#not that i really feel up to that anyway

[ultravioletness]

gay knights and dames collages part two

[imminent-danger-came]

I am seeing some of the WORST takes about tdp season 4. Sweet, sweet tumblr users. This season was a lot of set up, not everything was supposed to be explained or resolved, or even "should" have been. Season 4 had to do the heavy leg work of re-establishing characters and arcs and the plot moving foreword. It just needs a little time to be able to act on everything it's now established. It did a good job building off of arc 1, and now we are fully indoctrinated into arc 2!

[ganonfan1995]

Burnt out

[anna-scribbles]

congrats dr. swift on the new lovesquare album 

(lyrics from labyrinth by taylor swift) 

[butts-bouncing-on-the-beltway]

I was talking to a client today about "how to identify masking" as part of the process of learning how to shift masking from a reflexive coping strategy to a voluntary and conscious one and I feel like it led to a really important shift in framework FOR ME about masking and social distress.

Paraphrasing, the ideas we came to are as follows:

One of the reasons masking can be so difficult to recognize is because, essentially, masking is the act of performing "yourself" as a mirror for the other person you are interacting with. It's this idea of "I will micro-manage my own mood, affect, behavior, mannerisms, and environment in order to reflect back to you whatever version of "self" you need from me because if I don't there will be consequences". So because masking is essentially performing "mirroring" as selfhood by amplifying or minimizing aspects of yourself based on what you think the other person wants to see in you, it varies significantly from one context to another. The major commonality is that it takes up an INCREDIBLE amount of energy, mental and emotional resources, cognitive processing power, etc. So you don't identify masking by specific behaviors so much as by the feeling of "having a significant amount of your mental/emotional resources be occupied by the act of social interaction" to the point that it doesn't leave enough left-over for other cognitive tasks, or leaves you feeling exhausted and worn out, or basically by the impact that masking has on you during and after.

In this framework, part of why we get so anxious about new or unfamiliar people or situations is because we don't know how to mask in that context yet, and so until we get there and figure it out, we're basically just terrified of what could go wrong since we don't know what we're walking into.*

*This is the underlying framework of anticipatory and obsessive anxiety as well. Anticipatory and obsessive anxiety functions as the mechanism by which we conduct both predictive reasoning-basd advance planning and review/self-correctionof our mental predictive model.

Autistic aversion to uncertainty has a lot to do with our need to be able to use predictive reasoning-based advance planning to cope with "social deficits" aka how much harder it is for us to interpret subtextual/nonverbal cues, learn/meet social expectations, and work through/around disordered sensory processing. That predictive reasoning requires us to be familiar, in advance, with the stable constant factors that influence decision making in social contexts. If we aren't familiar with the constant variables than we can't plan, if we can't plan than we are more likely to make noticeable social mis-steps, and if we take notable social mis-steps there are consequences. It becomes necessary for us to be hypervigilent to observable patterns in other people's behavior in order to try to reverse engineer the social interaction playbook on the fly. That ends up making us more likely to assume personal responsibility for predicting and managing the emotional regulatory needs of people around us at all costs, replicating the behavioral/cognitive impacts of chronic traumatic stress due to the activation of our sympathetic nervous system from chronic hypervigilence.

Essentially, masking is a cognitive defense mechanism to severe and/or persistant traumatic interpersonal stressors. As the neurological impacts of chronic traumatic stress heal, we mask less frequently. But in order to heal from chronic traumatic stress, the human brain requires a safe environment that does not trigger a retraumatization episode or replicate feelings of helplessness/fear for safety. In other words, reducing/terminating masking safely requires us as autistic people to have consistent access to social environments in which we are able to utilize autistic interpersonal boundaries without fear of consequence or chonically unmet need. This requires the people around us to be able to respect not only autistic interpersonal boundaries, but also autistic self-expression/advocacy modalities and mediums.

I feel like a lot of the pieces of this framework have been rattling around in my head for a while but the flavor of words hit just right today and all the connections snapped into place.

Anyway, I'm still sort of sorting through the clinical implications of this framework but I think it's a direction I want to keep exploring for sure.

[kagoutiss]

so ive been thinking about an AU loosely based on the whole ‘sheik was a double agent also working for ganondorf’ thing in the oot manga and. basically here is a bunch of stuff so tonally different that it gives u whiplash

[sleepinglionhearts]

Give you 3 guesses what fiancée is playing rn

[malama-art]

liko and roy

[mkzmerryfriend]

Okay I’m not Asian and I’m not a child of Asian parents, but I fully started crying at “I see you Meimei. You try to make everyone happy, but you are so hard on yourself. And if I taught you that… I’m sorry.”

Because to be able to hear that from your mom, the person you’ve spent your life trying to make proud of you, is so validating.

[puppppppppy]

AKA... the CATS!!

[sarumint]

keep composing…

[revvethasmythh]

Still, as always, thinking about how Veth's story is such a complex look at womanhood and motherhood and what it means to be a woman and a mother who wants things. Because Veth's story is about wanting, just as much as it's about learning to be brave. Veth presumably comes from a very traditional small town, married her (effectively) high school sweetheart when she was quite young and had a child almost immediately, which, while based on love, might also have been an effort to fit in and become an independent adult in her town, away from the mockery of her brothers. The things people in town didn't like about her were her strangeness and her collections of bits and bobs and oddities. The shiny things that she wanted. In some ways, that was the wedge between her and her community, the strangeness of how she desired things and wantonly kept them. Even marrying and having a kid so young could be an extension of this. Veth wants things and strives to get them

All of that in heightened after she's turned into goblin. It becomes "the itch" to steal and to horde shiny, beautiful things, which is particularly poignant considering how ugly she finds herself, even uglier than she thought of herself when she was still a halfling. She wants to surround herself with beautiful things. She wants to help Caleb. She wants to be her again. She wants.

And it's okay for Nott the Brave to want things, because Nott the Brave exists outside of social contracts. She's already a monster--there's no need to pretend to fit in. It's freeing, to be able to want things as much as you want and people won't bat an eye. As much as she hated that body, she loved the freedom it gave her. The freedom to be transgressive in a way she was unable to be as Veth Brenatto. Because, much as she loves her family, isn't being a woman and mother something of a cage to her? Those labels put her in specific boxes, they determine how she should behave. So much of later development hinges on these questions: "What does it mean to be a good woman in this society? What does it mean to be a good mother?" She is SO hard on herself for not being with Luc enough, which is absolutely understandable, but she also wants this life of adventure. Does that make her a bad person? A bad mother? To want something that isn't her family?

And then Caleb. Probably the most unfortunate thing she wants, something she knows she can never have. Because she has Yeza and she loves him and he's her husband. They have a social contract that she must abide by. But Caleb's right there and she wants him. Does that make her a bad woman? Does that make her a bad wife? It's just one more thing that makes her different from her peers, her inability to be content with what she already has. And, at the end of the day, I think this is what we should think of when we talk about Veth's relationship with motherhood and womanhood. How transgressive it is for her to so deeply desire when clearly, from the way she grew up and the messages she internalized, it wasn't a woman's place to want more than she was afforded, nor was it a mother's.

[becasbelt]

every single time

[b4kuch1n]

genre of chillin

[rupicoluu]

The fate of a protagonist is a lonely spotlight

[aquanutart]

xadian field guide