#honestly I am often a little frustrated by the linguistic shift of just calling all supply/food distro “mutual aid” like

[jackawful]

I think one of the things that kinda got lost in the circa-2020 buzzwordificaiton of "mutual aid" is that like...if you have friends in your life who you help out sometimes and who help you out sometimes, you're already doing mutual aid. Like yeah, mutual aid can look like handing out soup and hygiene kits in a public park, it can be part of an organized distro project or collective or other Named Group, but it also looks like driving your friend to their doctor's appointment or court date. I have a mechanic friend who does minor fixes on friends' cars at-cost, and that's mutual aid. If you've brought someone a meal while they're sick or recovering from surgery, that's mutual aid. Checking in on your neighbors after a natural disaster or during a heatwave is mutual aid. If you're doing it for free, petsitting or housesitting or babysitting is mutual aid.

Mutual aid, as kropotkin wrote about it, is our natural tendency as social creatures to help each other when we need it. The capitalist, individualist social structure tries to keep us from doing this, to turn every instance of meeting each other's needs into a financial transaction. When we push back on that, and help each other expecting nothing back except potential help in a future where we're the one who needs it, that's mutual aid.

[beyondthetemples-ooc]

.....there is a huge, huge part of me wondering if what everyone was telling me was a panic attack was actually a panic attack.

Or.... meltdown? imean i’ve been seriously, genuinely wondering if i’m autistic. I need to talk to someone and ask. Because...

I think I might actually be autistic, because:

I run my life on a plane of logic.

I don’t communicate and connect with other people about things very well at all, certainly not face-to-face.

I communicate in weird nonverbal ways that other people don’t seem to get, but it’s not like I’m trying to be weird or mimick animals or anything, it just made more sense to me to use? (Could also be an extreme form of polyglot-ism expressing itself, but I don’t think linguists usually have to resort to hissing when something hurts them because they don’t have mental access to words at that point.)

I use social scripting to interact with almost everyone but friends, even at work.

Outside of friends, even on Tumblr, sending my typical three-part-welcome message to new followers on any blog but my personal (welcome, I’d like to Rp any time, if you need anything tagged let me know), I have to sit for awhile and put the words in the right order. It has taken me 40 minutes to put those in order.

I’m very good at writing descriptively and social interactions for my characters, but not in person? Not when I know I’m writing to communicate with an actual person, unless they’re a friend and I don’t have to expend the energy Communicating Perfectly??? what?????? is??????? that about??????????

I think I’ve been using echolalia my whole life (I quote things to myself when I’m happy, or to make myself feel better, always have, and used to quote Teen Titans to other people too), but I got better at disguising quotes as “my own words” because my stepmother emotionally abused me when I talked about Teen Titans too much. (I also repeat parts of questions people ask me as a way of processing what they’re asking, to help form my answer.)

I even use quotes and phrases from things when I’m writing because I don’t know how to say it otherwise??? (Most often with comic!Raven....)

I don’t do well with changes in plans. At all. Ever. Especially when it’s day-of. I have to withdraw and do something to completely “reset” my brain when it happens, to get myself out of the shut-down “nevermind i don’t want to do anything dealing with this is too much,, let me BREATHE” sort of mindset. (This is a thing that might be ADD and might be autism, but the level with which I have to “reset”, I think, is beyond what ADD psychologists say is “normal” for ADD.)

^ I’m generally a very emotionally calm, stable person. Like, ridiculously so. Most of the time I just don’t have emotions assigned to things that other people assign emotion to. (Even things that I know other people have extreme reactions to. Someone dies? I’m sorry they won’t be around anymore, but everyone dies eventually and I’m okay with that. I’m sorry if this makes me a bad person, but I don’t cry at funerals, I just get overwhelmed with the pressure of everyone else’s emotions. I’m sorry for you and I truly do ache for your loss, but don’t feel any emotion about the death myself. Unless I really, really love someone, which... fuck, I cried over my canary, but not my grandfather? who i wasn’t very close to tbh and disliked his stubborn streak of feistiness because it was Too Mush For Me, but... idunno the funeral made me sick for a WEEK with empathic overwhelming, but I’m okay with Mary’s death now because, well, my emotions aren’t as strongly tied to things like Pure Presence as other peoples’.)

And despite that, when my stepmother tells me “I’m going to pick you up from work” when I already had a bus pass (which doesn’t expire so it’s not like I wasted resources), even though it would be nice to get home in 15 minutes instead of 45 after work, I still get frustrated an annoyed and go “okaaay... a little notice ahead of time would be nice, now I have to re-adjust myself for the whole day.” i’m emotionally stable as hell, yet stupid little changes in plan like that really annoy me.

I’m touch-dominant, I experience the world through my HANDS. Apparently that’s a thing autistic people experience more than neurotypical.

Constantly stimming (hard to distinguish from ADD fidgeting, but I do it because it’s stimuli that helps me better process things, not because I have energy that I need to use.)

Teen Titans for me fits the exact definition of a Special Interest.

I am definitely hyperempathic. (Psychic empathy versus conceptual empathy, but reactively empathic to the sensations as well.)

I’m disconnected from my own emotions.

I cannot communicate my emotions well, I cannot recognize them, I cannot understand them. I am utter SHIT at actually EXPRESSING my emotions. I’m not emotive. When I try, people misread my facial expressions CONSTANTLY. (I looked at my father confused, and he told me not to glare at him.)

I’m not very good at reading facial expressions beyond the general Happy/Sad/Angry/Afraid. (I thought I Was, but it turns out I misread them half the time. I use books and the physical things they describe to learn “Oh, raised brows doesn’t always mean interest, it might mean disbelief if her lips are tight too”. Again: disconnection from emotions and expressing them.)

I don’t process visual information well, if i process it at ALL. I have 20/15 vision according to the last optometrist I saw, and my vision is just fine according to the DMV (when I got my temps license, again), but I struggle to recognize letters and call them by name, not because I don’t know it, but it takes me twice or three times as long to figure out what that visual information means? I can read very well and comprehend it extremely well, but when it’s not organized in a language I know: I struggle to process what letters are which.

And, I mean, I can, and I do, but I have to tell everyone in my life, parents and job and friends: “I don’t See Things the way you do, literally do not SEE and PROCESS them. I have very good vision, but my brain doesn’t process visual information, so if there’s a way I can notice this by touching it or hearing a different sound, that will work a lot better than relying on seeing things to notice it. Because I probably won’t.”

I think I’m communicating well, but my mother and girlfriend are the only people who consistently understand my words well in person.

I actually do rock and move my hands/arms when I’m really excited. (I’m okay at restraining it, but it’s much nicer to be able to express myself in “weird” kinetic ways. Again: touch-dominant, kinetic expression is part of that, but touch-dominant might be an autistic thing, and I don’t know anymore, and that’s frustrating.)

(( I remember doing the actual hand-flapping thing at age 8 or 10, when I asked someone at ALP if he watched Teen Titans. And he said the only good character was Cyborg... no, Raven. And I was excited, because nobody else I knew liked Raven best! I was sitting seiza-style but started bouncing on my knees while pumping my hands, and smiling at him. He got really weirded out and shifted away from me, because we were all sitting on the floor in a crowd of sorts and he probably would’ve gone to the other side of the room if he could, now that I think about it... but, I always remember that, and when I got older I realized my reaction was Abnormal. i always associated it with Strong Emotions, but now I’m wondering, why do strong emotions make me move like that, and other people do other things entirely? that’s the only way i can express emotions that deep sometimes, kinetic motion. what if it’s because i’m autistic?))

I become completely nonverbal when I’m overstimulated, emotional, processing something big, constantly processing something and then another then another, and I very often actually don’t have the energy to speak. (It takes me a lot of energy to ask a customer “What?” sometimes if I didn’t catch their full order. I have literally blinked at people because I couldn’t even say THAT, and hoped they’d understand.)

I know I speak bluntly when I AM verbal, but putting things to words is all I have energy for. I could rephrase things to be more diplomatic, but fearing my stepmother is the only time it ever seems worth it. (I speak bluntly and honestly because A, I feel things bluntly and honestly and I see no point in rephrasing to redress what I think/feel, I just say literally, and I do mean literal-literally, what I’m thinking. I don’t do the “ulterior motives” thing. I don’t understand, at all, when people say they said something just because they were angry or excited. Like... why? What??? How did those words get put together when they’re not true???? it’s foreign concept to me, completely.)

I get overstimulated in general, badly BADLY overstimulated, and shut down completely. (I experience “shutdown” exactly as autistic people have described it, more times in my life than I care to remember. This happens most often with empathy and emotion, but also in crowds/presences/too much activity or noise or even TALKING.)

That “panic attack” also could have... been a meltdown if this is really a thing. Because it sounds like a panic attack, but I didn’t want help, I just wanted to be hide in the corner and be left alone and I wanted everything to STOP.

Because when I’m lucid, I look at my life objectively, and I really, really do not think I have anxiety. Or should have had a panic attack.

...I mean... when it happened, my phobia had been triggered time and time again in the preceeding weeks, because one household family member after the other had the stomach flu. Two even got it twice. and when you’re an empath it is damn hard to block out the sensations and feel sick too, no matter how loud I blast my music. I existed at home in a constant state of “don’t breathe here, wash your hands twice like they do in hospitals, iron shields not just shadows, hurry in and hurry out to reduce exposure, open windows, ignore it and cast it away that is not yours to feel, breathe, breathe, breathe.” Purposefully high-alert and constantly defensive (determined, not afraid), but not total-breakdown-justifying anxiety...

But this was not the first year it’s happened, nor second and probably not even the third -- and my phobia was much, MUCH worse (AND empathy, thus doubly bad at coping with feeling what the sick/v*ing people are feeling), the two times it happened when I was 14-18.

The phobia-triggering alone triggered less anxiety than before, because I could cope with it, and I had the tools to better cope with both phobia-anxiety and miserable-empathy.

Outside that, I’m not prone to anxiety, I only become anxious about normal life things (re: not General Anxiety Disorder, just Specific Anxiety Disorder aka My Phobia, and severe Financial Anxiety because fucking hell people I’m only 24 and extremely frugal and borderline “stingy” and STILL 3000+ in debt, but my coping mechanism is HEALTHY-- you know, seeking better jobs even if I hate them, walking dogs, and saving money like hell whenever i can. You know: proactively FIXING the PROBLEM.)

And when I AM Anxious, it is controllable, if I can find a solution.

But if it’s anxiety like I felt over potentially losing my job due to health-related call-offs every month and bus routes, aka things I already do my absolute best to control: It self-feeds because every time I solution-seek, there is no solution.

And often, it’s far more FRUSTRATION than anxiety.

So, like... I don’t have “anxiety disorder”. I don’t have General Anxiety about things that don’t logically WARRANT it. I just have a very strong, atypical REACTION to anxiety, and sometimes get overstimulated by feeling my own emotion, and either have to withdraw from it, or shut down.

gods i really need to talk to someone about this because it would explain a LOT about what’s wrong with me and what’s “Abnormal” about me in the world and i’d really, really like to know what’s ADD, what’s from Emotional Abuse, and what’s possible-autism, thanks... ;;;;