of being perceived kind of stems from him and his innocuous comments. because i remember asking him later in life why he said things like that. why would you comment on such little things?

"because i was figuring you out."

that's all it was. that's all it ever was. and whenever we reminisce as adults, i find that he committed those little habits of mine to his long-term memory. harmless efforts to learn a loved one being warped into something so malicious that it negatively affected my health for years afterwards.

it's kinda scary what an insecure mind can do to you.

i'm saying all this to say that i'm having trouble eating right now. after all that work i put in to eat healthy, now i'm just... not eating at all. i need some encouragement; a little push in the right direction. and who better to ask for that push than my violet?

like i said, he replied to my message midway through typing this. i asked him to just.. tell me to eat. please. anything that'll give me the motivation to eat. and he did. the person i wrongfully blamed for my own poor mental state is helping me bandage my own wounds.

so... i'm eating. i'll probably be here all night until i decide that i've sufficiently eaten enough., but i'm eating. my hero.

(told him i appreciate him. that's my stand-in for the big L word for now. i'll wait until my break to say it – i gotta see how distance affected our relationship, if at all.)

[hismercytomyjustice]

Omfggg I cannot believe my little BG3 fic is about to hit 70 subscribers!!! (*꒦ິ꒳꒦ີ)

It is wonderful and terrifying all at the same time haha!!! It’s also weirdly humbling knowing almost 70 people trust me and this story enough to want updates as it’s posted???

Thank fuck I’ve written most of it already because otherwise I would be STRESSING TF OUT.

I crossed the 75k word threshold the other day. The 75k maximum I thought I would probably hit seeing as I’ve never written much over like 50k before and that was only once in the fanfic world and 3x in the ���this will likely never see the light of day” original work world haha.

PLEASE TELL ME HOW THE FUCK I STILL FOUR FULL CHAPTERS LEFT TO WRITE.

In the event you clicked to see more, just know you’re about to see a lot of rambling of mental health and writing.

I’m winding down chapter 14 now and chapter 18 is at least 50-75% done after I skipped to it in a panic due to the massive writers block I hit in 13 over hardcore stressing over my characterization of Cazador. Just “he is not being horrible enough, he needs to be more horrible, but not too horrible or this fic will need to be even longer and I’m already wildly out of my word count comfort zone” lol.

So that leaves the tail end of 14 and 18, and then I just have to write 15, 16, and 17.

Oh thank fuck. It’s only three I thought it was four full length ones left. Oh god. This simultaneously brings me relief and anxiety lmaooo.

Oh god.

But this fic is going to have such a special place in my heart because writing it has reminded me THAT I LOVE WRITING.

I’ve barely written in the last decade for a variety of reasons and tbh until I started writing this fic, I was starting to wonder if I really even enjoyed writing and wanted to do it anymore.

Not because I didn’t, but because the level of passion I used to have for it seemed to just be…missing? I kept thinking “it’s so weird how writing used to be such a huge part of my life and now I never seem to be able to do it or want to do it”.

I’ve come to realize in the last month or so, the biggest culprit was my previously semi-diagnosed OCD. Second biggest may have been my definitely undiagnosed ADHD.

Any time I’d try to sit down to plot or draft or anything I would get into OCD spirals and either completely talk myself out of it or get into it for a little bit and then hit a roadblock in the story I couldn’t get past or convince myself what I wrote was awful and no one would ever want to read it because I would get bored writing it so why the hell would anyone want to read it? So then I’d convince myself I needed to read up on the craft of writing to make up for my deficiencies. And the more I learned the more I realized I didn’t know or the more deficiencies I saw and the more I’d get into my own head.

I spent some much time kind of wishing I hadn’t read so many books, went to so many convention panels, listened to so many podcasts about writing, etc. Because any time I looked at a blank page, I couldn’t get out of my own head enough to fucking WRITE.

Just an endless stream of: The first line is super important and has to hook the reader, make sure you start in the middle of the story, your protagonist should have xyz, your villain should have abc, every sentence should do more than one thing, if you don’t regularly make time to write you’re not a real writer, all these other people make time to write and their lives are way busier than yours so what’s wrong with you, you must hate writing otherwise you’d actually do it, you’ll never get anything published because you lack discipline, etc etc etc.

I just desperately wanted to go back to the days where I could just flip open a blank notebook and go to town without giving a shit about what anyone else thought a story had to be and without second guessing every single letter I put on the page.

And then such a weird combo of stars aligned that finally made me remember why I fucking love writing and why I do it in the first place???

Consuming media that makes me passionate about storytelling and reawakens my creative drive.

My friend offhandedly mentioning she writes on her phone sometimes and isn’t a phone kind of like a little notebook you can carry around and whip out whenever? Bonus, you don’t have to retype everything after writing by hand!

Getting officially officially diagnosed with OCD. Third therapist’s is a charm amirite? If I had a nickel for every therapist who told me I was exhibiting signs of OCD I’d have three nickels… I didn’t even go to my current therapist for OCD. My former therapist suggested finding a specialist in exposure therapy to help with an unrelated phobia (I will not go into on here and probably never will because it’s deeply personal) and the specialist I found happens to specialize in OCD because exposure therapy is often used to treat it.

And my current therapist taught me what OCD thought spirals are, how they start up, how they take root, how they get out of control. Suddenly it wasn’t just “oh, I have anxiety so I need to use decision techniques to combat it” it was “ohhh this is therapy designed with my brain in mind and my brain isn’t as weird or scary as I thought.” It’s just wild to spend decades of your life thinking your brain is fucked up and you don’t understand what’s wrong with it so how could anyone but then you get a literal fucking worksheet that maps out an example spiral with a note on it that reads “this you?”.

Specifically, she taught me about Inference-based Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (ICBT). If anyone reads this and is curious about ICBT. this article does a pretty good job of explaining it.

It was just wild to look at this piece of paper that was like “oh, no, this is a regular/common enough brain thing that we’ve done research on it and made a fun little worksheet for it” that makes it all feel so weirdly mundane and less scary as a result? Like decades of “I’m scared of my own brain” turned into “your brain isn’t scary, there’s a clear pattern to this kind of thing and lots of people go through it”.

And then I decided to take piano lessons. Because I started writing a POTO AU before I started my BG3 fic and I remembered how much I loved music in the same way. How much I enjoy the violin but struggle to get myself to play now that I’m not part of an ensemble. And that was another thing I haven’t found much joy in lately either.

And my OCD went off the fucking RAILS with that. Because of all my insecurities around being someone who always struggled to practice regularly and realizing how much of a refresher I needed on music in general after so much time away. Leaving lessons wanting to cry because of how fucking stupid an inept I felt and being utterly convinced I was wasting my teacher’s time.

BUT. Because of ICBT and my therapist, I could see I was hardcore OCD spiraling. It marginally helped because at least part of me was like “okay, these feelings aren’t the truth and they are irrational” even as I still struggled to find any actual self-compassion over it all. Because why the fuck is wrong with me it’s piano, I am paying for lessons, I do not have to be perfect. My therapist insisted my only obligation was to just show up for the lessons and SHE IS RIGHT. Like, yeah, it’s great to practice and I want to get better at it, but OCD-ing myself to the point I’m fucking miserable and never practice (much like I did with writing) is not the answer.

Piano made me realize my OCD impacts my day-to-day life in a variety. Not just my 10/10 OCD spirals/fears.

Do I still struggle with how fucking ridiculous getting worked up over voluntarily taking piano lessons made me feel? 10000%. Am I actually enjoying and looking forward to my lessons and actually practicing because I want to instead of feeling paralyzed or over analyzing or avoiding or forcing myself to? Also 10000% true!!! It’s fucking wild how much you can enjoy things you like when your OCD SHUTS THE FUCK UP FOR FIVE GODDAMN SECONDS.

Like obvs I still have a lot of work to do on the OCD front, but I’ve made so much fucking progress over the past few months. It feels like night and day sometimes. If you’d told me like 6 months ago I’d have written 75k on one fanfic in addition more on others, I would have laughed on your face and then doom spiraled about it.

God I have missed actually ENJOYING things. My therapist was not exaggerating when she talked about me having a breakthrough last session about overcompensating and how it negatively has impacted myself and my fledgling self-compassion.

It feels so fucking GOOD.

Navigating OCD and ADHD, especially as a late diagnosed person isn’t easy. I’m still learning so much and also puzzling out what does and doesn’t work for me. But for the first time in such a long time, I feel like I’m actually making progress on those fronts and it is such a fucking relief after borderline hating myself for years now.

This got wildly out of hand, but OH WELL. I’m just so fucking happy and relieved to be seeing some progress for myself that I was starting to worry might never fucking happen.

[jacemchale-andi]

Potentially TMI thoughts about undiagnosed body hair growth. Queer feelings.

I never expected that I'd get my first chest hair (chest hair! Not the weird nipple/aerola hairs I've had since I was a teen that make me wildly self-conscious) at 24 years old. Or that I'd have it pointed out to me by my gf while we showered together. It's in a place I can barely see, after all.

She rubbed her hand across my chest, and I just assumed she was checking me for acne (a consistent, irritating problem) or new freckles. When the rubbing continued longer than I expected, I asked, "did you find something?" She had the look on her face like she was trying to investigate something, "Trying to figure out if it's attached". We determined, yup it's attached to me. "Aww your first chest hair."

I didn't grow up as the boy you see in cartoons who's constantly checking himself for any plausible sign of a chest hair. The neck beard already gives me conflicted feelings, and so does the happy trail that I've learned to like even if my stomach isn't flat. The chest hairs are shorter than my beard hairs, not nearly as coarse, and I can hardly see them because my neck doesn't bend that way.

It's a strange feeling to be confronted with a pseudo-puberty when you're in your mid-20s and already have gray hair. I have a whole streak of grays!

Anyway, just some thoughts I'm having y'all.

[zeroar]

I'm not deflecting

Some general musings on autism, specifically as I experience being autistic. I think many of these things are fairly universal or can be adapted to different autistic experiences, but if you've met one autistic person, then you've met one autistic person.

I think one of the more quintessentially autistic things is to live in 3rd-person POV. I do experience life, but in a very real sense, life is something that happens to this body am inhabiting.

This is influenced/enhanced some by dyspraxia—which makes the game controls a little less intuitive than I'd prefer—and by both trauma and complex trauma of living in a society and culture primarily designed by and for allistic persons.

If we think of autism as living inside your head, then our natural state of being is about as far away from "mindfulness" (where one's body and experience are united) as we can get.

However, this same state of self is one reason why I posit autistic persons are naturally predisposed to metacognition—thinking about thinking.

Because we have this distance as well as this internal demesne—which might as well be a pause/menu/cutscene screen—we more easily develop analyses if we so choose while we do our best to make sense of this reality which is not our reality.

These same processes we can develop are why undiagnosed autistic persons sometimes get diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder (or more specific ones). I get anxious about the unknown, sure, but what medical professionals pathologize as "anxiety" is this looking at reality from outside and trying to figure out what the flip is going on.

And I mean actual "reality" reality: the experience of life, independent of where you find that life living. It gets further compounded when you factor in cultural and societal "norms"—which seem to be purposefully designed to be completely counter to what would make sense.

What is a little less clear to me is how much of this internal "real me" is "natural" and how much is it from "real me" being such an attractive retreat from the slings and arrows of everyday "reality".

This way we experience reality is responsible for so many of our differences from allistic persons.

A "small" one (please excuse the pun) is our general distaste for small talk. This can easily be explained if you consider that allistic people are much more frequently experiencing and caring about all of those (to me, at least) trivial things. It's not just social niceties that we don't understand to them but small talk is actually relevant to them.

Allistic people have to actually sit in traffic and experience all of that traffic as though they were reading a book or watching a movie. To them, traffic and the weather might even seem more real than a good book or show.

I'm not saying allistic people do not think. I'm sure they do. I'm pretty sure even neurotypical people can do things like enjoy art.

Our internal self is one reason why realities we can engage with on the same sort of 3rd-person level frequently feel so much more real to so many of us, though; that is, fiction is tangible and part of our life's experience in a way that what our body experiences from day to day struggles to rival. I believe allistic people can get deep into a fiction, but my guess is they're more likely to remember what they had for breakfast. My guess is art and fiction for allistic or at least neurotypical persons is more like just something else to do instead of a new reality.

Allistic people have to actually sit in traffic and experience all of that traffic as though they were reading a book or watching a movie.

I acknowledge I'm pretty far out there in my hypotheses here; allistic humans seem alien and I'm wildly speculating about their experience without having specific non-autistic allistic studies to speak of. Their experience seems dreadfully boring, and I'm worried if I look into how they experience life it will confirm a lot of my fears.

So let's get back to some of the consequences of this distance from life.

This distance is part of why some of us struggle with alcohol. It's not simply a social lubricant, but, by indulging in that particular poison, it makes it more difficult to metatextualize, more difficult to experience life from outside our body. It chains us to our body (while partially numbing us to many sensory sensitivities) in a way that enables us to engage with allistics as allistics seem to engage with each other.

We exist inside our heads so much that it seems reasonable another consequence is our sensory issues, both hypo– and hyper–. If a sensation is happening to this body that isn't going to pull me out, then it's far enough away to go, OK, this is what my body is going through. We frequently struggle with knowing our limits. It seems like we can just keep going and going and going.

Not just physical limits, but alexithymia is a thing for many of us, too. Part of the, "How are you?" "I'm fine" discourse is that they might actually be fine. Whereas many of us will interpret the "How are you?" question as a, "Give me your current status."

If we are aware of the emotion we're feeling and what our body is up to, we wouldn't be as caught off-guard by the question. That is, when someone asks us "How are you?", our brains are likely to go, "Wait, how exactly am I doing? Hmm, the lights are flickering in here and there's a pain in my elbow for some reason, did I hit it against something?"

And the sensory stimuli that does pull us from our internal world is so much more disruptive because it's not just an annoyance, it's reality-shattering. If we could get used to it, then it wouldn't hurt so much, but how do they not notice it?" Because they're not escaping reality every other second and getting their base state constantly refreshed.

Of course, just because we may not notice a sensory stimuli that's bothering us, that doesn't mean we're not being bothered by it. We suddenly find ourselves out of energy and fully on tilt and realize we've been at a noisy restaurant for an hour and if EVERYONE COULD JUST SHUT UP and WTF is UP with that VENTILATION SYSTEM?!

There's this idea that autistic persons have fairly unique memories. If something is "real" to us, we may have an almost perfect memory for it, but if it is just what our body is going through, did we even store it in our short-term memory let alone our long-term memory? Was it even a blip?

I am also an ADHDer and how that influences my autistic memory issues is not entirely clear. I typically use the term "lethomathica" to refer to primarily the issue of *accessing* memories ("lethologica" is a technical term for "tip-of-the-tongue" syndrome where you know the word but you can't remember it, "–mathica" just means knowledge, so instead of "words" / "–logica" I can't access in a particular moment, I made the switch).

For me, I grew up with pretty much an eidetic memory to an absurd degree, but the things I recall the most were always text and screens (thankfully, I have a little bit of synesthesia and process spoken language as text). Eidetic memories are supposedly more common for autistic persons than they are for allistic ones. Yet, even though I could vividly recall the history textbook's infographics, I eventually realized I didn't know what my favorite band or movie or book was.

If you gave me a list, I could recall soooo much knowledge about the items on the list, but if someone asked me my favorite band the best I could do would be to give you a reasonably well-liked band of the ones I could recall at the moment, which invariably skipped a lot of really good bands.

Oh, I just recalled an interesting difference between autistic and allistic persons—at least, I am reasonably sure this is a difference between autistic and allistic persons. I've heard folks reference studies which say that humans will reason why they took an action after they took it. That is, they could be tricked into doing something and then internally reason after the fact why they did it even if the actual impetus for the action was wholly external. They might seem like liars, but apparently they believe their own lies (let's not get into the whole allistic persons gaslighting autistic persons by denying our experience of reality because we'll be here all night).

I'm not saying autistic persons don't do this at all, but when I read that study about "people/humans", my immediate response was, that has got to be mostly allistic people. It really seems like they exist and they act and *then* they think, while autistic people think and then we exist and hopefully we can pilot our body to do what we want from there.

You'll almost never catch me giving any sort of cover for persons who choose to engage in behaviorism to program the sort of external shell they want their kid to be, but maybe to an allistic person behaviorism is done with the assumption we do not have internal thoughts and feelings.

Anyway, how did past-Me get around not knowing what their favorite book or movie or whatever was? I kept copious lists in the form of whatever spreadsheet program existed back then (I want to say it was called something like, Microsoft Works?).

This lasted about as long as MySpace did. I lost a computer (in the sense of the hard drive being irrecoverable and not having back-ups), and I never went back to the same level of meticulousness. I embrace the void and if someone asks me for a favorite I just explain something like, I have no idea but I really like this one that I can recall.

Learning about Arrow's Impossibility Theorem and the general struggle of ranking things consistently and past-Me disagreeing with the ranking of present-Me even without any new memories coming to play contributed to me losing motivation to keep track of everything, also.

Now though! I started using the Obsidian note-taking apps to keep which form more like your own personal wiki to keep track of your life and the web of linked and tagged notes is so satisfying and I don't have to worry about ranking which book or band or movie or whatever is the best one to be able to answer the inevitable question and just accept that I know about some of the ones I like!

What, you don't maintain pages and pages of notes and spreadsheets to be able to answer the "small talk" questions that you actually are interested in? Guess your autism is different than mine lol

This inability to remember things I love is one reason why I feel so much comfort from collecting things, by the way. I may forget its existence, but if it is on a shelf in front of me, then future-Me is likely to notice it from time to time.

Wow, this was way longer than I expected. I believe I started this to talk about how I get really excited to talk about my analyses of why something affects me and how that can be generalized and what that may imply whereas my therapist wants to talk about just the part where it is affecting me and how to stop it.

Now look, I *super* exist. I think and everything. But it is much more "real" for me to treat myself like a character and try to figure out everything there is to figure out than it is to actually engage with what is happening. Once I figure everything out, I'll have a strategy or process or algorithm to employ. Until then, the process of figuring things out is more real to me than the things I am figuring out.

Thanks for reading!

[xoteajays]

Just stumbled upon your blog and I'm so intrigued by Nezumi, she looks so cool! If I may ask, what's she like? What is her personality like,her hobbies, etc?

luckily for you anony, i am still wildly obsessed with nezumi and she's still at the forefront of my mind pushing every other oc out of the way lmao.

nezumi is based off the dormouse character in alice in wonderland. so i took a bit of personality from that, with her being close with hatter and being incredibly tired all the time. as an in-world excuse for it, she has undiagnosed hypersomnia which causes her to be constantly tired, she’s almost always yawning if not full on dozing. as for further personality traits, she’s normally quiet, is pretty attentive which in turn makes her pretty smart and surprises people who thought she was just skirting along through games on everyone else’s coat tails, she’s got a major sweet-tooth, and has a bit of trauma around being previously homeless and losing both her parents (something which she blames herself for). she has her snarky moments though. i’ve unfortunately dropped a lot of her more violent-leaning moments because they didn’t end up fitting in with the plot, but know that she has the capacity for it.

hobbies back in reality, that spilled over into the borderlands, she’s an excellent player of hanafuda (which helped her win her second game, a 3 of diamonds) and she loves flowers. in her room at the beach, she has flowers stuck on her walls; in the real world, she collects small cheap plants and presses flowers in books. she also collects stamps and stickers. she doesn’t have a whole lot of hobbies because she doesn’t have much money to spending on things.

also i haven’t got to mention it much, but she has a bit of a ‘catchphrase’ in saying ‘i’m lucky, you know?’, and she really actually is.

[delphinidin4]

oh my god there are so many of them.

The current DSM actually says that in order to have PTSD you have to have survived a life-threatening situation. That alone is bullshit. And that's the PROFESSIONAL LITERATURE. You can imagine what other shit people (both professionals and nonprofessionals) believe....

Not realizing that a bunch of smaller incidents can give you PTSD

Not realizing that most cases of PTSD are from multiple incidents (Complex PTSD instead of Simple PTSD)

Not realizing that most flashbacks aren't actually like sensory hallucinations: instead of seeing and hearing the event, sufferers are more likely to just be overwhelmed by the emotions of the event, like fury, despair, shame, terror, etc. These are called "emotional flashbacks" and are the rule, not the exception

Not realizing how wildly common trauma and PTSD actually are in our society, how much they're underdiagnosed, and how few therapists actually know how to treat trauma because it's such a delicate operation

THE NUMBER OF THERAPISTS who will tell you they know how to treat trauma when they have NO fucking clue

People believing that PTSD only comes from being a soldier and/or sexual assault (it always throws me when I mention that I have PTSD and somebody goes, "Oh, you served?" ..... I wanna be like, "Yeah, I served LEWKS")

People believing that if you can just get people with PTSD to talk about their trauma that they'll feel better... not realizing that it's actually much more likely to trigger them and make the trauma response WORSE (this is why trauma therapy is so tricky)

People not realizing that Yes, your parents just kind of constantly being low-level douches to you throughout your childhood CAN traumatize you, and yes, I DO think it's possible you have PTSD, and yes that WAS a person responding to a trigger not just "overreacting like a snowflake" and oh my god.

People not understanding that a lot of the reason why members of minority groups seem (to the majority) to be "overreacting" to potentially offensive material is actually a fucking TRAUMA RESPONSE from being traumatized so often in the past by racism, sexism, homophobia, etc.

People have some really weird ideas about what counts as a trigger? Like, they've got it that loud noises are bad, and sometimes they understand that the discussion of certain topics is upsetting. But they just don't get it when I have to explain that I CANNOT hand-wash dishes or I'll start crying. Or that for a long time I couldn't watch ANY media in which a pet could potentially be in danger (even after my friends looked it up on DoesTheDogDie and assured me that the pets were fine). Or that I start having anxiety attacks every time I think my roommate might be on the phone with the insurance company.

And if you describe something as a trigger that doesn't match what THEY think a trigger SHOULD be, they start telling you that "you shouldn't use the word 'trigger' because that's harming to people with REAL ptsd uwu" and I"m like, ???!!!???? LIKE ME, YOU ASSHOLE?

and sooooo much more. I got into an argument online a few months ago when I was telling people that they needed to stop gatekeeping the use of the word "trigger" because it could potentially keep people with undiagnosed PTSD from enacting self-care or getting a diagnosis, and PEOPLE KEPT DOWNVOTING ME. A PERSON WITH PTSD. FOR BEING UNSYMPATHETIC TO PEOPLE WITH PTSD.

rrrrrrrrrrrrraaaaaaaaauuuuuuugggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhh

Unusual Discourse topics that make me GO OFF:

People freaking out about cousin marriages

People acting like Twilight is actively harmful

People feeling the uncontrollable need to "correct" one another's English

People not understanding how PTSD works and preaching to other people about it based on misconceptions

Fatphobic people acting like they primarily care about fat people's health