#and clothes I'll have to measure and pattern all on my own for its bizarre little proportions

[antisocialxconstruct]

finally brainstorming...........

[cleolinda]

Okay, I am having an issue I can only attribute to The Autism, and I am curious as to whether anyone else vibes with this:

I have an extreme aversion to wearing brown clothing. Like to the point where I started to wonder if I was persecuted by colonial Puritans or steampunk pilots in another life or some shit. It has only developed since I became an adult; I had a perfectly witchy brown and black maxi dress I wore as a teenager, and a pair of shoes I got compliments on all the time. Brown is fine in nature, in decor, on animals, on other people, on anything that isn't me. Love a good neutral (can lean slightly warm) brown eyeshadow; looks great with my complexion. Brown eyes of all shades are beautiful and I love them (I have green). Don't drink coffee but it's not brown's fault. Buy me a chocolate factory and I'll live in it. No real fight to pick with the mere existence of brown.

I wear black. Accessories, shoes, purses, jewelry, wardrobe staples, whatever: always black for the last 20+ years, never brown. It's like I decided that if I always stuck to black, everything would always coordinate, and it just... spiraled from there?

When I went to pick up my new glasses a couple weeks ago, there was some kind of mix-up, and the frames weren't black; they were a dark, almost-black brown with light amber mottling: tortoiseshell. "I HATE TORTOISESHELL" I blurted out (once the sales associate wasn't present. Nobody is paying him enough to deal with that kind of weirdness). I really did not know that I hated tortoiseshell at all until it came up when I was first browsing frames three weeks prior, and I blurted out, "I HATE TORTOISESHELL." I did not know this about myself! It might not have even been true until that moment! It's not the pattern; it's purely the very yellow/orange-leaning shade of brown, on me. Tortoiseshell is lovely on other people! It's aesthetically cromulent! I reacted like someone had offered me a tarantula. I don't know.

I have now reacted so bizarrely--I've spat out "I HATE BROWN" on previous occasions as well--that I'm trying to unpack what the fuck is going on. My best theory at this point is that it has something to do with a neurodivergent aversion to yellow, which I REALLY REALLY HAVE. (Again, yellow is fine wherever doing its own thing, love a gently yellow flower, but I do not want to wear it and it kind of hurts my eyes a little if it's too much. Like I almost feel queasy.) I keep trying to stress-test this aversion in my mind--what shade of brown would I wear? A sweater that's such a dark and neutral brown that it's almost black? A really pretty "brown sugar" color like the eyeshadow I like so much? "Redwood"? "Raw umber"? "Beaver" (........)?

My secondary theory is that it might come down to some kind of involuntary self-assertion thing. "I SAID I WEAR BLACK, WHY AREN'T YOU LISTENING TO ME??" I think... that's a good bit what happened with the glasses. Although I really do react very strongly to the sight of the amber bits (on me).

Anyway, I am usually a very measured, even stoic person with this kind of thing--to the point where I don't stand up for myself enough--so here we are, trying to figure this out. Do you have any kind of vehement aversion like this? Not to something rational (I can't deal with seafood and I stand by that), but like, "I jump back from this like a vampire from garlic and I have no idea why"?