#but anyways they were like if you think chronically mentally i'll people are abusive because of their illness ur an ableist piece of trash!!

[shenyaanigans]

you ever see a post that sounds REALLY good and you're super on board with it until one bit right at the end that has you go, "hey! that's a fucked up thing to say!" and so you check the original post and find that it's gone and then you go to the blog and notice even more dog whistles about it, and then you go to write a rebuttal on the post (bc you're me and you can't shut the fuck up) and then you go to add tags after and you see what the op wrote for their tags and you're like, "oh. i see. i get it now. this is not in good faith at all." and then you just delete your reply and make your own post where you talk about the experience of it all

[wawawawawawawawawawawawawa]

the amount of times i Do This must be a joke at this point but here i am. doing it once more. izaya's highschool videogame SCREAMS "i just found out i have aspd and i am NOT taking it well." and i shall explain how

a preface: wrt "how did he know in high school, don't you have to be 18?" you do.... with the dsm guidelines. japan, iirc, uses a conbination of the dsm and icd to diagnose mental illnesses, and the age stipulation isn't in the icd. also, shinra could have told him, and lbr shinra wouldnt care about strictly adhering to the age thing

anyway i went thru and highlighted different parts of the videogame's text, so i can easier explain which part means what. i'll primarily be focusing on the chronic boredom associated with aspd- since izaya's game deals with patience, most musings in it will be related to that boredom. but the boredom, especially izaya's, IS important, as its the boredom that drives him to do what he does. to be what he is.

(shoutout to miyukiwinter for the scan)

so... the red bit. this relates to izaya's worldview of the need to keep evolving to escape the mundane, and it not mattering if you aim high or low. now at this point, izaya was solidly in some shady shit and clearly on the path of the low aim. but the thing is, about aspd... the boredom is all consuming. you'll do ANYTHING to not be bored. i've seen people say they developed substance abuse problems to escape the boredom, and i confess... i've done it too. it truly is THAT bad

i say all this because... izaya will never be able to stop going lower, and lower, and lower. he's fated to fall forever. maybe he wouldve been able to brush his behavior off as teenage craziness, but with a diagnosis like aspd it becomes increadingly obvious that there is no "oh, i'll mellow out once i reach my 20s." it's not going to happen, at least, not without great effort. and lets be real, nobody has any faith in aspd's recovery rates, less so in the early 2010s, so izaya upon diagnosis would see NO FUTURE for himself. no escape from the cycle. he's trapped.

the blue bits are a bit more vauge, but the undertainty turning to loss evokes the next stage after the initial shock of diagnosis: grief. and make no mistake, there IS a grieving process with mental health diagnoses. you go from being shocked and scared, to being depressed and numb.

but there's... another layer to this, with aspd. you see it with cluster b disorders in general, but aspd is HUGE in the pop culture zeitgeist

the layer is, the idea that People Like That don't feel emotions. that any emotional display is false and an explicit ploy to mainpulate someone

and when this inevitably ends up untrue, you might start to feel... odd... about feeling those emotions people say you can't feel. and one of the biggest emotions aspd gets that with, is fear and by extension, anxiety.

some aspd people genuinely do feel reduced fear! but it's far from being a diagnostic criteria, and aspd can actually be comorbid with anxiety disorders. but scientific facts and wider culture rarely match up, so the idea persists

so izaya might have started to think.... was he ever truly anxious? or worried? was he really more rotten than people thought; was he just mainpulating people the whole time? does he really not feel anxiety? was his nervousness over things like shinra leaving him or hell, this diagnosis, rendered null and void?

and then we reach the teal portion.... despair

(just a sidenote, tumblr has no teal color option so it'll just be blue)

in this sense, "the hole" refers to the endless downward spiral, and his diagnosis- but not just having it. no, "the hole" most likely refers to the moment izaya developed it in the first place.

who are you, if you thought you were in control your whole life, but you found out that the reason you do the things you do were because of foeces beyond your control? who are you now, having a label you know will cause everyone to see you as nothing but a stereotype?

why was he still alive, suffering like this? what point is it to be alive, controlled by something you can't fight, forced to make your life worse and worse and worse, until you die young?

so now what? who did this to him?

in the game, the hatred is towards "the player." and honestly this could have multiple different meanings when applied to izaya's own life

does he hate god? was he raised religious, his father being a christian, and was this what made him lose faith? what loving god would condemn someone to suffer like this?

does he hate his parents? after all, it was their genetics that passed this down, their upbringing that nurtured it, their neglect that made him the way he was. is it their fault?

or... does he hate himself, for being the way that he is? for having it in the first place, for not being able to overcome it, for having such a bad reaction to it?

for being too cowardly to kill himself?

which brings us to the final segment. awareness.

he says outright, the game is depicting the player's life. in the game itself, this ties into his mockery of players, but in a meta sense, it could be a hidden admission that it's depicting his life

especially the talk of meaningless games- fooling around with nakura creating small gangs, betting pools, and his eventual adult pastimes of messing with people. is his life enriched? no, it's merely occupied, and he knows it. he might have repressed it as an adult, but here, in high school, at this moment, he knows.

and if he can never truly alleviate his boredom, never truly be fufilled, then he can act like he's in control all he wants, but he's no better than a man falling in a hole.

[newhologram]

Some say that everyone is "mentally 3 years younger" because of all the time we "lost" during the pandemic (which is still not actually over). I don't disagree; that can be a lot of arrested development for people who were teens in 2020 and adults now. I think of my nephew, who started kindergarten online. But also: millions of spoonies "lost" years way before covid, all around you. In isolation. While families, friends, and society abandoned them. While I do feel stunted in many ways because of "losing" 10 years to the intense onset of a higher level of disability (while already badly traumatized and mentally ill), I think maybe a redefinition of all of this is needed. Just because a spoonie's experience isn't the norm and they had a very different way of "growing up" doesn't mean there was only a loss. I feel disconnected to most (non-disabled, neurotypical) people I meet who are my age. We've had very different life paths and live so differently as adults. I often form close bonds with people who turn out to be near the age I was when my hourglass froze. I don't know, it's hard to be concise and precise when describing how I feel about it. I think I'll feel like I'm in my 20's forever, because I mostly spent it surviving some really bad stuff. Chronic illness, disability, grief, abuse, isolation almost killed me so many times. I feel like a living ghost, like I'm in the wrong timeline. Do I feel like I "lost" a decade? Do I still grieve, because I never got to have a "normal" life? Yes. Do I also feel grateful for what I gained and how I learned to survive? Do I also wonder fearfully who I would be today if I hadn't gone through this? Yes. It's the anger at having my youth taken from me competing with the gratitude that I was able to survive to become this version of me, who I actually like. Not perfect or pure, but also okay with not being so. Even though I still have a lot of health issues wearing me down, I feel a weird sense of like "okay, NOW I get to experience my 20's" but what does that even mean? If I break the hourglass, it's meaningless anyway. The sand just falls all over the place, there's no "gap" in time that was "lost" by being sick. It's all filled up with the same sand. I want to stick my hands in it even if the glass cuts me. I don't think it'll make me feel like an adult or even a person. But the sand is there. It wasn't wasted. My youth wasn't wasted just because I had to spend it surviving. My life isn't a waste just because I spend it mostly at home, taking care of my body. It's not wasted if I never get to see my dreams come to life. It's not wasted if I'm only able to carve out a simple kind of fulfillment. Sometimes it feels impossible to find the richness in that sand, when I can't access medical care, when I'm really sick, when I'm frustrated by trying to coordinate hang outs with able-bodied people who need constant reminders of my limitations. Other times the sand is warm and comforting. I feel like as long as I stay wrapped up, I'll be okay.