#hannah gadsby something special netflix

[thequeereview]

Exclusive Interview: comedian Hannah Gadsby on Something Special "from Nanette to this show you're witnessing someone who's overcome trauma”

Emmy and Peabody Award-winning comedian Hannah Gadsby follows their acclaimed Netflix comedy specials Nanette and Douglas with their aptly named latest special, Hannah Gadsby: Something Special. Although they admit they’re not a fan of com-coms, Gadsby’s typically smart set has a “feel-good” vibe, focusing on their relationship with Jenney Shamash (also the show’s producer and director), the…

[tora-the-cat]

guy who's only ever watched John Mulany and Bo Burnham comedy specials after watching Baby J: I'm getting a lot of Bo Burnham vibes from this

[plottingalong]

GO WATCH SOMETHING SPECIAL (HANNAH GADSBY'S NEW NETFLIX SPECIAL) RIGHT THE FUCK NOW

[sugarcoatednightshade]

Yeah, I feel the same way about Stephen King. I haven’t read a lot by him, but I refuse to read more because what I have read just feels mean spirited and cruel. Which is awkward because I do really like horror, and he’s often the first writer people bring up when I mention that.

I’m glad other people can enjoy his works, but they’re really not for me. We all have different limits. An now I understand Pratchett’s work from a different perspective, so I’ll be more conscientious of recommending it in the future!

Just curious, but why don’t you like Pratchett? Ik his writing style is very distinct and not for everyone, but from what I’ve read of him so far I feel like he has a good grasp of the human condition. (In that all of his characters have strong characterization and his stories typically involve them confronting and oftentimes overcoming societal adversities)

A lot of his writing feels unkind to me. I get the impression I'm expected to be laughing, but instead I'm just feeling sorry for whichever character is being discussed.

The only example my brain can think of right this second is the thing about Cheery having a gender, where it's described as "in the little bullet head the thought had arisen: why not me?"

Like, cheers (heh) for her for having the thought, that's awesome, but why does she have a "little bullet head?" What would that even mean? I don't know, and maybe I'm reading it wrong fundamentally, but it almost kind of sounds like a "little bullet head" doesn't have many thoughts in it, that in the middle of this interesting thing about her it needs to be pointed out she's kind of simple, hyuck hyuck.

It's little stuff like that. I'm so busy going "why the fuck is that even there? I guess I should be laughing. But why would I laugh at that? Who laughs at that? Oh god does everyone laugh at that? Oh fuck, I'm gonna get bullied, aren't I? Oh no, I'm just reading a book? But why am I reading a book where I feel vaguely like my bullies are around the next corner? I thought I lived through that and was done."

"BUT IT'S THE DISC!!!!!! EVERYONE LOVES THE DISC!!! YOU'RE NOT A REAL NERD UNLESS YOU'VE SPENT YOUR WHOLE LIFE ENAMOURED OF THE DISC!"

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'll be good... what was I doing again? Hiding I think..."

(Secretly: "why the fuck is it a disc? I guess that's The Funny too?")

[chambergambit]

Something Special by Hannah Gadsby is probably the funniest stand-up comedy special I have ever seen. Please go watch it on Netflix as soon as you can.

That being said, as a fan of her previous stand-up specials (also on Netflix, please watch), I was a little disappointed that the new one didn’t have any art history jokes.

[bettygemma]

A non exhaustive list of content I consumed during covid (I am updating this list as I go and NOT EDITING I DON'T CARE IF I MAKE SENSE THX xxxx):

- The Americans so much deathhhhhhh too grim

- Miss Fischer's Murder Mysteries death but make it cute and fun everyone in this show is a literal EYE TREAT

- Bo Burnham Inside because I am three years too late for everything and it felt appropriate. This was also about death??? Is everything about death? Wow was 2020 not a fun year for most people

- Douglas by Hannah Gadsby or Gatsby as Sam likes to get wrong 4.5/5. Hannah is a genius.

- First five minutes of Celeste Barber's Netflix special. Celeste is the only worthwhile person on Instagram and I love her. I used the have Instagram buy I deleted it #smug #virtuous. But the first five minutes didn't really do it for me. Also adventure cats in Instagram are good too

- Back to Hannah we go!! Something Special by Hannah Gadsby. 4/5. A delight. Fucken adorable. The Lover album of their Netflix specials. CW for animal death though

- Howl's Moving Castle. Lovely thankyou Tumblr for reminding me about this movie.... Its long though hey wow

- Hank and John Green reviewing things while having covid videos. Hey now I'm part of the covid club!!! Hope I keep taste!!

- Bluey!!!!!!! One of these days I will get through a whole three episodes of Bluey without crying, but todays are definitely not that day!!!!

- READING! Am rereading The Summer of the Danes. Cadfael my best beloved, my ultimate comfort, my little Welsh bon bon mwah mwah! I know you would absolutely love paracetamol and immunisation. Funny that this also has DEATH but make it cozy

- Age of Empires III which is greatttttt but I wish they had more sea maps

[rayinberkeley]

Coming Out as Neurodivergent

When you're gay, a thousand people will try to tell you that it's a phase, a choice, something you have to suppress, something they cannot condone, and a variety of other things that basically punishes you for what you couldn't turn off if you tried. Because it's something you didn't choose. You were born as you are. And you have every right to be enraged by their statements.

For a very long time I've felt a very similar way when people tried to tell me things like, "Beggars can't be choosers," and suggested I'm where I am because I don't make money. I knew that I could at least get them on board with the first thing, because many of them were either gay or understood that issue, but I knew also that they'd never understand it about my inability to hold down a job or responsibilities. I knew they'd think I was reaching. I knew they'd think I'm "just making excuses."

And yet I felt it nonetheless. A thing I couldn't say, but a thing I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt. I couldn't bring you into my mind so you could experience the tremendous meltdowns, the depressions, the complete disappearances and coming-to in a place without remembering how (sometimes even why) I escaped there. And people wouldn't have heard.

Then came my diagnoses: PTSD, major depressive disorder, and that one I still challenge called Avoidant Personality. Diagnosed with the most advanced testing available by doctors at a JFK University facility in Concord, California, successfully defended in a court in Oakland, winning my claim to SSI disability pay. Despite this, I still knew, I could never say this without someone thinking the same things.

Diving further in, however, coming to realize I most likely am autistic, I can actually defend this. Autism is another thing, like homosexuality, that I was born with, that I didn't choose, and that isn't a phase, a choice, something I should have to suppress (although my high-masking suggests on the surface I'm a damned master at it), it's not something for which you get to condone or deny, nor is it up for debate. Instinctively I knew, but if we test this, I'll know for a fact I can say this and can refuse anybody's challenging of it.

I do not have that diagnosis yet. I'm saying it ahead of time. That is how certain I am.

"The day I was formally diagnosed with autism," comedian, Hannah Gadsby, said in her Netflix special, Douglas, "was a very good day. Because it felt like I'd been handed the keys of the city of me. Because I was able to make sense of so many things that had only ever been confusing to me. Like why I can be so intelligent but struggle to leave any proof." (Pause for laughter, and it's okay, I find this funny too, and it TOOOOOTALLY applies to me!) "Why I can't feel informed. Why I felt such a profound sense of isolation my entire life despite trying so hard to be part of the team. And that is a big thing about being on the Spectrum. It is lonely. I find it very difficult to connect to others because my brain takes me to places where nobody else lives."

I've only ever felt like the proverbial "stranger in a strange land," like I didn't speak your language but if you hummed a few bars I could fake it, and faking it is all I was ever really able to do. Because I never really felt a member of your species. Growing up, everyone my age started getting interested in things I simply didn't, rode bikes while I never learned, played games that didn't interest me, couldn't wait to start dating while I stayed alone, learned to drive cars while my family didn't even think about teaching me, planned futures while I didn't even have any such notion of how I could even begin such a task, for college or jobs or such. I just floated, unguided, and with no notion of what I would need next.

Like I didn't get "the memo."

"To give you an idea of what it feels like to be on the Spectrum," she'd said a little earlier in that special, "basically it feels like being the only sober person in a room full of drunks, or the other way around. Basically everyone is operating on a wavelength you can't quite key into ... why didn't I get the memo? I never get the memo. I never do. I've always missed the memo."

I've said things exactly like this to therapists. Some of these almost word for word. Not a one ever even introduced the idea of autism. Not a one. But I do know what they introduced to me, and that was the possibility that I could work if I just wanted to, because in the end I think that's all they seemed to care about. I wasn't saying I didn't want to. I was trying to find out why I couldn't. And I didn't need pep talks.

And don't get me wrong, some people with autism do very good work, and some don't, and the one I'm quoting is a goddamned stand-up comedian who stands in front of an audience (I could NEVER) and entertains them with amazing skill. But it's not called the Autism Monolith. It's called a Spectrum.

I might have done just fine on a job if someone might've understood how to guide someone with autism like mine to doing so, but unguided isn't where I can function. Assuming I'll understand what I need to do isn't the way. Hell, the part time job I shined at, working in that metaphysical bookstore in Acworth, was because Wanda guided me in just a way that worked for me, while no other position ever did so.

And when she was gone, I could not continue it. Not for very long.

Nobody really understood what it was I needed, nor cared, nor owed it to me (save for my family who, also, didn't care). I couldn't count on that guidance to be beside me in the stable way I needed. I probably never will. And without a sense of safety and stability, you can forget me being able to do any damn thing, and that's what I've never really had. Or okay, FELT I had. I hadn't keyed into the wavelength that where I was was safe, even if I were in a place of safety, but I'm not entirely certain I ever was, because I always remember being proved that I really wasn't. And what I hate most is my self-doubt that I'd even really know this.

Without safety, with chaos or a sense chaos was coming, my ability to function crumbles, my mind panics, my entire self melts down, and all this happens while I'm masking the living SHIT out of my inner hell so I don't bother anybody with what's going on inside of me.

I can't turn that off any more than I could turn off that I prefer dick over vagina. I can't make that part of me vanish any more than I could go into shock therapy and turn myself into a breeder. I simply am gay, and I simply am autistic, and I simply have no idea how to function as a part of anybody's team.

This is me. This is my other coming out.

I'm here, I'm neurodivergent, get used to it.

If there's a flag for that, please let me know.

The difference is, I'd actually choose gay. It's pretty fucking awesome. I've seen the alternative, and eww. But I wouldn't have chosen autism. You have no idea the things I wanted to be, wanted to do, wanted to accomplish. The years and years of loneliness that I would've done anything (if only I could) just not to feel. I don't even get the superpowers of autism like Sheldon Cooper has, to solve massive equations and unravel the secrets of the universe. I just get the kryptonite parts: human interaction drains me, connection is impossible, I can't recognize red flags, I cannot keep promises or fulfill obligations, and I don't just go out and meet people without it being a terrifying endeavor.

And I'm just too tired, after decades of trying to fight this, to continue to do so. To paraphrase Will & Grace, I've heard the neurodivergent version of Jack tell my denial version of Will, "Aren't you tired yet?" And I am. So very tired. I can't do this cycle any more. I can't mask and entertain and make people laugh and then find myself baffled why they suddenly get angry when I don't just magically get better, find work, and sustain, or they accuse me of excuses, or just being lazy, or just......

I don't know. I don't understand your world. You all talk to each other in terms of, "What do you do?" and money troubles, and your house or your car or your business, and I'm sitting there trying to not tell you I'm still floating like I have since I was in fifth grade, no work, never really owned a car, will never have a house, scared I'll end up homeless at any moment, having no idea what to do, how to do it, how to hold it together as I try to do whatever it is I simply don't have a map for in the first place!

I didn't want to become this alone. And now it's practically the only thing I want IS to be alone. Because I need now to learn how to be this, figure out who the fuck I actually am without the mask, so I no longer feel the need to wear that damn mask. So that if and when I should choose to try to be with people again, it is by choice rather than desperation and need, and I can show you who I am, without committing those same failures of my past.

But also, because I'm hard for people to take in the few minutes they have to take me, but I need you to know, I take that part of me everywhere, and I find everyone always hard to take all the time. For me it's a 24/7 job to try to be one of you. I'm bad at showing the usual niceties that are expected amongst you, but also, I rarely feel them anyway. Step in my head. See if you feel like saying "thank you" and other formalities when you're in nonstop fear and uncertainty!

And as I already stated, professional tests defended in a court of law found that I can't sustain work. It is no wonder I melted down. What's a wonder is, how I kept going as long as I did.

[no-sleep-for-the-dreamer]

Tag people you want to get to know better

Thanks for tagging me @periwinklecurtains

1. Three ships: Root x Shaw - Person of Interest, Rebecca x Margaux - Ten Percent, Franky x Bridget - Wentworth

2. First Ever Ship that I actually participated in fandom for: Rizzoli and Isles

3. Last song: LA Devotee by Panic! at the disco

4. Last Movie: She said

5. Currently reading: A German book about ship captains and their most incredible experiences at sea.

6. Currently watching: Something special, a Netflix special by Hannah Gadsby

7. Currently consuming: nibbling on a dry spaghetti noodle believe it or not

8: Currently craving: mousse au chocolat

Tagging @adoratato @knighterrante @comeonharold if you feel like it :D

[warningsine]

If you studied art history or another of the humanities in the 1990s or 2000s — say, if you are around the age of the Australian comic Hannah Gadsby, 45 — you may remember the word “problematic” from your long-ago seminar days. Back then it was a voguish noun, borrowed from French, that described the unconscious structure of an ideology or a text. Soon, though, like so many other efforts to think critically, “the problematic” got left behind in this century’s great shift from reading to scrolling. These days we encounter “problematic” exclusively as an adjective: an offhand judgment of moral disapproval, from a speaker who can’t be bothered by precision.

A whole cast of professional art workers — conservators, designers, guards, technicians — has been roped in to produce “It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby,” a small exhibition opening Friday at the Brooklyn Museum. (It is a title so silly that I cannot even type it; I am cutting and pasting.) The show, one of many worldwide timed to the 50th anniversary of the Spanish artist’s death in 1973, is essentially a light amusement following on from “Nanette,” a Netflix special from 2018. In that routine, a sort of blend of stand up and TED Talk, Gadsby riffed on having “barely graduated from an art history degree,” at the bachelor’s level, and attempted a takedown of the Spanish artist: “He’s rotten in the face cavity! I hate Picasso! I hate him!” Now this entertainer has come through the museum doors, but if you thought Gadsby had something to say about Picasso, the joke — the only good joke of the day, in fact — is on you.

Like the noun-turned-adjective “problematic,” this new exhibition backs away from close looking for the affirmative comforts of social-justice-themed pop culture. At the Brooklyn Museum you will find a few (very few) paintings by Picasso, plus two little sculptures and a selection of works on paper, suffixed with tame quips by Gadsby on adjacent labels. Around and nearby are works of art made by women, almost all made after Picasso’s death in 1973; finally, in a vestibule, clips from “Nanette” play on a loop. That’s the whole exhibition, and anyone who was expecting this to be a Netflix declension of the Degenerate Art Show, with poor patriarchal Picasso as ritualized scapegoat, can rest easy. There’s little to see. There’s no catalog to read. The ambitions here are at GIF level, though perhaps that is the point.

So far as it has an argument — a problematic — it goes like this: Pablo Picasso was an important artist. He was also something of a jerk around women. And women are more than “goddesses or doormats,” as Picasso brutally had it; women, too, have stories to tell. I wish there was more to inform you of, but that’s really about the size of it. All the feminist scholarship of the last 50 years — about repressed desire, about phallic instability, or even just about the lives of the women Picasso loved — is put to one side, in favor of what really matters: your feelings. “Admiration and anger can coexist,” a text at the show’s entrance reassures us.

That Picasso, probably the most written about painter in history, was both a great artist and a not-so-great guy is so far from being news as to qualify as climate. What matters is what you do with that friction, and “It’s Pablo-matic” does not do much. For a start, it doesn’t assemble many things to look at. The actual number of paintings by Picasso here is just eight. Seven were borrowed from the Musée Picasso in Paris, which has been supporting shows worldwide for this anniversary; one belongs to the Brooklyn Museum; none is first-rate. There are no other institutional loans besides a few prints brought over the river from MoMA. What you will see here by Picasso are mostly modest etchings, and even these barely display his stylistic breadth; more than two dozen sheets come from a single portfolio, the neoclassical Vollard Suite of the 1930s.

Unsigned texts in each gallery provide basic invocations of gender discrimination in art museums, or the colonial legacy of European modern art, while next to individual works Gadsby offers signed banter. These labels function a bit like bathroom graffiti, or maybe Instagram captions. Beside one classicizing print of Picasso and his lover Marie-Thérèse Walter: “I’m so virile my chest hair just exploded.” Beside a reclining nude: “Is she actually reclining? Or has she just been dropped from a great height?”

There’s a fixation, throughout, on genitals and bodily functions. Each sphincter, each phallus, is called out with adolescent excitement; with adolescent vocabulary, too. What jokes there are (“Meta? Hardly know her!”) remain juvenile enough to leave Picasso unscathed. The adults involved at the Brooklyn Museum (principally its senior curators Lisa Small and Catherine Morris, Gadsby’s collaborators here) really could have reined in this immaturity, though to their credit, they’ve at least fleshed out the show with some context on the cult of male genius or the rise of feminist art history in the 1970s.

The trouble is obvious, and entirely symptomatic of our back-to-front digital lives: For this show the reactions came first, the objects reacted to second. A show that started with pictures might make you come to wonder — following the pioneering feminist art historian Linda Nochlin — why Picasso’s paintings of women are generally lacking in desire, quite unlike the pervy paintings of Balthus, Picabia and other cancelable midcentury gents. A show properly engaged with feminism and the avant-garde might have turned to Lyubov Popova, Natalia Goncharova, Nadezhda Udaltsova or Olga Rozanova: the remarkable Soviet women artists who put Picasso’s breakdown of forms in the service of political revolution. A more serious look at reputation and male genius might have introduced a work by at least one female Cubist: perhaps Alice Bailly, or Marie Vassilieff, or Alice Halicka, or Marie Laurencin, or Jeanne Rij-Rousseau, or María Blanchard, ​ or even Australia’s own Anne Dangar.

Instead, “It’s Pablo-matic” contents itself to stir in works by women from the Brooklyn Museum collection. These seem to have been selected more or less at random, and include a lithograph by Käthe Kollwitz, a photograph by Ana Mendieta, an assemblage by Betye Saar, and Dara Birnbaum’s “Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman,” a video art classic of 1978/79 whose connection to Picasso is beyond me. (At least two paintings here, by Nina Chanel Abney and Mickalene Thomas, draw on the example of Manet, not Picasso.) The artists who made them have been reduced here, in what may be this show’s only true insult, into mere raconteurs of women’s lives. “I want my story to be heard,” reads a quotation from Gadsby in the last gallery; the same label lauds the “entirely new stories” of a new generation.

This elevation of “stories” over art (or at least comedy) was the principal thrust of “Nanette,” a Sydney stand-up routine which became an American viral success during the last presidency, shortly after the wrongdoings of Harvey Weinstein were finally exposed. “Nanette” proposed a therapeutic purpose for culture, rejecting the “trauma” of telling jokes in favor of the three-act resolution of “stories.” It directly analogized Picasso to then-President Trump: “The greatest artist of the twentieth century. Let’s make art great again, guys.” It even averred that Picasso, and by extension all the old masters, suffered from “the mental illness of misogyny.” (Given this pathologization of Picasso, it is very intriguing that Gadsby has described the Brooklyn Museum show as their own deeply desired act of sexual violence against the man from Málaga, telling Variety: “I really, really want to stick one up him.”)

Most bizarrely, the routine rested on a condemnation of art as an elite swindle, and modernism got it particularly hard. “CUUU-bism,” went Gadsby’s mocking refrain, to reliable audience laughter. (As it is, Picasso’s own Cubist art appears at the Brooklyn Museum through a single 6-by-4.5-inch engraving.) The sarcasm, from a comedian with moderate art historical bona fides, had a purpose: It gave Gadsby’s audience permission to believe that avant-garde painting was actually a big scam. “They’re all cut from the same cloth,” Gadsby told the audience in “Nanette”: “Donald Trump, Pablo Picasso, Harvey Weinstein” — and the art you never liked in the first place could be dismissed as the flimflam of a cabal of evil men.

Not long ago, it would have been embarrassing for adults to admit that they found avant-garde painting too difficult and preferred the comforts of story time. What Gadsby did was give the audience permission — moral permission — to turn their backs on what challenged them, and to ennoble a preference for comfort and kitsch.

So who should be most brassed off by this show? Not Picasso, who gets out totally unharmed. But the women artists in the museum’s collection dragooned into this minor prank, and the generations of women and feminist art historians — Rosalind Krauss, Anne Wagner, Mary Ann Caws, hundreds more — who have devoted their careers to thinking seriously about modern art and gender. Especially at the Brooklyn Museum, whose engagement with feminist art is unique in New York, I left sad and embarrassed that this show doesn’t even try to do what it promises: put women artists on equal footing with the big guy.

“My story has value,” Gadsby said in “Nanette”; and then, “I will not allow my story to be destroyed”; and then, “Stories hold our cure.” But Howardena Pindell, on view here, is much more than a storyteller; Cindy Sherman, on view here, is much more than a storyteller. They are artists who, like Picasso before them, put ideas and images into productive tension, with no reassurance of closure or comfort. The function of a public museum (or at least it should be) is to present to all of us these women’s full aesthetic achievements; there is also room for story hour, in the children’s wing.

[suchananewsblog]

Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Hannah Gadsby: Something Special’ On Netflix, A Feel-Good Comedy Special From The Comedian Who Made ‘Nanette’?

Per the blurb on Netflix’s house display: “A panicky proposal. A novelty marriage ceremony cake. A fateful bunny encounter. Hannah Gadsby shares tales of affection and marriage on this feel-good comedy particular.” Feel-good? Hannah Gadsby? Say it isn’t so? With Gadsby, there’s at all times a catch. As she jokes:  “I didn’t say who it’s a really feel good particular for…” The Gist: This is…

[tvrundownusa]

tvrundown USA 2023.05.09

Tuesday, May 9th:

(exclusive): Hannah Gadsby: "Something Special" (netflix, stand-up special), Eurovision Song Contest (Peacock, semi-finals begin, live) [performers | schedule]

(streaming weekly): Love Village (netflix, next 4 eps)

(hour 1): FBI (CBS), Superman & Lois (theCW), "9-1-1: Lone Star" (FOX, penultimate), Night Court (NBC, part 2/2, season 1 finale) / . / Lopez vs. Lopez (NBC, season 1 finale), Jeopardy! Masters (ABC, tournament night 2)

(hour 2): FBI: International (CBS), Gotham Knights (theCW), Accused (FOX, season 1 finale), The Wall (NBC), Judge Steve Harvey (ABC, season 2 opener), Supermarket Stakeout (FOOD), Frontline (PBS, "Clarence and Ginni Thomas", 2hrs), Dancing Queens (BRAVO, ballroom competition docu-series premiere)

(hour 3): FBI: Most Wanted (CBS), Weakest Link (NBC), How I Met Your Father (Freeform, ~60mins), Frontline (PBS, contd)

[laresearchette]

Tuesday, May 09, 2023 Canadian TV Listings (Times Eastern)

WHERE CAN I FIND THOSE PREMIERES? JUDGE STEVE HARVEY (City TV) 7:00pm DANCING QUEENS (Slice) 10:00pm

NEW TO AMAZON PRIME CANADA/CBC GEM/CRAVE TV/DISNEY + STAR/NETFLIX CANADA:

NETFLIX CANADA HANNAH GADSBY: SOMETHING SPECIAL

MLB BASEBALL (SN1) 6:30pm: Jays vs. Phillies (TSN/TSN3/TSN4/TSN5) 7:30pm: Red Sox vs. Atlanta (SN Now) 9:30pm: Astros vs. Angels

NHL HOCKEY (CBC/SN) 7:00pm: Hurricanes vs. Devils - Game #4 (SN/SN Now) 9:50pm: Stars vs. Kraken - Game #4

BIG BROTHER CANADA (Global) 7:00pm

NBA BASKETBALL (SN360) 7:30pm: 76ers vs. Celtics - Game #5 (SN360) 10:00pm: Suns vs. Nuggets - Game #5

CANADA'S GOT TALENT (City TV) 8:00pm: Nine acts perform in the hopes of making it to the live finale; the Judges will pick two acts to go straight through to the Finale, with the remaining seven acts going to a Canada-wide public vote.

OUTBACK OPAL HUNTERS (Discovery Canada) 8:00pm: The Blacklighters attempt a dangerous night-time dig; heavy storms could destroy the Boulder Boys' season, while the Young Guns lose valuable opal.

[scvpubliclib]

New story on NPR: Hannah Gadsby on their new Netflix special 'Something Special' https://ift.tt/QHo9yWj

[queermarzipan]

YAY

also btw in other news i have found a comedian (hannah gadsby) who i am LIVING FOR istg i need EVERYONE to watch her with me. she has 4 specials on netflix nanette (2018), douglas (2020), something special (2023), & gender agenda (2024) i've watched the first two i'm mad about her istf

[sob warning for nanette]

Alright I slept through all the daylight hours, the Horrors hate me, this seems like a GREAT time to watch the Sandman on netflix for the first time. Mmm Dream.

[kurozu501]

i really need to get my shit sorted out. 

[thechangeling]

The Wall

For the longest time I said I wasn't going to write a fic where Ty figures out he's autistic because I don't remember a time where I didn't know. I was diagnosed when I was two.

However in the end I decided I wanted to put my own spin on it. Happy disability pride month.

Cw: mentions of ableism, ableist abuse, trauma, autistic self dehumanization, dissociation and depersonalization. Also a not so favorable look at Andrew Blackthorn.

It's 3:35 am and Tiberius Nero Blackthorn is autistic.

It was something Julian had mentioned to him in passing after dinner, telling Ty to look it up. He hadn't thought much of it at first, although granted it was a little peculiar. But Ty had done as he asked that evening and now many hours and many websites, instagram posts and tiktok  later, he was spiraling.

Not for the reasons one might assume. It wasn't exactly surprising, the idea that there was something different about him that separated him from the rest of his siblings, from almost everyone else he had met actually. Although according to the extensive research he had done, different sets of traits could present themselves differently in each autistic person.

Autistic

There was a word for people like him.

There were people like him.

Ty was trying to focus on the information, on the facts and not let his emotions overwhelm him. But the irrefutable proof that there was a reason. A reason for him being this way. It wasn't his fault. He wasn't broken or weird or strange. He wasn't some creature other than human.

As a child he always thought he must be a changeling of some sort. Some alien creature left amongst humans either by mistake or as some kind of experiment. He never felt as though he fully fit in with his family, even his twin. It was always as though there was a giant wall of ice separating him from the world.

He had tried so hard all these years to break it down. To feel apart of something fully and truly. To feel loved. But there was always something missing. Even reading these posts online and watching these videos he still felt seperate in some ways. He had a community, a place of people of shared his thoughts and experiences, but it still wasn't exactly right. Like a shirt that fits a little small. Something felt off.

He watched a Netflix comedy special by an autistic comedian named Hannah Gadsby who stated that "it is lonely being on the spectrum because my brain takes me to places that nobody else lives." And that was it wasn't it? The simple truth. Ty existed in places that the people he loved just couldn't reach. Sometimes that was fortunate. When he wanted to get away. He could just leave. He could leave his body and float away.

There were also moments when he felt so disconnected from any sense of his self or who he was. As Tiberius Nero Blackthorn. What did that name mean? Who was that? When he looked in the mirror he saw a face, but had no connection to it what so ever.

The internet called this dissociation, depersonalization in particular. It was a symptom of trauma, but often associated with being autistic. 

Trauma. Another new and exciting word.

Ty thought about everything he and his siblings had gone through. He thought about the death of his parents, his parents in general. His father was hyper aware of the reputation their family had for being different. It dated long back before he had fathered two half bloods but that certainly didn't help. And then he had the audacity to take his anxieties out on Ty.

Andrew had never liked that he was different, strange. He thought that he could teach Ty to be normal. He probably thought he was doing him a favor.

He would try and hold Ty's hand down to his sides while he stimmed and try to hold him steady when got upset and rocked back and forth. When Ty had what he now knew was called a meltdown, he would just get angry. As if Ty was doing it on purpose. He could remember one time his father had locked him in his room and refused to let him out until he calmed down.

Ty shook himself from the memory and attempted to regulate his breathing. He rubbed his fingers together, feeling the pads moving against each other.

Then there was his mother, she wasn't as bad but she never tried to stop his father. She was always telling him that she loved him but he needed to learn how to control these things. That she knew how harsh and brutal and loud the world could be but he needed to learn to cope as she did. He need to learn to keep still and blend in.

Ty had found his attention drifting over to articles about symptoms in women. Autistic women and girls talking about their lives and experiences. He thought about his mother, so clearly uncomfortable and obsessed with presenting a certain way right up until the bitter end. He thought of Livvy, his own twin with her obsessions and her tendency to pack bond with her weapons. Of the way she was always moving, not like he was, but twirling her hair or tapping her leg or pacing back and forth.

And dancing. She loved to dance and belt out the lyrics to her favorite songs. She always said it calmed her down. She was always talking with her hands as well. It was like his twin always had a switch that was on. Even in death. Livvy's ghost hovered beside him offering moral support and helpful criticism. And when he turned to her and asked if she was ok as he tried to remember to do from time to time, she smiled her perfect wide Livvy smile and told him she was ok. It sounded exactly the same as it always did.

It sounded almost rehearsed.

He was worried about her. But amongst his worry for Livvy and all of his siblings was crushing realization that he just didn't know what to do. He didn't know how to put all if their peices back together. Everyone was so fucked up. It wasn't just him. None of the Blackthorns were normal. All dealing with trauma in their own ways. The dark war, so many dead. Julian had been forced to kill their father.

Ty had been so furious at the time. So emotionally unbalanced that during a meltdown he punched a mirror. It was strange. How you could love someone who hurt you so badly and still miss them. It didn't make what they did ok, but it made things messy. And then Mark and Helen were taken.

Ty found he didn't remember much from that period of time. When they knew Mark was lost to them and they were being told that Helen had to leave. It all blurred together. At a certain point Ty just stopped. Stopped being. It was all too much so he had just left himself behind.

He thought about Mark some more. How Mark was the one who would always listen to him no matter how many times Ty had repeated the same information. Never getting bored or frustrated. How Mark matched his enthusiasm for whatever thing he was currently obsessed with, a special interest Ty had learned they were called, by rambling about whatever he was passionate about in that moment. Mark never had year long intense loves for certain subjects like animals or cats or Sherlock but he would occassionally spend a few days completely buried in something and eager to share with whoever would listen.

Ty recieved the same joy he felt hearing about Mark's passions when he saw videos and posts if other autistics rambling about their special interests. It was tangible proof that there was joy and passion and love in this life even when he himself could not find it. And that rush of feeling, just feeling so deeply about something, or someone. It was like a drug. Although that line of thinking was bound to lead him somewhere dangerous if he pursued it. Thinking about autism and love would lead him somewhere he didn't want to be. Couldn't be. So he aggressively ignored and references to relationships in his research or romance.

He thought about Mark's relationships and how he had always been sensitive like how Ty was sensitive. And as he got older that sensitivity had grown into insecurity and a profound self hatred preventing him from seeing how people really felt about him.

His fear of rejection often led him to actively push people away, like Cristina and Kieran.

It was a good thing Ty wasn't like that.

But there had always been similarities between the two of them, and an unspoken solidarity.

Now we both have hurt hands.

Maybe that was something. Ty didn't think Mark was like him but...something.

It was then Ty realized how exhausted he was. Not just exhausted physically but exhausted all the way through into his brain. Exhausted emotionally and mentally. He can't sleep though. There's still too much energy vibrating through him. He gets like this sometimes, where he is unable to to sleep. According to the internet it's yet another symptom. Insomnia.

For fucks sake.

It was starting to feel like everything in his life was an autistic trait or at least related to autism in some way. As if there was no way to tell where he ends and the disability begins.

Livvy tells him that maybe that's the point. Maybe there is no end and beginning, maybe this is just him. The good and the bad.

"We're all made up of good bits and bad bits and some that are just ok," she murmers to him softly. "That's life. That's human nature."

Ty thinks about this. He thinks about his life, his mind, his thoughts and feelings. The good the bad and the parts that are just ok. And in spite of everything, he loves it.

He loves his crazy wild and wonderful big beautiful brain. Because it's him. And bared underneath all the trauma and anger, underneath all the despair there is a burning urge. An urge to live.

Not just to survive.

He lays in bed and listens to music from his headphones, not classical this time but something soft and calming. A song called The right way around. He let's his mind wander as it does when he hears music, concocting different fictional scenarios in his mind. He lets his imagination take him away.

It's now 4:55 am and Tiberius Nero Blackthorn is autistic.

And he is going to be ok.

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