#BUT I PROMIISSEE IT'S ALL OKAYYY AND YOU ARE VERY VALID FOR FEELING THISS WAY

[anulithots]

hi hi hi! unsure if you'd prefer I'd listen and offer support, or give my half-useful advice that may or may not be helpful... so I'll do both!

first: it's completely okay to feel like that. rejection sensitivity is NOT fun and pretty much messes with emotions for wayyyy tooo longgg over small, small things. But it's okay to feel that way. The best I can say for it is that sometimes you have to just let the emotion be until it goes away... even though that can take a while. (and is just absolute pain and misery) Attempting to get rid of it makes it worse in my experience. (for me it got unhealthy very fast).

Nowadays I find it helpful to 'observe my internal feeling sensation as if it were the outside world?' ... like the physical sensations of the feeling without any labels as to whether it is good or bad. ALSO distractions. They won't fix everything and it's important not to let distractions get unhealthy (i'm a hypocrite when I say this but in theory...) but IT"S OKAY to distract yourself from the immediate emotion. Emotional regulation is HARD but the best thing about this confusing internal world is that no one else can see it. No one sees it so nothing you do in your head is being judged or can be 'right' or 'wrong'.

(Even though I've mentally screamed to all the mind readers, no one has reacted to that yet, so it seems our brains are all private yee! /j)

The mental coping mechanisms you use are yours and you can do whattevvverrr youuu wantt, have fun with it even! (It will still be hard some days but thinking about it like play is easier.)

And I'll just note here that.... IDK if the things I do are 'healthy' or not, or if they make any sense, or if 'putting all sense of myself into my oc's so I dont' have to feel anything and have distance from them' is problematic... but it is helpful as of now. (the last one can be dangerous if you ever get writers block/can't write sadly. It's like all my mental stability crumbled as of now. Still learning I guess.)

Please do what works for you and take care of yourself <3

Er, not sure if that made any sense, I wish you all the warm fuzzy floaty happy stimmy feelings. (and hyperfixated joy)

ANd as far as the whole 'what if I'm not [x] and if I don't belong here and I only stimmed after I found out" <--- because YES I UNDERSTAND THIS I WAS SO AFRAID OF THIS FOR A GOOD COUPLE OF MONTHS.

If you find yourself functioning differently, having different needs, some things being easier and some things being so much harder -and even if none of that is true - you still deserve to find lifestyles and mechanisms that make life easier. It hurts no one to take care of yourself I promise.

And the DSM-5 is for free online if you want to take a look at that. (It helps satisfy the brain to make it stop being like 'well what if you're just doing it for attention')

also the stimmy thing, YES I WAS SO WORRIED THAT I WAS JUST DOING IT BECAUSE I WAS COPYING.

until I was like... but isn't it easier now to be in public environments? aren't I happier? don't I get less tired if I allow myself to stim?

ALso there are plenty of ways to do it! I used to try to hum songs in my head, same part of the same song, over and over and over again with a... strained vibe to it, just to keep myself okay during school because I hated it. (there's a whole list of different types somewhere, but what happens sometimes is that society says that the children must be polite and behaved so you'd stop stimming, or just stim in your head/inconspicuous ways) It's stimulating or grounding yourself, and is completely and totally healthy and okay and I'm sending burning pitchforks to whoever scolded you /j

oh random accectdote I'm including in the 'yes I can relate to this and we're in this together and I understand and am sending heart emojis sort of way': If I remember correctly, the first irl writing meeting was a month? after my 16th birthday, and this was still in the days where I needed to cling to happiness for as long as possible because I didn't know how long the happy period would last. I didn't want to go back to normalcy and trying to grasp at abstract feelings became my entire life and it was sooo awfulll don't recommend. SO much dissatisfaction that wallows into self-hatred. (In fact ANuli exists just to hold the self-hatred for me.....)

ANyways! After writing meeting, which I did not plan well, because I'm awful at it, and I haven't met up with friends before that for yearrrrrsssss. So 'it went on for three hours and we were too loud' according to my mom. ALl my shreds of happiness I had been clinging to slipped away and I spiraled from there. Crazy how such a small comment can do that, but it does and its fine.

gifs!!

Hope everything is doing wellll!!!

Okay, tumblr is my ‘safe space’ other than my room, so I’m going to talk and anyone who wants to can listen. Aka all the stuff I’m gonna say will take up a lot of room so take a look under the ‘keep reading’ if you care enough to lol

There are a couple of JIC trigger warnings: mentions of church/religious settings (not talked about in a negative way), doctors, uhh there’s a time where I talk about someone yelling at me?

without further ado, here's my vent for the day.

I stress out so much over liking anything posted by autistic people. I’m so sorry, I have literally nothing against you, I just freak out for no reason cause once I heard someone on YouTube say ‘if you aren’t autistic your opinion is completely invalid here’ and I’ve taken it to heart 🥲

I will go to like a post but then go ‘wait… that explicitly says it’s about autistic people/autism… I can’t! I don’t count!’ (And I am so salty about stuff like that cause I’ve thought to myself ‘well what if I’m agreeing about something that they approve of?’ But it still isn’t enough to justify it to myself.) (again, I HAVE NOTHING AGAINST Y'ALL)

I was considering asking my doctor if I should get evaluated for stuff but I also really don’t want to because what if they just say ‘nope, you’re normal. Why’d you even bother?’ And I KNOW I’m not neurotypical because I have GAD (Generalized Anxiety Disorder) and there is no WAY it’s normal to feel like your entire day has been completely and utterly ruined by someone not telling you clearly that if you didn’t go eat the leftovers of your family that you wanted, it’d be passed on to the others.

Oops, that’s not where that was meant to go, but I’m keeping it.

My original point BEING, I have a feeling I don’t JUST have GAD, I wanna get evaluated for Autism and ADHD, but the imposter syndrome (can I even use that here? I’m not autistic so does that mean it’s… rejection or something?) is too much and I’m gonna wimp out of bringing it up to the doctors. I’m fairly certain I have ADHD tho, cause everything I’ve watched I’ve basically agreed with. (And yeah, the internet isn’t good source material, but there are some good people on there.)

Also I'm so worried that I'm just copying people. Like, I didn't used to stim until AFTER I learned about autism and ADHD, so what's to say that I'm not just copy pasting? And that's not genuine and it's probably also rude.

Oh and on the topic of being too sensitive for my own good, let’s talk about how I deal with people scolding me. (Other than my parents.)

I genuine want to cry any time it happens. I had some pretty bad experiences of that kind of thing (maybe like 3-4 years ago?) and they happen to be some of the only clear memories I have of pandemic times cause everything kinda blurs together from that time. The clearest one and the one that affected (is that the right one?) me the most was when some of the neighborhood kids got in trouble for hurting each other from a tree in my sibling’s best friend’s yard. I was a witness, but I wasn’t paying a ton of attention to the situation. The sibling’s best friend’s mom asked me to tell my version of the story, so I did. I tried my best not to twist anything and to make it clear that I wasn’t sure about anything. Without me noticing (cause my back was turned) one of the kids mom’s (the one who had done the potential hurting) came up behind us and started yelling at me for ‘lying for no reason’ and ‘being rude’ and how ‘her kid would never do anything wrong, so if I wanted to go tell lies for fun she would go and tell my parents.’ Y’know, the kind of thing you tell semi-kids.

So from then on, I tend to have to choke back tears when not my parents scold me.

Another time (this week actually) was when I was scolded for acting my age at church. Now, I’m not a CHILD, so I see where the person was coming from. But I was also having fun with my friends. We were joking around, and one of the old people came up and scolded us. I thought I was fine till I got home and then realized that stimming in any way, even in my room, now felt childish and horrible and like I shouldn’t be doing it. (I’ve gotten over this, I’m back to normal. Ish.)

So yeah. I guess I take things too seriously? And it REALLY frustrates me. Like I can’t just let things go, can I? No, cause that’d be EASY.

Also, don’t you just hate it when you feel the urge to stim (hand flapping specifically in this case) but your muscles/wrist is in pain for no explicable reason?