#i be having autism

[paintedvanilla]

throwback to when me and manar were talking about fight club and I got so excited I hit myself in the face

[kenapiece-main]

Can you believe I'm having to make this meme even after successfully finishing up taxes and applying to job

[aimlesspoet]

a bottom-tier autistic experience is being told throughout your entire childhood that you are just an overthinker when it comes to social situations and later finding out that your friends did, in fact, hate being around you and tried to communicate that through weird little hints

[etherealspacejelly]

sometimes you just have to let yourself be a bit neurodivergent.

i hate going out, it gives me a lot of anxiety and sensory input that i dont like, and i am often forced to talk to people.

so i do this thing on more difficult days, or sometimes just for fun, where i "bring a fictional character with me". i walk and imagine Fictional Character walking next to me. they talk to me, reassure me, hype me up, whatever i need them to do.

today dean winchester came christmas shopping with me. he went over the list with me of stuff i needed to get, told me i was doing a good job every time i finished in a certain shop, reminded me to take a deep breath when i got a little overwhelmed.

and yea. its kinda silly. and i know its just me talking to myself in a different voice, but it Works! especially since all of my special interests/hyperfixations tend to be tv/movie related.

so do what you gotta do to Get Shit Done. stop holding yourself to neurotypical standards. if you need Fictional Character to tell you you're doing a good job, do it! if you need Favourite Singer to walk you to school, do it! yea it might feel silly but you're literally fighting against your own brain to get stuff done every single day. you can have a little self indulgent daydream, as a treat.

[aroacedavestrider]

people will hear you talk about struggling with mental illness and say “you can do anything if you just put your mind to it”. brother what part of the body does the mental illness happen in. what do you think is the problem

[emilnikos]

I need non autistic people to realise meltdowns are a real debilitating thing that has a serious effect on your mental and physical health NOWWWWW!!! The way its been trivialized and lessened pisses me the fuck off. It's not a tantrum and it doesn't come from "being too weak-willed" it's painful and it's embarrassing AND MOST OF ALL IT'S INVOLUNTARY!! Don't claim to be an ally to autistic or disabled people and then make fun of people who have meltdowns. Literally get the hell out of my sight

[arashixyarts]

REJECT RENDERING RETURN TO ANIMATION RAAAAAAGH

some stills from the thing ^_^

[xx-k1tsun3-k1d-xx]

the mobile phone museum is a online museum featuring over 2000 types of old and funky phones that’s amazing for seeing old phones and getting info about them for stuff like writing/art or just because they’re so cool and i love them look at them

behold! some of my favourite silly creatures :3

[swordy-da-goat]

i connected two dots

[sapphia]

autism screening quizzes will be like “do you take things too literally” and then ask fifty of the worst-worded questions ever dreamt up by man

[mirror-mariposa]

Never gonna get over how the anime made this scene just so,, haunting and elevated. Like I love the manga but I love how the anime has taken these scenes and elevated the themes of death and rebirth with simple shots like this and it’s why even after reading all of the manga I still get excited for the anime because I *know* the anime will not only be a faithful adaptation, but also an artistic masterpiece as it uses the medium to its advantage

[teleportzz]

"bluntly honest" autism but in the sense that i absolutely cannot refrain from complimenting strangers if i like their earrings or their shirt or i think they have a friendly-sounding laugh or i think their art is beautiful or i think the fic they wrote portrays the characters so well. "bluntly honest" doesn't have to mean "mean". i love to tell people things that are kind and also true.

[bogkeep]

ok so i think that my favourite fantasy subgenre is The Inherent Tragedy Of Being Born Into Royalty. which mostly means that i like to read about gay princes but with some nuance

[cheeseanonioncrisps]

It's a weird fucking feeling realising that you actually have to plan ahead for and schedule in the things you like to do, as well as the things you have to do.

I don't mean the complicated stuff, that's a given.

If I'm going to the cinema, then I accept I'm going to have to look up film times and buy tickets and figure out when I'm going to leave the house. If I'm going to visit a friend who lives in a different county, then I accept that I'm going to probably be looking up travel times and planning activities and where to eat and what time we'll be doing what, for possibly days beforehand.

But its even the fucking lowkey stuff. If I want to watch a tv show, I have to plan time out of my day to do it, and I don't always get round to it. If I have a whole day free for some reason, and I decide I want to watch a film (at home, on the sofa) and I don't lay out a plan for when I'm going to do that and how long I'm going to take, then it just won't happen.

If I want to go for a walk just around my local area before it gets dark, or eat something with a slightly longer cooking time, or write my diary, or read a book I've been looking forward to reading, or even read fucking fanfiction that is longer than about 8000 words, then I have to set some sort of plan beforehand.

Like, I know intellectually that executive dysfunction affects more than just the things you don't enjoy doing. But fuck it doesn't really hit you until you realise that you haven't sat down to watch an episode of that show you like for over a week, even though you can't really name any activities you've been doing or commitments you have that would make it impossible to do so.

Anyway, this is a reminder to people who struggle with that sort of thing: schedule your days off, lest they be swallowed by the Pit before you get the chance to do anything fun with them.

[inbabylontheywept]

she was dead silent on the drive home, but that was okay. sometimes, after band practice, she was just out of words. it was a short drive to her house. the only part where it actually felt weird was after i pulled up her parent’s driveway. 

after that, the silence stretched so far it smeared and left a weird residue. she kept looking at the car door like she wanted to leave, so i looked at the door too, then she looked at me, and i looked at her, and my first thought was that she was going to tell me that the door was stuck. i was used to that car always doing some damn thing. it was the car me and all my siblings had learned to drive in, and it was really beat to hell. there were dents all over the body, which we’d unsuccessfully tried fixing up with spackle. it had looked nice for maybe a week, but then the sun wrecked it - the spackle cracked up like the mud on the bottom of a dry riverbed and turned a sort of off yellow-white that made the car looked like it had been molded out of chicken shit. it also had a bullet hole it through the cabin that whistled like a toothless old man whenever the car went above 40, so loud it could drown out the radio, and a cabin that smelled so strongly of bugspray that even the arizona summer we drove everywhere we could with the windows down.

(if you have kids one day, you will maybe, possibly, begin to understand how much i loved that car.)

anyway, i was thinking about what else could possibly be wrong with the chickenshitmobile, and she just kept looking at me, and then i wondered if there was something on my face, and she just kept looking at me, and then the penny dropped and i realized she was trying to work up the nerve to break up with me. 

now, i’d seen her work up the nerve to do things like this before – it could take quite a while. and knowing it was about to happen made the waiting immediately unbearable. 

so i said hey. 

and she looked at me, very startled, and said hey back real small. like she’d been caught. and in a way, i suppose she had. 

and i said it’s okay. you can just say it. i’ll be okay.

i’m always okay. 

and she said: i’m really sorry. 

i loved her, you know? it was highschool, but teenagers are capable of love. the way people love changes over time just as much as the way they stand, or the way they talk, but things don’t stop existing just because they're different. opposite really – a thing only stops changing when it's fully gone.

and i said, nothing to be sorry for, and i meant it. she looked a little relived, and i was happy to give her that peace. then she left. i watched her make it through the front door, because that was just habit at that point, and then i sat there a while afterwards, checking how i felt. and the answer was not good, but good enough to make it home. good enough to limp on. 

so i put my car in reverse, took my last look goodbye, and immediately backed into her neighbor’s car. 

crunch. 

air bags didn't go off, which was good. i left a decent dent in the bumper of the other car. genuinely couldn’t tell if i did anything to my car – anything wrong with it just kind of blended together into the general ecosystem of hand mottled, sun cracked, chickenshit spackle. 

i checked my glove box, and my car insurance info was, of course, out of date. my phone was dead too. as a teenager, my phone was less my lifeline to my friends, and more my tether to my parents, so i wasn’t particularly conscious of keeping it charged. both my fault.

i sat there a few minutes, trying to think of the best way to handle things, and there was only one answer i could think of, and i hated that answer, so i spent a few more minutes trying and failing to think of a better one, and then a few more coming to peace with what had to be done. 

then i went back to knock on my now ex’s front door. 

her dad opened, which i was very relieved over, even if he seemed less than thrilled. he looked me over, and in a firm, but slightly apologetic way said: she does not want to see you right now. 

(i think he assumed i was going to try and talk her out of the break up?)

and i said not here for her. i just backed into your neighbor’s car, and i need to call my dad, but my phone’s dead. could i borrow yours?

and he looked at me, then back at his neighbors car, which sure enough was dented, then he looked at the chickenshitmobile, and if there was something wrong with it, it just kind of blended into the general Wrongness of the car, then back to me, and i could see him imagining the last ten minutes from my pov: getting broken up with, backing into a car, having to walk up to your exes door and borrow a phone, calling my dad to tell him that i just reversed into someone.  

and his expression shifted from stern and apologetic to truly sad, which felt more kind that i deserved. things only got here because i kept fucking up - forgot to look behind me, forgot to replace the insurance forms, forgot to charge my phone. it was my mess, but his sympathy meant the world to me. i probably would’ve cried if he said sorry, or patted me on the back or called me sport, but instead he said

stay out here – i’ll bring you a phone.

and then he left.  

i found a nice spot on the lawn in the shade under a sycamore, then settled into his grass.i was trying not to freak out, and was doing an okay job. he came out a minute or so later, not just with a phone, but a juicebox and a jar of green olives, which really threw a wrench in the whole try not to cry thing. soon as i saw those, a few tears squoze out. i was still hoping i could pass them off as Manly Tears but then he told me that he’d gotten the olives a few weeks before and had been meaning to hand them off to me, and that this was his last chance for that. then i made a sound like a horse drowning in a bog, and he patted my back pretty rough, four solid thumps, like he wasn't sure if i was crying or choking on an olive, and was trying to cover both bases at once.

then he went back inside, and i made a few more bog horse noises while finishing off the rest of the entire jar of green olives, and then i called my dad.

he was about ten minutes away that day, and luckily was home. he drove over, and we went to the neighbor’s house, and from there things actually went quite nice. the neighbor was a retired man who actually said he could fix the dent himself, no need for insurance. he said he appreciated that i didn't just drive off, and i said i was really sorry about his car, and he said he was really sorry about my car, and then he gestured to the chickenshitmobile and i laughed because it really was a disaster on wheels.

then we left.

i thought we were going to head straight home, but instead we went to a gas station, and we both got several slim jims that we folded into thick enough coils that we could put them on a hotdog bun because the growing up mormon equivalent of having a sad brewski with your dad is just choosing to make bad decisions sober. then he took me to the canals and we watched the sun turn all orange and pink, and he looked over at me and said:

brains are good at remembering bad days. so you gotta make sure that a bad day has a good part in in, so you can remember that too. remember that when you have a kid. try to do a good job on days like that - they're going to be a big part of how they remember you.

and then he gave me a big hug and said he was never going to eat another slim jim again.

---

the year after that i went to college, which kicked my butt in new and exciting ways. and on a lot of those bad days, after a test that went sour, or a faux paus that was particularly embarrassing, or some other hardship of my new adult life, i’d stop by the gas station and pick up leathery, half jerkied hotdog before heading to the canals to watch the sun set. i’d take a bite and imagine my dad next to me, grimacing through the slim-jim wad, asking what good thing i was going use that time to remember. 

and in my head, i’d say you, dad. 

i’m going to remember you.

[averageludwig]

painting my hyperfixation like a woman I am in love with + bonus painting i like less