#i went through every single autistic happy stim while reading this

[knifeforkspooncup]

*takes a deep breath*

OK so a while ago I posted about wanting to read Aziraphale's first time getting drunk. @klikandtuna stepped in and wrote the fic.

And you guys.

YOU GUYS.

I am on cloud 9. Go read the fic, and the rest of their stuff because so far everything I've read drives me RABID.

Also, hold these pics in your mind when you read it:

And if I may demonstrate for you my 5 stages of reading this fic:

[sasarahsunshine]

To the person who send the vent about moving in with your autistic friend: you literally don't deserve any credit for not getting angry at her. It's the bare minimum:)))

Also the fact that you are relived now that you know that no one got frustrated or angry with her? Why moving her in a place where you weren't sure about that?

And lastly why would you share her struggles like that? She probably went through enough why would someone post that ?

(This is absolutely no hate to you,Sarah!! Much love to you and I don't see anything wrong with you being happy about that ask. These are just little things people do so often that annoy the shit out of me. Yes, the whole story, that they moved in together and everything is really wholesome and I wish them the best. 💙)

Anon, you're totally right about the first thing. As someone with autism, PTSD, etc., I'm so used to people getting upset with me and not being patient or understanding. I'm used to my own family and friends getting frustrated when I talk too much or too fast, or when I do the opposite and shut down completely.

So when I see people talking about or explaining how they were patient and kind, I tend to get overly excited/happy about it. Especially because all I can think about is how happy I feel when someone lets me stim, or when my brother texts me from across the room because he noticed I got quiet and I'm humming to myself to drown out noise (and he knows I can't talk so we message each other instead).

So, in the grand scheme of things, you technically shouldn't get a pat on the back or a gold star for being kind, because yes, it is the bare minimum. But then again, they don't really teach you how to handle when someone goes non-verbal in school, you know? My mom knew my brother was autistic and still had no clue on how to handle his outbursts or help when he was overstimulated. I learned how to help him on my own, just by observing and sitting with him (plus living with him for 15 years of his life probably helped, so I got to know him pretty well).

It's completely possible that the first Anon has never experienced seeing their ASD friend act like this before. And when someone locks themselves away, refuses to eat, refuses to speak—well, that can be scary and overwhelming when you don't know how to make it better. You can't just go into their space and make them come out, you know? So being patient, while being worried, and waiting for their friend to come out on their own was all they could really do.

To the second point: everyone with ASD is different (like every disorder, mental illness, disability, sexuality, etc), so I don't know how their friend handles change on a day-to-day basis, but for myself, I always hope that I will like the change and that I will have fun. Moving in with your friends is supposed to be fun! Going to college is fun! Picking out your room and decorations, making schedules, and getting to be an adult for the first time are fun and exciting! AND she was going it all with her friends! So, it's totally possible even she didn't know she was going to shut down as badly as she did until she was already moved in, when reality hit. I always want to go do big fun things, like go to the fair or the mall, but then once I'm there I get overwhelmed and need a break (sometimes before we even get started).

So, although I don't know their story, I can see how they didn't know they would have such a bad reaction to all that change at once until it was too late. And then Anon being relieved that nobody else was upset with her, in my opinion, is a good reaction and feeling to have, since they clearly care about their friend enough to hope that nobody saw her as a burden or was upset with her actions.

And the final point, this is the internet and it's anonymous. The chance that this anon's roommate is on Tumblr, follows my blog, and realizes this post is about them is slim. If that were the case, the only people who would know would be the original Anon and said roommate. That Anon wanted to share something that made them smile and feel good/happy, but clearly, they needed an anonymous way to do so, so they came to me. And I don't mind when people come to me with stuff like that! I love getting messages from people about whatever they're going through, good or bad.

Since they're going to college, I will go with the assumption that everyone in the household is young. 18-20-year-olds most likely, with no real-world experience just yet. They're learning new things every single day, and that includes how to understand their friend who happens to have autism.

So, Anon, I totally understand where you're coming from with this follow-up message to them. I get it! I see why you get annoyed and upset when it feels like people are only doing the bare minimum and expecting a reward. But I also like to hope that, maybe, this person is just starting out on their path to learning more about neurodivergent people (ASD, ADHD, OCD, ADD, etc), and mental health as a whole. And I want to encourage them to keep learning, to keep being patient, and to keep trying to understand those of us who don't quite think the same as everyone else.

Thank you for messaging me, really! /gen. I love that you're passionate about your feelings for this, and I love that you messaged me so you would be heard. I also love being able to talk about this stuff, even though I doubt anyone really reads it, lol.

We all wish the other Anon the best with their new move, their friend, and their college semester! And I love you both!! I hope you're having a wonderful day/night wherever you are!! <333

[verdigrisprowl]

human au

Hey I’m back on this meme yay.

This post is over 1400 words long??? how the fuck

1. Prowl became a cop because her whole family was full of cops, so she was exposed to it a lot as a kid—and consequently got completely obsessed with it. Spent her whole life preparing to be a cop. Did all her book reports on police biographies and as many school projects as physically possible on the history of policing, went into her local Explorer program as early as possible, spent every year in track & field in school and took two different martial arts extracurrucularly, drove off all her potential friends in school because she basically had nothing to talk about that didn’t somehow relate back to policing, majored in criminal justice in college, every single class and elective she took was geared specifically toward giving her extra knowledge or skills that she thought could be useful for policing, applied for the police academy the day she finished her last final, soared through the application process (with one near-hiccup during the psych eval), completely aced every class and every lesson in the police academy.

She was a police officer for less than a year when she saw crime scene investigators at work examining the blood spatter evidence at a crime scene, and realized deep in her soul that she had to spend the rest of her life doing what they were doing or she would literally die.

She’s now a ballistics expert and is extremely happy with it.

2. She’s still weirdly obsessed with policing and struggles to carry on conversations that don’t relate back to law enforcement. Luckily, this is less weird for someone who works in law enforcement than it was for, like, a twelve-year-old. But it does mean that, outside of coworkers who talk with her about work, she doesn’t really talk to anyone. She doesn’t have close friends. She doesn’t talk to her family. She’s lonely.

She goes on a lot of first dates, because she’s conventionally attractive and big enough boobs automatically cancel out resting bitch face, and she doesn’t have the social sense to realize she probably shouldn’t be giving a shot to every guy who hits on her out of nowhere simply because they think she’s hot. She has a fair amount of second dates, too, because it’s excusable to only talk about your basic life facts and your job on the first date, and because a lot of guys just don’t notice if they’re doing more talking than she is. She even has some third dates with those guys who are extremely chatty and too self-absorbed to realize she’s saying almost nothing back. It’s the fourth date at the very latest that either the guy realizes that she can basically only talk about one subject, and says maybe they should see other people; or that she decides the sickening feeling like she’s stuck inside an invisible bubble and all alone while she’s supposed to be connecting with this other human being has gotten too bad to bear, and she texts him to thank him for his time and inform him that they will no longer be dating, and then ignores his calls.

Sometimes she hangs out in libraries reading because she hopes to meet maybe vaguely intellectual guys and that seems like the place to do it, but she doesn’t strike up conversations with anyone and it turns out that pretty much the only guys who interrupt reading women at libraries are jerks. (She still dates them, and ends up predictably disappointed.) Sometimes she goes out to bars, which she really doesn’t like, but at least then she sometimes gets laid without having to go through a couple awful dates first, which is something.

And believe it or not her dating life is going better than the rest of her social life.

3. Prowl is bi-everything and demi-everything. The latter has prevented her from figuring out the former because it’s kind of hard to realize you’re attracted to girls if that attraction only springs up after you’ve made an emotional connection, and also you don’t make emotional connections. And also she hasn’t even figured out she’s demi because she’s hungry to make a romantic connection to someone and because she’s got a fairly active libido, and she’s never quite realized that wanting to be in love and wanting to have sex aren’t the same as having attraction TO someone. So she keeps dating lame dudes that hit on her first.

Other things Prowl has not figured out about herself: she’s autistic. You’d think that would be one she would have figured out about herself, because it’s honestly pretty obvious. But she never had the super obvious traits that would have been dead giveaways as a child—her stims were either small and unassuming or else done in private and so never stuck out to anyone; she had shutdowns instead of meltdowns and those were very infrequently triggered; and when she was nonverbal as a child people ascribed it to deeply traumatic childhood experiences. (Garden-variety divorced parents, coincidentally around the time she went nonverbal.) In fact, it turns out you can get away with a whole lot of pretty obvious signs of autism without getting diagnosed if you use “childhood trauma, therapy will fix it”! Especially if you’re a girl! Wow!

She probably would have gotten diagnosed if she hadn’t figured out how to get words to work again. And immediately demanded to stop going to therapy.

4. She rents the attic of a house occupied by five other people, who clearly all know each other and are friends, so she’s not sure why they rented out the attic to a total stranger. Maybe they couldn’t find a sixth friend to rent it? She thinks they’re all construction workers or something. Only 1.5 of them isn’t an idiot. Even though she has the same permission to use the common areas of the house that the rest of the residents do, she never uses them, and sneaks around avoiding the living room or any other room where the other residents are likely to be in order to get to the kitchen. She also eats at odd hours to try to avoid running into any of them. Sadly, a couple of them eat at odd hours too, so occasionally she’ll peek in the doorway and then bolt like a scared rabbit because somebody’s already in there. Why is she so determined to avoid them tho? It’s like she thinks she’s a home invader and she can’t let them know she’s there. She pays the same rent the rest of them do. What’s she scared of.

They met as construction workers but only two of them actually still are. The others are a doctor, a trucker, and a drug dealer respectable chemical engineering student. And they all think their roommate upstairs is pretty great even though she only talks to them, like, once a month. (They would be 100% dtf any time if she asked but she hasn’t and they don’t know how to broach the topic besides nude pics. And they figure it’s probably a bad idea to send unsolicited nude pics to someone who works with the police. Especially when they’re hiding drugs.)

5. I was like “hey guys I’ve got four headcanons but I need a fifth” and my friends were like “what’s Prowl’s favorite pizza” and I was like “what kind of pizza says ‘autistic forensic investigator with a special interest in police and a sad social life’” and I got “pepperoni? cheese pizza?” 

Prowl’s favorite pizza is cheese pizza, except she doesn’t eat the cheese, she peels it off and just eats the pizza with the tomato sauce. No, she can’t order a pizza with sauce and no cheese, if you do that the tomato sauce gets overcooked and crusty and nasty. It needs the layer of cheese on top to protect it during the baking, and then the cheese can be removed and the beautiful saucy pizza consumed.

She prefers a largely liquid diet, though. As a kid she’d mechanically swallow down sandwiches (PB&J, preferably, or melted cheese BUT NOT on toast ONLY on plain bread and melted in the microwave), or squishy food like mashed potatoes and cooked carrots, but given a choice she’d live on soup. If the food is the least bit crunchy she can’t process it.

The recent trends of a billion smoothie recipes and nutrient drinks that supposedly fulfill 100% of a human’s dietary needs have been basically the greatest thing to ever happen to her, in her life, full stop.