#how did anyone ever think I’m neurotypical

[swugflower]

Me: hey I’ll watch the pro shot of a musical I used to be obsessed with when I was 15 and that changed how I view musicals, story building and writing fundamentally in TV. Im sure nothing bad will happen

Me, about 12 hours later, soundtrack on repeat, three video Esseys about the musical deep and after a dream of having breakfast with fucking Máté Kamarás: ah, fuck

[impactrueno]

(From Twitter) I think ppl still have a right to be more comfortable with Musical BJ and or Toon BJ than with Movie BJ. No one is trying to say that either Beetlejuice is a good person. We know they’re all bad. Some ppl are just more comfortable with one than the other and that’s just their preference.

And while you said the green card thing didn’t originate in the musical it still rubs me the wrong way that movie BJ stalked and obsessed over Lydia all the way into her adulthood as she grew up when he maybe could have just found another ADULT woman to get the green card.

Most of us find more comfor in musical BJ and or Toon BJ because they both seem more relatable and we are able to see ourselves within them. Especially musical BJ. A lot of ppl relate to and find comfort musical BJ because he struggles with similar issues we do.

Those being mommy/daddy issues, depression, anxiety, being neurodivergent,

(it’s not necessarily canon explicitly within the musical but let’s be honest there is no neurotypical explanation for musical BJ’s mannerisms/behaviors/pos)

abandonment issues/extreme fear of abandonment and being alone, and just wanting to be/feel loved and desired by someone after feeling invisible, othered, ostracized, unloved, and unseen by everyone around you, including by the ppl who are supposed to love and care about you and accept you and your flaws. And I think the same could maybe even be said for toon BJ too tho I’m still in the process of watching the cartoon and i didn’t get to certain episodes yet tho I have seen clips.(not to mention him and Lydia being BFFs)

Most ppl agree that musical BJ SA’ing Adam and Barbara plus wanting to marry Lydia, and killing ppl cuz of things not going his way was not a good thing.

Ppl just feel more comfortable with the fact that musical BJ at least wasn’t attracted to Lydia in that way and viewed her as just a friend/pal. Again HE STILL SHOULDNT HAVE DONE IT EITHER WAY but I just hope you understand what I’m trying to say .

While it most likely wasn’t your intent, your most recent thread about you talking about ppl thinking that musical BJ was better than movie BJ kinda came off as you talking down to the ppl who find more comfort in/are more comfortable with musical BJ than they do with movie BJ.

Majority of us aren’t necessarily trying to say that musical BJ is a good person. We just think he’s misunderstood in some areas. Both things can be true. I rlly hope i wasn’t coming off as rude in this message. I just think you could maybe try and see it from another perspective, you know?

i responded on twitter but i'll do it here as well just to make sure (the posts this person is referring to are here and here)

i want to apologize for coming off like i was talking people down. it was not my intent but i can definitely see why it comes off that way.

frankly? i totally get you! cuz i'm the same. i find musical and cartoon bj very comforting and relatable, more so cartoon bj. i know it might not seem like it because i'm always giving him shit lol but beetlejuice (in general) is my absolute favorite character of anything ever.

if you see my replies to ppl when talking about musical bj you'll find that despite what i said in the thread, i completely understand WHY people are more comfortable with him. he's designed to be that way, you ARE supposed to sympathize with him, there's nothing wrong with that!

movie bj is absolutely supposed to rub you the wrong way, even when he's not doing anything. he's an unsettling presence. *this* bj is designed to make you feel creeped out, not sympathize with him like musical bj. this is undeniable

i guess i made that thread as a way to compare the two, how despite everything musical bj did fans are completely endeared to him and why that is. never meant to talk anyone down. hell, i would be talking MYSELF down if that were the case 😭

another thing i should add; i've been getting a lot...a LOOOT of comments recently on my beetlejuice comics so i've been getting a clear view of how people tend to look at one bj or the other, and i often comment on that because fandom sociology is interesting i guess? i'm a nerd

LASTLY (sorry this got long)

a lot of my tweets are my unfiltered stream of consciousness and me talking to myself 💀 and sometimes i don't realize how it might come off to other people. i just yap a lot when i'm doing character studies and i'm subjecting you guys (my twitter followers not here on tumblr) to it SORRY

[redbreastedbird]

Hey Robin!

I’m an autistic writer like you and I have a question.

Do you think that being autistic made recovering feedback more difficult when you first became an author? I know that me and other autistic writers I know become very attached to our characters in a very personal way - not like neurotypical people don’t, but it seems to be a different sort - and that makes taking criticism very hard sometimes.

Was this something you found and if it was, how did you overcome it?

This is SUCH a great question! I’m honestly not sure, because I’ve only ever had experience of how it feels for me to get feedback, so I don’t know if I take criticism harder than a neurotypical writer would. But certainly, I’ve really struggled with it in the past.

I think to some extent it depends on the kind of criticism. I have an editor I’ve worked with for ten years, and these days I feel quite excited to get her feedback, because I know that she and I often see things in similar ways, and the things she picks up on are things that I do know deep down are problems. For example in the new book I sent her a message with the first draft saying ‘there are too many suspects and we don’t get to know them enough’ and in her notes to me she wrote back ‘as you know, there are too many suspects and we don’t get to know them enough’.

BUT when I get negative feedback about characters I really like, or editorial suggestions I don’t agree with, I really struggle. I also just get absolutely sick to my stomach when someone points out I’ve made a mistake or written something that could be hurtful. It feels like an attack on me (understanding Rejection Sensitivity Disorder has helped make sense of this). What I’ve learned to do over the years is take a day - read the criticism and then step away from it for 24 hours. Usually I’ll spend that time slowly coming to terms with what the other person has said, and realising that their comments have merit. Sometimes I don’t, and I think that’s fine - if, even after I’ve sat with it, I still don’t agree with it, I let myself remember I don’t have to make those changes.

So yes. I think I live in my stories in a way some authors don’t, and I see my characters as real human beings in ways some authors don’t. But to be able to cope with the job I have, I’ve had to teach myself to remember that they all came from my head, and so I can change them if I want. The special thing is the fact I can make up stories, not every detail of the stories I make up. (But if anyone tells me they hate Daisy or Hazel I do think less of them as a result, because they are essentially me, and why would you tell me you don’t like me?)

[redditreceipts]

https://www.reddit.com/r/196/s/Qr3rxB9mw1

Jesus fucking CHRIST why do they always talk about their straw man as if it's so matter of fact??? WHICH radfems are they even talking to? God it's so hard to try and be open minded about how genderists think when they get literally everything wrong about radfems.

It's like all they do is watch Contrapoints or Lily Alexandre etc. talk about radfems instead of actually engaging with radfems and radfem theory.

Okay, so let’s go through this bit by bit: 

okay, what nuances are these? 

so this is the claim that radical feminists don’t understand intersectionality. Which is just not true. I also have never heard anyone say that??? I mean, maybe there are radical feminists who don’t believe that white women participate in a system of racism, but I haven’t met a single one yet?? Who is saying that white women don’t benefit from systems of racial oppression? (genuine question) 

Okay so this might be a hot take but I actually do think that a member of a marginalised demographic is allowed to not be as nuanced while talking about their oppressor. To stay with the racism analogy: If a person of colour said things like “I’m fucking done with white people and I don’t want to be friends with any of them because I don’t want to go through the tedious process of finding out who is racist and who isn’t”, I wouldn’t be offended or anything, because they are probably right. I as an autistic person personally also wouldn’t want to date a neurotypical person again, because in the past, there have been considerable difficulties in communication. And now imagine how a survivor of rape or abuse or sex trafficking would feel like! 

So is hating men a solid political theory? No. But is hating men a way of life that makes the life of many women safer and happier? Definitely. 

FOR THE THOUSANDTH TIME: WE DON’T WANT TO BAN SEX WORK! WE WANT TO BAN PEOPLE BUYING THEIR WAY INTO NON-CONSENSUAL SEX!!! This can’t be true. How often has it been said that radfems want to criminalise prostitution or throw every prostituted person in jail 😭

Who the fuck thinks that men are inherently predatory 😭 I can’t anymore.

No, men are not inherently predatory. Men are socialised into being predatory, or at least to a large degree. Which is why we want to change that socialisation process. Have you ever listened to any feminist ever in your entire life? 

Also, saying that a movement is cultish and people are being manipulated into joining is not patronisation. By that logic, you also wouldn’t be able to criticise Jehova’s Witnesses because you saying that they manipulate people into joining would be patronising the people who did join. 

I mean it’s possible that some feminists agree with the takes presented here, but acting as if it was some sort of foundational belief to radical feminism is just stupid 

[fierceawakening]

So this post is going to be a bit rough and rambly but… I don’t know how we put this genie back in the box.

Do any of you remember when I’d freshly left the abusive relationship I was in and I read VORACIOUSLY, trying to figure out how I’d been taken in by such an awful person? (I vividly remember telling my dad about her saying I’m sure I’m gay because on my previous relationships with men I never thought I was in love, but this was so intense… well. I still wasn’t sure but I wondered if it might be.)

I read stuff like Why Does He Do That? and I Hate You, Don’t Leave Me. I also read things like The Sociopath Next Door and one of Hare’s books on psychopathy. I’m pretty sure my ex just had BPD, and I hasten to say even there that I have known many other people with BPD who I emphatically don’t think would treat me the way she did. I was trying to make sense of her, not trying to condemn anyone with a label I don’t have. (There are prosocial psychopaths, too.)

Mostly I was trying to make sense of her lack of remorse. She presented it as sexy and exciting—oh no, I don’t ever worry about taking kink too far, I don’t care what people think of me, I never give someone who wronged me a second chance.

I now see these as huge red flags and worried about them even then, but I tend to be someone who obsesses over whether I’m giving people a fair shake, so the idea of getting with her sounded like a fun vacation from scrupulosity.

It was actually “surely the leopard won’t eat MY face,” but I didn’t see it then.

Anyway. Around that time I got into a lot of arguments with people here who felt that putting too much stock into those books was inherently ableist.

The things the books said about lack of empathy, about how someone who lacks empathy treats even close loved ones as objects of use and not as full people, resonated with how I’d been treated by someone who professed to care about me. But it ruffled HARD the feathers of people for whom “lacking empathy” just means “beepy boopy, but not uncaring.” I have no solution to this—I think they’re two different phenomena that unfortunately have the same name (on tumblr. Not sure they do offline.)

Any double way. One thing I kept coming across in that research was the specter of the sociopathic leader. A charismatic public figure who charms a whole community or nation, and once they do that, rule with an iron fist.

The appeal was eerily similar to why I’d latched on to such a gross girlfriend. “Don’t you ever just want to go ape shitt,” basically. What if you don’t have to care? What if you get to put yourself, your family, your tribe, America First?

Doesn’t that take a load off your mind?

Those weird leftists who don’t understand God or gender or American exceptionalism… what if you don’t have to understand them anyway?

What if all you have to do is win?

My books said THAT is why we should continue to think of sociopathy as bad and people who have it as predators. Not because human rights stop mattering if someone isn’t neurotypical but because the attitude is infectious.

A person who thinks that way by default, if they’re charismatic (and many are), can EASILY get someone who doesn’t think that way to start wondering why they bother with perspective taking and empathy and remorse anyway.

Dehumanization is a virus, and people like that are carriers. The more power they have in a society, the more virulent the strain.

Do most people eventually snap out of it? I mean I’d better think so, my sister in law is German.

But how long does it take?

That I don’t know. And that’s what makes me think Trump might win.

And why I continue to think fighting ableism is important but ALSO to think acting like empathy is superfluous is playing with fire.

[luckyshouse]

I agree with you. I have a hard time with understanding “the point.” I’m sorry.

its ok my bad, i didn't mean to come off rude. my tone in generals a bit off the past few days bc ive been having a really bad pain flair up. my point is that autistic people experience trauma at higher rates than non autistic people due to how severely ableist society is as a whole, and DID itself is a demonized disorder that is literally caused by trauma and is demonized for the way it breaks social rules. People don't like DID because DID is connected to concepts like gender identity divergence, dehumanization (ie:furries, kinning, shifting, physically dressing weird), self identification, and weird behaviors. most people with DID are traumatized so young that they don't get the proper socialization or learn social skills which mimicks autistic people not understanding social cues or rules. people with autism are more likely to develop things like maladaptive daydreaming or escape into their mind to cope with the outside world, int he same way DID systems do. my point is that i think psychiatry and psychology has set up all these bars between "normal" and "not" when in reality nothing and no one is normal and everyone has some kind of disorder, and i think we need to explore autism being genuinely a neurotype and DID being a type of PTSD that is formed in that neurotype. but i'm also a 23 year old on the internet whos coming with "research" thats mostly been accumulated through personal experience being in the psychiatric system my entire life, so its not like i can say this is true or that the models we have right now are false. but the thing is when i talk to people who have autism and not DID, they tend to strongly relate to my DID traeits especially when it comes to the multiple-selves part, and when i talk to people who have DID but not autism, they relate to almost every aspect of my autism except for the fact that its a neurotype and not trauma caused. i think we're going to see a lot of changes to the way psychiatry is handled in the next few generations or so because of this, because the more i learn about autism it becomes clear that autism itself is a neurotype that comes with multiple physical differences than allistic people that cause them to be disabled, and then i think we're going to be exploring that disability aspect of autism a LOT more in the coming years.

basically the point is, i know that psychiatry is telling us that autism and DID are separate disorders, but psychiatry is also pushing people to avoid getting diagnosed with autism, pushing people to learn to mask, pushing people on antipsychotics and heavy medications to help a disorder that genuinely does not NEED all of that an in reality needs a society that is willing to help them through their expected milestones. and that if you ignore the needs of people, that leads them to get traumatized, and that if you have untreated long term trauma as a child you often end up developing DID. i believe you that allistic systems exist, i really do, ive met them. but every allistic system ive met is either so autistic presenting it wouldn't matter to define the two, or is such a nervous bundle of highwire nerves that i wonder if theyre SO fucked up because they havent learned its safe to unmask yet so people assume theyre allistic.

there is higher rates of both autism and DID than anyones ever expected, and i think if out of like seven years they couldn't figure out or come to a decision on whether i was autistic or just traumatized over multiple different psyches and therapists, i think they need to figure this shit out. if so many disorders are caused by trauma and specifically intertwined with autism and theyre still denying autism is a common thing but over diagnosing things like OCD and BPD and bipolar disorder which all ALSO have connections and overlaps with autism i think theres soemthing there that needs to be figured out. same thing with the physical disorders that are linked to autism. everyone has POTS and binocular vision dysfunction and GERD and EDS and we all KNOW theres an overlap with autism but for some reason its just like "yeah well many people who have it dont have autism. they just ACT like they have autism because of their disorders" in most peoples eyes. which i just dont think is acceptable and is holding people abck from researching this shit

[lesbian-honey-lemon]

Here is my problem with posts like these- the concept is sound. Autistic people *can* have all of these traits pictured. Autistic people can make eye contact, not be good at science, and understand emotions.

But all of these posts come off with the undertone that NOT having these pictured traits is the default, the standard, that autistics who don’t have these traits are talked about too much and that NOT having these traits is just stereotypical and bad. Those sentiments have been repeated far too often in the community for me to fully trust people who make posts like this one shown above. How can I know that they don’t REALLY mean to leave autistics who don’t have these traits, these “cute, good, more socially acceptable traits”, out of the conversation. How can I know they don’t think autistics who don’t fit this cutesy list are bad and stereotypical and should just shut up already so the cutesy autistics can look better to neurotypicals. Because it really does come off this way.

I didn’t read fiction at all until I was nine (I was forced to start reading it then) and didn’t enjoy it until I was twelve. I still only enjoy the few fandoms I know well and it is very hard to get into anything I’m not familiar with. My lifelong special interest is geology and has been since I was five. I have always been good at science, and although I have a vivid imagination and love art, I hate English class and can only make art for Big Hero 6 and the SCP Foundation because I know those fandoms well. I don’t make eye contact, and I have low empathy and struggle to read and understand the emotions of people I don’t know well. I have noise sensitivity so bad that I have almost given myself tinnitus playing music to cope. I couldn’t do dishes until I got myself rubber gloves, I can’t eat many “quick foods” such as instant and microwaveable foods because of texture issues.

I don’t fit most of those cutesy traits on the list. But, I barely ever see any positivity for MY traits, because the community sees me as the default, thinks I’m talked about enough and visible enough. There’s this undertone in all of these posts that us non-socially acceptable autistics are visible enough and we should just let high masking high empathy LSNs have the spotlight. And that would be fine if they didn’t also make the community completely inhospitable to us by shitting on people with low empathy, misusing the term nonverbal (which ABSOLUTELY pisses off actually nonverbal people and you’d know that if you actually listened to them), and refusing to talk about anyone who isn’t a cutesy high empathy high masking LSN. Apparently everyone else is accepted enough. Apparently people are aware of me already. If so, then where did my diagnosis run off to, huh?

[physalian]

Y'all ever heard of "IB"? I'll tell you my tale of woe

So we know the US education system is ass, right? The pressure to get good grades over actually learning anything is detrimental to both learning and the desire to seek knowledge and discover our world.

Well I have a little story, about this exact principle on acid. Idk if anyone on here will ever be in/or is already in something called the “International Baccalaureate” (IB) program. What it is, is an “intensely rigorous” allegedly-standardized method of schooling that’s supposed to be transferrable between countries. Like, if I went to an IB school in America, I could transfer to the equivalent education level in France and not be completely lost. That’s the point.

It's way harder than traditional high school, with zero focus on things like arts and physical education (you know, important shit) and a draconian dedication to STEM… and nothing else.

If it’s not clear, this shit did irreparable damage to my high school career, so this is a warning to anyone considering it: If you are not neurotypical and somebody who’s willing to get hospitalized over how stressed you are (which did happen to a friend of mine) maybe skip the snobbish high school? If you don’t plan on being a lawyer or a doctor, maybe skip this bullshit.

—

So, guess who did not know that they’re neurodivergent back then? Me. Somewhere in the realm of ADHD and Autism, possibly both, who knows? Either way, I’m “high functioning” and you’d never know, or so I’ve been told.

I went to this high school because I wanted to be with all my super smart friends, and bought into the classist bullshit of “traditional high school is for dumb kids” and the whole “honors program” hierarchy—in my middle school, your first year there, you were separated into four groups of students.

Group A was the dumb kids, and everybody knew it. Groups B and C were the average-intelligence kids. Group D were the “honors” kids. First day in 6th grade, you were literally handed a themed t-shirt and compared to every other kid you know and don’t know and implicitly told “you’re not as smart as these kids and we want you to know it”. I was in the B-C group, which absolutely led to “well I’m not smart enough to be in D, but at least I’m not an idiot like A”.

Super healthy shit to teach children.

You did not have classes outside of your group. It wasn’t like elementary school where honors kids split off for a few hours but were still in your class. It was a complete social schism, and you only saw these people during lunch and maybe across the yard in P.E.

Fuck that school.

So anyway, with that damage done, I wanted to go to the fancy high school with all my smart friends, applied, and got in.

When I was younger, I had a massive procrastination problem. The usual stuff, like not starting a project until the night before it was due, forging my parents’ signatures on forms they were supposed to sign as the teacher was collecting them (got super good at that, bet school wishes they hadn’t encouraged it), doing homework in homeroom the morning of, and completely forgetting about readings and such.

Not the case now, but back then it was chronic.

In regular “dumb-dumb” school, one can get away with neglecting a little work.

In IB, if you fuck up in year one, that fuckup will haunt you through your entire high school experience. Everything in IB builds on itself, so if you have a shitty foundation, you are screwed without even realizing it, and there is little fixing it.

IB is also structured irregularly compared to traditional American high school. You only have four “blocks” of classes each day, and they switch off every other day. So I’d have Day 1 on M, W, F one week, and then T R the next week, yada yada, with those blocks lasting 90 minutes. As opposed to the 50-ish minute classes with the same schedule daily.

You would think that this would make it easier, as teachers had more time per period to really dive deep into subject matter without being rushed.

You would be wrong.

IB, like with all American schools, focuses on quantity over quality. Quantity in every facet of schooling. I needed a rolling backpack so I didn’t fuck up my spine hauling around my textbooks because the school didn’t have classroom copies/you needed them every goddamn night for homework and in class. The amount of homework, frequency of tests and quizzes, all that, is increased compared to traditional school.

But my very first class, my 1:1, was Algebra 2. Reader: I am awful at algebra. I cannot learn concepts without being able to ground them in realty. Geometry always came easy to me, because you can see and touch geometry. It has practical uses and follows logic. I can use a formula to measure the volume of a box, or I can bust out the tape measure by hand and get the exact same answer.

Algebra is fictitious, it’s not grounded in the tangibility of geometry, and once we hit stuff like quadratic equations, without being able to understand why I was learning what I was learning and how this all fits in to the greater concept of mathematics and why it matters, I not only checked out, but started to feel very, very stupid.

This was my very first class.

I almost failed Algebra 2. I had gone down to a 33%, because my teacher, for this super smart and super fancy high school, taught the same way every other teacher in that godforsaken place taught: Lecture.

If you do not learn through lecture, you’re fucked at an IB school. If you cannot process and retain information simply because someone tells it to you, you’re fucked. If staring at a 70-slide powerpoint presentation is understimulating, you’re fucked.

This teacher’s personality in particular was absolutely nasty. Haughty as the rest of the school, who made jokes at the idea of returning to the “trads” and the “dumb kids” at regular high school if you dropped out, and we had several who were way smarter than me who left by day 3, who were able to understand that this was not for them, while I stuck it out for 2 years.

I brought that 33% up to a 65% and got my first ever D.

But that first class, opening day of my high school career, left an impression that I carried with me for two whole years: Out of absolute terror of being thought of as “dumb” by leaving all my friends to go to traditional high school, I chose to be the dumbest of the “smart kids” instead of the “smartest” of the “dumb” kids.

And I paid for it.

I spent two whole years completely checked out and unwilling to learn because of this one math teacher on my first day of high school. Once I figured out that this man and this institution did not give a single fuck if I passed and would not change their teaching style at all to accommodate me, I could not be bothered.

I still got decent grades, and I did have classes, like geometry and my second year of English, in which I excelled. I had teachers who cared and loved their jobs, but by and large, I spent two whole years suffering because of the social pressure to pretend to be neurotypical, to learn the “normal” way, to pretend to be the only valid definition of “smart”. I had a Spanish teacher who gave me dresscode 3 days before the end of the school year, right after I failed an oral exam, in the back of the class where everyone could hear us. The entire foreign language department of conservative bitches stared at the girls wearing shorts with far more intensity than they should have.

We had this thing for “volunteer” hours that had three groups: community service, creative hours, and one other thing I can’t remember. I do remember desperately approaching my shit guidance councilor, the sole lady responsible for the entire school’s population of IB kids, asking if I could count my builds in Minecraft as part of my creative hours because I needed a certain number of hours to pass.

She I guess heard “video game” and thought I was slacking off killing mobs, when I played the game for the builds. But “creativity” only counts if it’s what they define as “creativity”.

Every step of the way, this education program demanded more. I got humiliated by multiple teachers in front of multiple classes because I did not understand something and got so upset that I cried, and they refused to explain it in any other way except repeating what they’d already said in lecture. I lived 45 minutes away from this school by bus and my parents couldn't come pick me up or drop me off to use office hours or study groups even if I wanted to, and I sure as hell didn't have a car.

So when I left, to go back to my regional high school for my junior and senior year (after getting gaslit and guilted by my parents for “failing to uphold my commitments”) turns out, I’m not an idiot.

Suddenly, I had teachers who gave a shit. I was turning in assignments on time. I was doing my homework the night it was given. I was starting projects in the very next class. I finally got straight-As. I liked learning again.

Turns out, not every “smart” kid I knew went to IB, they were instead very successfully running my regional high school’s SGA. They were doing just fine in getting into the colleges of their dreams and pursuing STEM. They didn’t need IB one bit.

The only good thing IB gave me was that by the time I got to college, it was a breeze.

All these years later, the thing that sticks with me the most was how much of a sham the whole thing is, and this insidious caste system of perceived intelligence. My super fancy IB school was inside of a larger high school built in a rural area, and put there to make that school look smarter.

So you had this institution not only giving these rural kids an enemy to hate, but reinforcing an idea that they’re not as smart as the special IB kids. And in turn, you’re telling the IB kids “you’re better than your peers, look at how dumb they are”.

While then sacrificing absolutely everything in the name of "quality education". Arts and music, physical exercise and sports, free time outside of school now spent doing homework, free time at all to have a mental break from it, and time to go to clubs and school events. You could take those extra classes, sure, but it cost you in time you needed to do all your other non-negotiable homework. You might graduate and get into Harvard Law, but you might get there with a heart condition from stress that you'll have for the rest of your life. Is that degree worth it?

But also how narrow and antiquated this idea of intelligence and learning is. I’m someone who, by and large, does not need to study, so long as I care about the subject matter.

One time in college, I took astronomy. I love astronomy. I ditched a class once and forgot all about a big unit test we had coming up. I walked into the next class to that test, having prepared nothing, and wrote a note on the top of my test before taking it apologizing to my astronomy professor for the F I was about to get.

I got the highest score in the class (a 92 I think), having only paid attention during lecture, because I cared and I wanted to learn and was able to retain everything only from hearing it, seeing it, and writing it down once. So long as something is grounded in the context of why it matters, one lecture is usually all I need, and I am consistently the fastest test-taker I know.

But back in high school, once the “you are not supposed to be here” baked in and solidified within the first week, that was detrimental for two long and stressful years, and, guess what? I’m not friends with any of those people anymore.

I probably could have done it, but the attitude of that pretentious, bullshit program ruined it. The people who stayed all four years? Some ended up at my college anyway, they just got better scholarships.

So to anyone who’s thinking about IB or knows anyone thinking about it or who is already struggling and suffering: Unless you plan on being a doctor or a lawyer, it’s not worth it, and you aren’t “smarter” just because you can learn one very specific way. I left after two years and never went back.

[theflannelwizard]

Oops, I lied about sending all my questions in one, I thought of an actually specific question and not just a super general one five seconds after sending the ask:

Do you have any neurodivergent hcs for Buster and Gob(or other characters if you hc anyone else as neurodivergent)?

This is such a good question!! Okay!! It got long so I'm putting it under the cut, but TLDR: undiagnosed comorbid autistm and ADHD for both of them plus ADHD Tony Wonder :) I forced myself not to get into it with the rest of the Bluths cause this post would be a mile long but i did put cursory thoughts about them in the tags. All of this is spitballing and I'm definitely open to hearing other opinions!

Whatever is going on with Buster’s brain is the same thing that’s going on with my brain, so most likely ADHD and/or autism but DEFINITELY undiagnosed. None of the Bluths have the diagnoses they need and if someone (Tobias) tries to so much as allude to them being neurodivergent in front of George Sr. and/or Lucille it gets shut down immediately.

Anyway Buster reads more autistic than ADHD to me but it could be either or both. He has trouble reading other people’s emotions and regulating his own, he’s “strange” and “childish” in ways that are direct responses to how he was raised but also just read as neurodivergent, he’s got safe foods and takes things literally and has no clue how to read social cues and stims and gestures vaguely at all of him is just so very ND. Also the thing with ADHD-havers being randomly struck with bouts of guilt or self loathing? I think that’s him. ADHD was recently reclassified as an anxiety disorder, too, which we know full well is Buster, and it would not surprise me if his panic and anxiety attacks were brought on by sensory overload and RSD and other ADHD things at least some of the time.

As for GOB, I think he’s got the same deal but he reads more ADHD than autistic. I think they both have both but it presents differently in each of them. I’m fully on board with both magic and bees being special interests for that man, and he also just moves and talks and interacts with people in a very neurodivergent way. The stuttering when he’s overwhelmed is, to me, adjacent to (if not straight up being) him going nonverbal. He definitely has RSD too, look at how devastated he is when anyone rejects him ever. And I wouldn’t be surprised if he was bipolar, getting manic when he’s really into a project and then falling into depression for weeks or months at a time.

And, just as a bonus, I think Tony Wonder has ADHD. He recognizes it in GOB and helps him with learn to function in a healthier happier way and his siblings are so confused cause GOB just magically started getting more normal?? Except it’s not magic (and it’s not an illusion lmao) it’s just coping mechanisms. Tony’s been collecting them from various therapists for like 30 years. He has no clue how anyone in this family thinks they’re neurotypical.

[the-cat-and-the-birdie]

I vibe with hyperfixating w/ characters. To varying degrees I’ve fixated on: Armin from AOT for a while, 1D had a DEATH GRIP on me for a few years, (SEVEAL book characters through my teen years)I had an Alucard from castlevania fixation for maybe 3 ish years (‘ending’ only recently) and now Hobes lives in my head rent free ngl.

I get the “being sad cuz you can’t meet them” part, I’ve felt it. I try to not daydream TOO much cuz otherwise it takes over my life and I’m doing a considerable effort to live OUT of my own head, but BOI do I LOVE just daydreaming about my blorbos of choice.

I don’t speak too much about it (mostly the daydreaming) cuz to an extent it feels like a “me thing” (like something I don’t wanna share with anyone cuz it���s special to me), but if given the chance I DO info dump on my fixations.

I don’t think it’s cringe, not at all. These things are stuff that helps us process the world and our experiences with it. I believe everyone has sensitive weird shit that they don’t talk about, but if there’s something Ive learned is that we hardly ever have completely unique experiences. Most people just hide their oddness. Fandom being a prime example of how much our blorbos can mean to us. I think it’s okay and normal. (Until it goes overboard and people send idk violent messages to others because they headcanon something differently idk, the unreasonable stuff imo)

Can’t believe our of everything people would dare to make JOY and INTEREST the things with negative connotations. Being mean should be cringe, being a bully should be embarrassing. But unashamedly enjoying stuff?? That’s wonderful.

Anyone too embarrassed of their own vulnerability that they deal with it by making others feel bad about their interests are the most immature out if all of us.

Joy is everything that’s good with the world.

Even just seeing the letter 1D makes me wanna scream (in a good way!!) cause it takes me back to high school lol 1D was a bit older than me so my grade had Mindless Behaviour (does anyone remember them, where they even popular) but I remember the days where 1D was like the definition of summer songs

And I can totally understand the 'me thing'. Like I never really spoke about it but I felt like I knew my daydreams were more substantial or vivid than the 'average person' so to say.

Or when I spoke about characters to other people, I understood that neurotypicals likes characters, but they often didn't see them as fully formed 'persons' in the way I do - as to say, they didn't speculate or see emotional backstory, connections, or their behavior the way I did.

I never really shared any of my daydreams because like - I can't even get into it that's like asking someone to explain Star Wars to someone who doesn't even know space travel exists.

I grew up in a time on the internet where self-inserts and OC were seen as cringe, and someone would be very quick to call out 'Mary-Sue's (or flawless OCs) whenever they could.

It's not like that now - but in juxtaposition to canon x canon shipping, that bias is still there I feel like. Like it, as a work of fandom art has less 'value' that art or fics of canon only characters

It kinda bums me out still.

I think OC and daydreams and self-indulgent inserts are all the best part of fandom because it's the purest way of fans connecting with content on a personal level.

I'm happy that I see more people pushing back on that lately. Like after years of seeing people viciously hate furries when most of them seem like very nice, fun people, it's refreshing for people to be like 'nah, actually this thing is cool. and im gonna spend of time and/or money on this thing cause i makes me happy;

like you remember when the new Star Wars movie trailers came out and that dude reacted to it and he was moved to tears and people made fun of him??

yeah fuck everyone else that dude knows whats up.

Like yes, openly cry to your faves. Fantasize deep meaningful daydreams that help you process your feelings. Draw your OC with them, or learn every single thing their is to know about them.

That's why I wanted to talk about this. Because I've never heard it spoken about before. Maladaptive daydreaming, yes - and that can be harmful. But I hardly ever hear people talk about the basic mundane experience of it - or even how it can enrich our lives and help us emotionally develop of neurodivergent people.

When I think of it that way, it's something that makes me happy. I don't think I'll ever be able to describe it fully, and that's the point. Our stories are private to us, not because theyre embarrassing, but because they're so us that to even describe it would like describing a new world top to bottom

I love it. It's what makes humans humans.

[flyingbananasaur]

4, 9, 10, 24? :3

so many!! thank u :3

4) What moments make you think, “Well, I’m definitely ace”

hm... without going into graphic detail, i definitely was like "ok, this person is attractive, i should be able to imagine doing the thing with- augh oh gods why brain bleach brain bleach". several times. until i realized Oh Oops It's Sex Repulsion.

9) Who’s the first person you came out to, if any?

my sister! it was in college and distinctly remember it was after we got dinner together one night, we were standing outside the cafeteria and i told her that i was asexual. i cried about it but she was supportive (if confused at first) and then she asked questions and did research and stuff. she's the best i love her :3

10) Has anyone ever come out to you as ace-spec?

not sure if it counts as coming out really because it was casual, but i have two friends who have been like "oh same" after i've come out to them as ace, which is cool.

24) Best part of being ace?

hm... probably like, how i can like, be chill around people who know without them assuming that there's that whole secret neurotypical code language for "let's bang". like, yeah i mentioned your boobs, that's just a statement it doesn't mean anything else.

at risk of maybe accidentally sounding weird i also think it lets people trust me to vent about their own sex lives (with permission) without thinking that they'll be making things weird. even though i can only kinda go "that's rough buddy" since i can't relate, i still love being able to help even a little bit.

[firethekitty]

(about the fic bingo) personally i count the “livio but no razlo” as a negative because i love razlo and people with DID, and i desperately want to know your hottest takes. please Please i’ll even share one of my own, there’s a few fics where Vash gets put into this weird white savior position where he’s The Good White Man and not like his brother who is apparently a big fan of slavery? which in turn ends up giving vashwood this gross slavemaster/slave vibes WHILE they’re making sure to explicitly write wolfwood with darker skin and it’s so. it tastes so bad

actually some of the bingo boxes are the exact same on the hater version! including “no razlo”!

so, on the non-hater version, i acknowledge that sometimes there isn’t enough livio screentime for razlo to make an appearance, or the author just doesn’t feel like they’re able/allowed to write a character with DID. i think this is perfectly understandable and i’d much rather someone say “i don’t know enough about this subject to feel confident writing about it” than someone just reinventing jekyll and hyde again

however, in a hater context, i can count the number of times i’ve seen razlo in a vashwood fic on one hand. i get not having the space to include him in shorter fics but i’ve also seen 40k+ word (WITH livio as a main character!!) fics that never even mention him and i think it’s lame as hell. don’t have DID? consider talking to people (who have given you permission to ask questions of course) or research from well-trusted studies or how people talk about their experience with DID. otherwise don’t just pretend it doesn’t exist?

i just hateee when aus get rid of characters’ disabilities and disorders and trauma. to me it’s kind of the same thing when people write aus and vash has both arms, or wolfwood is just like some random guy with no problems at all. i think these things are such intrinsic parts of characters, ALL characters, and it doesn’t make sense to leave them out or even get rid of them altogether. like, why would you do that? are you “healing” them? are they somehow “better” if they’re able-bodied and neurotypical? how interesting 🤔

anyway GOD that is horrible😭😭😭i can’t say i’ve ever seen Slavery Knives (mostly bc i don’t trust anyone to be normal about him and avoid most fics with him in it LOL) but i see a TON of weird fetishy wolfwood depictions, even more prevalent in fanart. any fic that has him speaking gratuitous spanish like that one tumblr post (si i recognize your señorita, she trabajo'd here) or goes out of its way to talk about how brown his skin is i’m immediately nope-ing out of

[some-random-lizard]

I should preface this with the fact that I’m not officially diagnosed with anything yet, but we are pursuing an ADHD diagnosis. I have a formally diagnosed parent, with a long family history indicating it went back a long way. The other side of my family has a lot of autistic markers, although I don’t think any of them have ever been diagnosed. I don’t know what combination of neurospicy I am, since again, I am currently undiagnosed.

I don’t think people talk enough about overstimulation. For me, it doesn’t happen so often, but usually when it does I get incredibly stressed. It’s not just something I can walk off.

For the 3, maybe 4 neurotypical people on this site, I’ve found a pretty good way to explain how it feels to be stuck in choice paralysis which in a twisted way causes overstimulation.

Sometimes, my brain finds the task at hand not mentally stimulating enough. It decides to make its own stimulation by making me hyperaware of everything going on around me. This seems cool, right? Like a spidey sense in real life? Nope. Sometimes actually, but in this case, nope.

I have a history of overstimulation, although I didn’t put together what it was until recently. My family always tends to go to caravan resorts on holiday, and typically we go and see the evening entertainment after the stuff aimed at younger kids wraps up. The microphones are always turned up far too loud, leading to a number of times when I was younger where I’d sit with mum with her hands over my ears and I’d be completely silent and detached because it was so loud it was too stressful to do anything but shut down, since I was very young and wasn’t exactly trusted to go outside on my own to get away from it, or because on one occasion I was performing in a talent show, but they only did the results after the adult’s section (pretty late at night for a 9 year old), but I wasn’t sure how long it would take so I couldn’t go anywhere else.

It’s like being in a room with the drip torture setup, where the slow tapping of water from a leaky pipe makes you willing to do anything to get away from the noise. Overstimulation is like having three, four, maybe a hundred leaky pipes all at different volumes and distances, all driving you insane at once, making functional existence extremely difficult.

It’s like the POV in The Telltale Heart being incredibly convincing to the police, but the old man’s heartbeat no one else can hear is deafening and he can’t tell anyone about it for fear of seeming insane.

One leaky tap or silent heartbeat might be a clock in the other room, another might be people talking upstairs, or the refrigerator buzzing, or yet another clock in the hallway that ticks out of time with the first, or the trickling noise of the fish tank, or the fabric of an item of clothing suddenly making you want to scream, or the taste of the last thing you ate constricting your throat, and all these things stack up. You can’t tell anyone or do anything about them because they don’t feel those things. Of course they hear and feel, but as background noise. For you, it’s all foreground all the time, and daily life gets lost in the midground as it’s covered by the things most other people store elsewhere.

Stacking a dishwasher is a mountain of overstimulation for me. Each fork to go in the cutlery compartment has to be carefully positioned and quickly dropped and moved away from. If old food (or new food (eating chicken wings is similarly torturous), or even water) stays on my hands and starts to dry on its own, it becomes extremely itchy, adding to the network of pipes dripping, the all-eclipsing heartbeat no one else seems hear.

[dilutedapplejuice]

Hmm. I’m having trouble explaining this coherently so I’m just making a list. Here’s why mainstream autism content on tiktok is waaaaaay skewed.

*disclaimer this is not an attack on anyone, just informational.

1) TikTok’s algorithm promotes and prioritizes the voices of hyperverbal, conventionally attractive American/British AFAB women and non-binary people with low-mid support needs. There is also just a lot more content from people like that (This excludes anyone who talks slowly or quietly or with a lisp or not at all or with an AAC, has a genetic disorder that affects how they look, can’t look at the camera, can’t organize their words in a way that pleases the algorithm, have camera anxiety, are BIPOC, are fat/plus-sized, etc etc etc.

2) The neurodiversity movement as a whole is just exclusionary. People use “neurodivergent” as a blanket term for people with LSN ADHD or autism (even though the word is meant for anyone who isn’t neurotypical, like people with personality disorders, anxiety, depression, schizospec conditions, brain trauma/injuries, etc).

3) Bad takes. From the videos I had seen, autistic people were accepting autism as a disability, but only in the social sense (aka if society accommodated better autism wouldn’t be a disability)-which is fine because for many low-mid support needs people that might be true. But it ignores autistic people who are disabled on an individual level, and not just because of how society treats them. They might need caretakers to do their daily tasks or any other number of supports. There IS a reason autism is ranked in order of support needs. It’s not just accommodations.

The same goes for autistic people who reject the “disordered” psychological model of autism (basically, psychology does diagnosis and treatment of autism based on how many “deficits” an autistic person has in social communication and restrictive/repetitive behaviors). Again, that’s fine if you don’t see any part of your autism as “deficient,” but it is not up to you to tell other autistic people that they don’t have any deficits. It’s up to the individual and saying psychology should get rid of it altogether is a harmful ideal which doesn’t take into account HSN autistic experiences or opinions.

Also, autistic people are allowed to identify with the labels of low- or high-functioning. Or Asperger’s. Again, that’s their decision. I didn’t see anyone mention that on tiktok. There was just a slight lack of nuance.

And… about ABA. It’s good that ABA is getting pushback because it is harmful to a lot of autistic people. It needs work. But the stances on tiktok about it are, again, un-nuanced. Most people talking about it don’t actually have any experience with it. No one ever mentioned that ABA actually has helped autistic people, and many autistic people who went through ABA have mixed feelings about it because it both helped and hurt them. There was no talking about alternatives to ABA or efforts to improve it. It was just about how awful the practice and its history is (which it can be a LOT of the time), and I suppose why it should be abolished?

^ And to make it crystal clear here, I am NOT defending ABA in any way, shape, or form. I don’t have the solution for it here. I’m just saying tiktok isn’t doing a good job of representing people’s arguments.

4) Lack of information on HSN people. Did you know that up to 30% of autistic people are also deaf/HOH? Me neither until today. There is almost no information on comorbidities with autism (other than ADHD/anxiety/depression and maybe EDS/POTS) on tiktok, even though people with autism are more likely to have another physical/psychological disability co-occurring.

So in conclusion, tiktok is a HUGE echo chamber for LSN autistic people and while it has some useful information about autism outside of the psychological view, there needs to be a lot more work for inclusivity, both by tiktok and the people making the videos there.

I think this list can probably be applied to other social media as well, but it’s just tiktok that I’m familiar since I used to browse autism tiktok obsessively bc of my special interest.

*also another note: I realize the algorithm was also responding to my own inputs: how much I watched certain people’s videos over others etc. It WAS my fault that I got so minimally diverse autism content, to an extent. But I know that many HSN non/semiverbal autistic people said that their content was never getting as much attention as LSN content in general and I wholeheartedly believe that. If you think your feed should be more diverse, it’s up to you to look for it because the social media platform is not going to do it for you. As a starting point look up “high support autism” or “level 2 autism” or “level 3 autism.”

I am completely open to talking about this, especially with level 2/3 autistic people. As a level 1 I want to listen to your opinions and respect them to the best of my ability.

Sorry this is so long and unorganized, I’m not sure how to make this more readable.

TLDR: Most videos on tiktok show LSN white autistic people and their content is mostly limited to takes about the late diagnosed LSN community, and doesn’t account for HSN autistic people and their families/caretakers.

[fierceawakening]

Fair! I’ve definitely changed my views on multiples from reading their blogs, so… seconded. I’m still a little unsure whether I think alters are wholly distinct selves, but I don’t have to know that to think that taking people seriously when they say they have them is reasonable.

But this didn’t work for me about the tumblrs of people who claim to have npd and ASPD (I say claim because conventional wisdom is they don’t generally seek help because they tend to think everyone else has the problem, which leaves me a little confused about where lots of people talking about it as a disability identity would come from. The only person I’ve met that I’m pretty certain had an NPD diagnosis had this sort of attitude. “County mental health says I have NPD. Bullshit. I’m ACTUALLY a higher breed than the others. Can’t be a delusion if it’s true.”)

The reason it didn’t work for me is both what I noticed people saying and what I didn’t, which I’ll get into more detail about below:

Here are some things people with PDs have said that eventually led me to feel so uncomfortable I stopped actively reading their blogs. I’m doing my best here to be vague so as not to identify anyone, but I want to give examples to show you I’ve tried and it didn’t change my mind, so you can argue with knowledge about whether you think it would be wise for me to try again or not:

People who are not my partner are NPCs. It’s difficult to remind myself they are real.

I think it’s funny when animals get mildly hurt, because I lack empathy. I still love my pets though.

Why do neurotypicals cry at funerals? It’s so hard to mask!

I don’t know why my ex boyfriend was sad when his dad died. He dumped me over this. I want him back. How do I better understand so I can keep him?

I’m so afraid of abandonment that I manipulate people into not leaving me. I know you value consent, but you don’t understand. It’s too painful for me to let them leave me.

I’m tempted to behave cruelly all the time, but I don’t. I’m not going to give you anyone to double check “I don’t” with, though. Trust my blogging.

I mask all the time. If you saw what’s under my mask, you’d be afraid of me. But I’m good, because I mask.

I’m such a perfectionist that I’d rather believe everyone else is inferior than acknowledge I make mistakes. It’s too painful for me to do that. So I believe I’m superior.

Again, I’ve tried to keep these generic enough that they don’t identify individuals. If you can tell who any are, please DO NOT say so. I a, talking about my boundaries, not trying to arm hate mobs.

Are these things deal breakers for everyone everywhere ever? No.

But they’re things it upsets and scares me to hear, so I stopped forcing myself to read them to try and make myself less ableist. These are things that would make me think someone’s an asshole that I have to try to pretzel myself into thinking don’t “because disability means you can’t change.”

But if these people can’t change these things I don’t want to be around them.

And then there’s the thing I notice by its absence:

These blogs claim over and over that they’re as compassionate as more neurotypical people, including that having a name and description of their PD helps them to know where tjr6 might mess up and correct it.

All of that’s great!

But I don’t see them ever say, “my partner was upset with me this week because I didn’t notice they were sad. Here’s how I realized things had gone south, here’s what I did to take responsibility and fix it, and here’s where things stand now.”

That is, from what I’ve seen, these bloggers tend to talk about how the pain in their lives is everyone else’s fault, but not about what they do wrong sometimes and how they fix it.

Which is suspicious to me precisely because not taking responsibility for having hurt others seems to be part of the symptomatology!

But that COULD be incorrect or off or misleading. (People who say PDs are inherently neutral tend to make comparisons to drapetomania, the pathologizing of enslaved persons who desired freedom. When freedom is a perfectly normal thing for someone somebody enslaved to want.)

Which is why I’m looking not for blogs but for hard data. What do I have wrong? If it’s true that psychiatry as a system views these people incorrectly or unfairly, where’s the body of evidence people are building up to prove this?

If they’re not… the whole thing strikes me as a grift. Using the word “ableism” to shut off people’s critical thinking because no one wants to be accused of isms and most of us will bend over backwards to prove we’re good leftists.

It’s super creepy to me especially as someone who HAS experienced blatant ableism of the “you’ll never deserve good grades in phys ed because part of gym is talent and you have none” “you’re a cripple, I can’t help cripples” etc. sort.

Ableism isn’t “expecting you to take responsibility for being hurtful even though your illness makes you want to blame them.” Ableism is “you described how you tried your best to do so and what was making it difficult, and instead of recognizing your efforts someone laughed in your face.”

The whole empathy thing reminds me of a lot of anti-gay or anti-trans posts. People say that gay or trans people won’t do certain things, and I look at gay or trans people IRL and they are doing those things. You say people without empathy won’t care for other people, and I look at people who don’t have empathy and they demonstrate care for other people. You can go the route of “these people are lying to themselves when they say they don’t have empathy,” but I think that’s as unfair as “these people are lying to themselves when they say they’re gay.”

Okay, can you answer some questions for me then?

Lack of empathy is often cited as a symptom of disorders that make healthy intimate relationships difficult for people who have it. This is most often described from what research I’ve done as leading to behavior that the other partner in the intimate relationship finds damaging—that they’re ignored, their partner insults or degrades them, their partner takes advantage of them for resources or support but doesn’t provide these things in turn, etc.

IF this is the type of behavior that lack of empathy leads to, THEN it would make sense that professionals would exhort people not to get into intimate relationships with them—to keep things at the acquaintance level, to “go gray rock,” etc.

You’re asserting that lack of empathy doesn’t lead to these sorts of behavior.

This is big! If you’re right, I’m wrong. Absolutely! Totally! Completely! If you’re right i’m not only a jerk but also an idiot.

So tell me, please, so we can settle this: what behaviors do people do as a result of lack of empathy? Which behaviors lead clinicians to note a lack of empathy?

Being gay, from what I can tell, leads to one or both of two main behaviors: having sex with someone of the same sex and/or gender, and entering an intimate relationship with someone of the same sex and/or gender.

These are neutral behaviors, and ones that suppressing can’t be done without harm. So homosexuality, the term for someone prone to these behaviors, is harmless.

Can you explain the behaviors that result from lack of empathy in a way that helps me see in detail that they’re also neutral?

That would be the best way to most clearly change my mind.

[feminist-mina-harker]

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