#i don't feel the need to justify my interest in dolls anymore i really don't

[britneyshakespeare]

i love hearing old ladies share about their vintage fashion doll collections. like doll collectors on social media skew very young bc duh it's social media but there's something extremely comforting about pre-internet era collectors sharing their knowledge and history.

[babybabymerrychristmas]

Late diagnosed autistics, when did yall truly accept your autism?

For me, it was when I realized you can analyze song lyrics like you can poems. Like, hello, music is the way I communicate my feelings and has always been the way I mask my meltdowns. My parents used to hate my response to them yelling at me because I would get so scared I'd start crying and I couldn't stop. They'd accuse me of crying to manipulate their emotions so I learned I couldn't do that anymore but that caused me to get depressed in high school.

Like, I truly felt like a doll inside. Empty, no feelings or emotions but on the outside, I was perfect. I had good grades, my sister hated me for the size of the shoes I left her to fill, and I'm like really pretty. But I felt so fucking terrible all the time but I couldn't do anything to relieve that pain.... except for when I listened to music late at night and I could cry for hours and hours and hours and hours without being hit or yelled at to stop or accused of manipulating anyone.

I would listen to terribly depressing songs on purpose because crying made me feel so much better in the morning. Like, crying is truly a cathartic emotion for me and the only way I could find that was socially acceptable to cry was through late night musically induced breakdowns. Everyone on tumblr was constantly talking about their breakdowns, so I didn't think I was abnormal in my emotional regulation. Like, I didn't realize how deeply this affected me psychologically until after I got diagnosed and was thinking about how I went so long without being diagnosed.

The answer isn't that I'm low support needs, because the only reason I'm succeeding today is through the support of my partner. The answer is that I was quite literally abused into being socially acceptable autistic.

Anyways, reblog and add your own autism awakenings because so many people need to hear our stories and seek diagnosis/research themselves about what autism actually is, how it works, what "autism is a spectrum" actually means and the ways in which presentations of autism are highly, highly, highly dependent on socialization.

For example, in white communities and black communities there are different social culture norms. This means that the presentation of autism as "being really obsessed with trains" is like... not helpful at all when looking for special interests in black kids. Instead, black boys might be classified as "weebs" or be really, really, really into anime/Manga to the point where they Naruto run in school for example. Most people don't need to own every single novel in a 30 novel series, for example, and don't spend money on that because they can't justify to themselves. Autistic people like to make themselves happy and that's reason enough to buy something.

I'm going to stop rambling now but I'm really interested in hearing the moment that it truly clicked for you that you ARE autistic and WERE the entire time.