#but yeah how ableist do you have to be to blame neurodivergence for literally being a mother......which is what you committed to.....

[am-i-the-asshole-official]

AITA for threatening to become a girl's step dad to troll her into blocking me and stop dragging me in a group chat ? Jenny (23F) blew up because I (24NB) said she'd be a shitty social worker bc of her specific autism symptoms + class bg. My gf (45F) said it was warranted because of how  overwhelmed i got by the wall of text with triggering details of my abuse. I never told my GF that the fight started because Jenny called me a gold digger. I also never mentioned that I ended it an hour later by posting pics of Jenny's mom in the chat, ignoring her ranting and discussing the vacancy left by her dead dad*, and how i could fill said vacancy. 😬😬😬 Might of gone too far with this one.

Backstory: I lived with Jenny when I was houseless indefinitely. She only let me stay for two weeks because it would be too "distracting" to her studies. Jenny was incredibly rich, didn't work, and her parents paid her rent for a 2 bedroom. She admitted she got rejected from every grad school she applied to except for the one her mom was in charge of. Her mom bought her a condo in the city the school was in. She kept asking me how she should decorate it, completely ignorant to how uncomfortable this made me and my other friends. Jenny was oblivious constantly to how she made others feel. She was actually the most incompetent person I've ever met in terms of comforting other, always tone deaf and completely absorbed with her own, single traumatic event. She made constant jokes about the abuser I was fleeing and even compared this stalked to a /serial killer/ documentary she watched, but never EVER showed any signs of internalizing how I almost lost my life to another person, how that might affect me or even just bum me out. Seriously, I've never met someone else who was so incapable of even being sensitive to issues that were /EXTREMELY SERIOUS/. Forget comforting, the stuff she routinely said to me and my other friends to try to cheer us up was beyond degrading. It was wearing on me a lot.

Jenny herself was neurodivergent. She often said her autism prevented her from understanding the feelings others had, reading their expressions, and tolerating crying or loud noise-- she forbid her musician roommate from doing both. None of those mean shes a worthless person, but all of those things would make someone a horrible therapist or social worker. Oh my God, literally every time I talked about my recent trauma, she would talk about herself and then blame her autism when I told her it just wasn't helping.

The final piece of this was I had a nervous breakdown and screamed at her over discord that she was a shit friend and needed to give up on social work, for like an hour. NOT MY PROUDEST, but I ALMOST DIED. I was living with her because SOMEONE WAS STALKING ME. and I would have liked to not have my abuse JOKED about. HOW DID JENNY RESPOND!? She began dragging me, through the mud, in the group chat, for, dating, an, older, woman, who, paid, for, my, air bnb, because, !!!she!!! wouldn't let me live with her for more than a week. I was HOMELESS. It became all about "OP you are such a b*tch, you are with a woman twice your age and she pays for everything now but you are still a miserable and angry person. You are so blah blah blah you are an ableist, you said I can't become a social worker bc of autism blah blah blah you have major major issues, Go back your rich granny and leech off of her you useless, fucked up little gold digger."

U_U Then, she started graphically describing how I deserved my abuse, so I shrimply began to troll. And yes, I pulled out my magnum oppus like fucking playing blue eyes white dragon, oh yeah I slipped her a pristine Jenny's mom facebook photo and said "Hey you never said your mom was so cute. Maybe, I could leech off her next and become your new dad." Yes, her dad died.* She blocked me immediately. Its OK. It was knives out for Jenny as soon as my GF gifted me a pair of $700 Isabel Marant shoes** , the most EXPENSIVE thing ive ever owned in my whole life, and Jenny saw me excited and called her mom to buy her a pair. It's, absolutely OK, if I am the asshole. I wear my crown of thorns, judas that I am, but I really, really think Jenny was being cruel. *he died 18 years ago ** the shoes are no more because i fell into my gf's rich friend's koi pond

[arabnico]

just want to know what’s your opinion lmao I saw you saying solangelo is one of your notps and you didn’t explain so I was just wondering

i guess that’s fine. for me, and that’s been my opinion ever since i first read the books, solangelo is an ableist ship at its core that portrays a really unhealthy dynamic and power imbalance that’s very harmful especially if you take the books’ audience (marginalized children, in that case especially disabled/neurodivergent children and children living in abusive households [not calling the ship abusive. don’t take it that way.]) in mind.

there are a lot of issues with the ship, i do understand it’s “harder” to notice/grasp them if it doesn’t affect you directly. you just can’t deny will is written as a savior character in canon (i’ll get to fanon later). will is repeatedly portrayed to ignore nico’s agency/own choices in regards of his medical needs, is very forceful on nico when he pushes him away in that same context. his phrase or whatever “doctor’s orders” is distasteful and has,, weird and ableist connotations to it. there is an inherent power imbalance that comes with the ship because dating someone who’s ‘responsible’ to provide you with professional medical care is a brinch in power balance and poses a dynamic that makes it look like someone is in some aspect dependent on the other. furthermore, will is shown to cross nico’s boundaries (especially in tho, if i recall well) and like. reading this as a kid who was living in an abusive household (and still is) was very painful and triggering [again, not calling the ship abusive]. plus, will blamed nico for his alienation and made him feel like it’s something that he made up in his own head or whatever which is,, very patronizing to say the least. i am aware of how some people interpreted that particular point in fanon but i see it as... very questionable and just weird. i mean let’s pretend yeah nico imagined his alienation and being pushed away by everyone. wouldn’t that be due to, as his autistic coding in canon implies, his blindness to social cues? it doesn’t matter if it happened or not (it did.) it matters that nico felt the consequences of it and severely suffered through it mentally. dismissing it otherwise is very patronizing and straight up invalidating nico’s trauma which is,, i don’t have to tell you,, bad. nico’s been fending for his own since he was a ten year old child he really doesn’t need someone to hold his hand and kiss his scar after getting a shot or whatever. yeah he shouldn’t have HAD to fend for himself but denying his autonomy in favor of making a ship look like caretaker with a weird savior complex x character with literal and figurative scars to fix is plain ableist idk what to say. also, i just think the implications and connotations of making your first canon gay character, who suffered canonically through heavy internalized homophobia and felt like he had to fix himself somehow, date a healer is... let’s just keep it at distasteful instead of messed up. again, imagine the young gay people you wrote nico FOR reading that. is that the gay rep you praise and want to be given? i am aware tower of nero tried to mend some of those points but it,, just didn’t feel genuine and like the book itself isn’t free of some issues regarding it. imo.

fanon is a whole other story lol. still bad though. most fan content is based on will being a savior and fixing nico or whatever, infantilizing him in favor of highlighting will as a savior hero that cured him completely or whatever. also in those pieces it always features blaming nico for his trauma and everything else and painting him as someone who’s a threat to themself and cannot be left alone to take care of themself like. it’s just disgusting imo. nico is not a child i don’t know what to do to make you all understand that. will is not responsible for nico’s recovery it’s not his job to constantly repeatedly make sure he ate and slept nico didn’t sign up for having will as a nurse but for a boyfriend. nico is responsible for his own healing process he sets the pace you can’t force someone to do something in regards of their medical needs if they don’t agree with it that’s just stepping over boundaries. nico is in charge of his own needs and agency please understand that. personally, i would go as far as to say that i think that making any kind of fan content for the ship is... questionable because how do you acknowledge that the ship is ableist at its core and still feel comfortable catering for it content-wise? maybe it’s just my brain but i just couldn’t do it myself and couldn’t live with myself if i did, it’s just when it comes to consistency with what i believe in and defend and call out. as i said that last point was personal.

i am well aware you can blame most of this on bad writing or ‘out of character’-ness but like. come on lol. you can blame it all on richard if you want to you can’t ignore it completely and it also caused the creation of fan content that is very ableist like idek what to say anymore. anyway that’s very long lol i hope it’s understandable and i was able to get my point across.

[aether-asterisk]

wait hold up.......is she.....blaming autism for the extra weight that EVERY mother gets during/after pregnancy??? regardless of whether or not her child is autistic?????? she's literally blaming autism for something it has no correlation to whatsoever wtf.........

It’s this type of stuff right here that keeps me from being able to relate to parents of autistic children. The comments all say “I didn’t sign up for this.” Well you know what? You did. I did. The moment you conceived your child, you signed up for whatever that child would grow to be. You think it’s hard for YOU? Imagine how hard it is for THEM. You feel sorry for yourself because you “wake up to screaming every single day”? Feel sorry for the human being who wakes up screaming every day, because they’re crying for a reason. You don’t want to change your child or feed your child beyond toddlerhood? Then WHY did you become a parent? Why would you take the 1 in 68 chance, if you don’t want the chances of having an autistic child? If you resent your child this much, go fuck yourself.

[brightlotusmoon]

So, I got an anonymous ask about how Autistics in our thirties look at terms like ‘Aspergers’ and ‘high and low functioning labels’ and see outdated terms that really shouldn’t be used anymore due to how the community is desperately trying to bring everything in together as a cohesive whole and to, you know, not separate ourselves into bullshit like Mild and Moderate since it is literally All Actually Autism, it has been since the ancient Greeks gave us the word, it has been since people were people. There is no longer a user or need for separation in “having autism” because, hey, we all have a target on our heads, it’s the same target, we’re considered wrong and stolen and diseased for existing, and being on this gorgeous rainbow spectrum is hard enough knowing autistic culture, autistic history, knowing the fact that Dr Asperger may have possibly been a Nazi, the fact that Dr Kanner wanted us dead, the fact that Dr Lovaas taught the world how to abuse and misuse us with ABA therapies. The fact that Dr Baron-Cohen still thinks we don’t have minds or empathy of our own. The fact that Suzanne Wright compared us to lepers. The fact that Autism Speaks wants us gone in general, that a cure means the death of our selves.

Do people know those names anyway?

I was gonna post the anonymous ask but it turned into internalized ableist eugenics with apologetic “Aspie Supremacy” bullshit, so nah.

Autism IS autism. We are not high or low, mild or severe, one doctor’s term over the other. We are all of that, and we are in a war that has been fought physically as well as socially - my mentors and friends have scars from neurodivergent “autism paaarents” who were frightened of autistic adults for saying that hurting autistic children was terrible. Did I mention that my main mentor K coined the term Neurodivergence, because she actually did.

There are books that need to be read, there are stories that need to be told, and they are violent and visceral and are full of tears and screams. But I’m worried that the young Autistics and the newly diagnosed are less concerned with knowing how deeply and powerfully the older Autistics have been fighting literally for decades just so they could be out and proud without someone swinging a knife at them. I’ve only been out since 2013 and I already feel battle weary, worn out, angry enough to roar, I can barely imagine what it is like for my mentors at the decade mark, the fifteen year mark of striving to create a cohesive community. It’s really fucking hard. It’s hard going in screaming circles with Martyr Mommies who think their kids can’t function. It’s hard to listen to politicians who want to deny your ability to exist genetically. And it doesn’t help when someone wants to literally fight you over outdated phrases that are old ways of thinking, and now it’s parallel to so many ways that so many people are struggling to hold on to their rights.

So yeah, I am bothered just a little - just a teeny bit - when someone actively gets in my face to insist on calling themselves “Aspergian” or “HFA” and I have no one to blame but myself for feeling uncomfortable, because all I see is a history of kids being told they’re subhuman growing into adults being told they’re subhuman, and it is all the exact same thing.

Oh! Oh! I need to quote a friend who made a brilliant point about personal words: "Ugh. I know some people who still use Aspie but it’s more like a sensory thing… they like the way the word feels on their tongue more than “autistic” or “autie.” TOTALLY FUCKING DIFFERENT REASON. I fucking HATE that assholes like this are making it harder for the friends of mine who literally only have a preference because of how the word sounds/feels. *wishes to take a baseball bat to these people’s joints and possibly tender parts…. joints first though*" I’m done. I’m done.

*crawls under rainbow, takes nap*

(Small note: I’m a bisexual part Asian ethnic Russian Jew born with cerebral palsy and we’re also trying to work out the functioning labels in the cerebral palsy community; so hey, if I see any eugenics apologetics the claws will come out)