#what do you mean I’m neurodivergent?

[three-taikas-in-a-trenchcoat]

My therapist had me write down when I feel happiest and my list included

1. Fostering cats

2. Reading/learning

3. Infodumping about my passions

Anyone else get joy out of the slightly startled look on people’s faces when they realize they’ve opened the can?

[gremlin-pattie]

no more discourse about high empathy vs low empathy autistics. neither one makes you a better or worse person. let’s all hold hands

[faithfromanewperspective]

what’s there not to understand about hypomania? you know when you get overtired, and like a toddler, you get all hyperactive and also want to cry or do Every Fun Thing you can think of and it actually becomes harder to sleep? like as a result of too much overwhelm or being so emotionally exhausted that’s how your body makes you able to cope, the aftereffects of too much adrenaline? just imagine being stuck like that. and every day it triggers itself more, overload of emotional whiplash and energy and you’ve lost all ability to think rationally and you can do anything at this point, because why not? you’ve got nothing left in you to hold back on any idea that could be exciting and stop you from falling into the void where the wiredness you feel has nothing to latch onto to burn off that nervous energy in a positive way, emotionally. for days or weeks or months on end. you don’t need to have ever experienced this fully to extrapolate and be like. yeah. I can see how it would suck eventually to get stuck like that

[themanirealityshifter]

once again, not shifting related, but see, i have a lot of things that come along with autism and ADHD, and the like, but i’m still prettyyy damn sure i don’t have em, but also maaaybe, buuut alsooo i don’t knoooow. i have hyperfixations, special interests, the verbal shutdowns, shutdowns in general, meltdowns, also executive dysfunction, neurodivergent stimming (plus some that can pass as neurotypical stimming), and lots more that i can’t remember at the moment, cuz i haven’t eaten enough, OH YEAH AND SENSORY PROCESSING DISORDER, annnd auditory processing disorder, also internalized echolalia and just echolalia, possibly alexithymia, and have trouble with social cues and eye contact. plus food allergies which is also common/comorbid with autism. plus also i was what ya call the gifted kid and now i’m burnt out and even though my grades are always good when i actually hand something in, i constantly procrastinate and have basically given up on school altogether, cuz there’s no possible way for my mental health to be okay, for me to have relationships, for me to do things i like, and do well and be consistent in school all at the same time.

soooo, what am i? i relate to autistics and ADHDers A TON. buuuut i don’t think i am one of y’all. buuut what else can i possibly be? i have no idea. i am a mystery and i pretty sure i always will be.

[the-only-teruteru-fan]

fun fact you should stay up late and right / rp while listening to some everywhere at the end of time songs

[clottedscream]

this is SO kids when all they have in the world is each other-coded. literally SO you’re all that i have-pilled. so found family core

[edge-oftheworld]

one thing I love about following celebrities/artists who are honest and proactive about their mental health struggles etc is I can’t count the number of times someone I know is going through something and I’m like ‘I’ve got a song for u’ and how much of my life involves telling myself ‘if [redacted] can do something/get better/etc then so can i’ (and having actual real evidence of it in front of me) and I can’t understate how much I appreciate these things.

but at the same time it involves a whole lot of watching people I care about suffer and you learn to read the signs and infer between the lines in songs and interviews, and yes we can never fully know what they don’t share with us, but when they do share things it’s not a big stretch to be like ‘this seems like it’s what life is like for you and I have taken encouragement from it but you deserve so much better’. and it’s easy to find ways to get angry at a predatory industry and realise things that could be hurtful if you’re already fragile.

and we can advocate for some things and help ourselves and the people around us feel better but it’s hard to meaningfully reach your faves as an individual. and there are things we can’t say on the internet in too much detail, speculation becomes the harmful kind of gossip, and so sometimes it’s a whole lot of internally saying ‘you’re doing incredibly well to have gotten to where you are but I wish for your sake things would get better faster’

[uncaught-coolfish]

thank fuck I didn’t end up in the “willingly accepts the copaganda of rwby because the fake catgirl told me to do it” club because each and every time some new person tries to stand up and preach to the world “the writers writing an organization of in universe minorities, led by a fridged desi woman, with members including an indigenous girl, two middle eastern-coded twins, and a jewish named ex slave with the initials of a german named company branded into his eye, thats ackshully ☝️🤓 just an evil bunch of reverse-racist TERRORIST ABUSERS who are ON THE LEVEL OF if not WORSE the racists OPPRESSING AND ENSLAVING THEM…… is actually good and subversive writing” I want to throw a cinder block at something I am so serious

[oakt733]

when i think about it yeah i am autistic i got the symptoms but i don’t have time to get into all of that rn i got stuff to do

[emmebearpaw]

Keeping my thoughts short as I find trying to write about my emotions just makes me feel them longer as I continue feeling them while writing about them. Do you ever find yourself wishing something upon yourself that would objectively make your life harder because “then it would be easier to make things make sense”. Like, no brain, having more symptoms of neurodivergence wouldn’t make things better except for in the very specific situation of diagnosis. It would just make our life harder the rest of the time. No dysphoria isn’t something to want either. Yes it would make it easier to parse out what the gender situation actually is. In both fronts we just have to be ok with never investigating and never getting an answer, because investigating is miserable due to how unhappy it makes me and without investigating I can’t get an answer. Now please stop thinking about myself and stop feeling the stomach void TM plus nausea.

[raisedbythetv89]

The thing about a lot of the Autistic coded characters in media, especially with female characters (thinking Anya Btvs and Bones as examples) is they’re often shown as being almost completely oblivious to how they’re perceived by the group and only know they’ve made a misstep when someone else tells them directly they did something everyone perceives as strange or odd or impolite and that is not the reality for so many Autistic women - especially adult women.

Many of us know almost instantly when we have made a misstep and so part of our mask is cataloguing that feedback to try and prevent that from happening again which is why so many of us go undiagnosed because this hyper-awareness caused by our socialization as women turns us into the slightly quirky manic pixie dream girl archetype or in my case the “surprisingly bold” and entertaining yet slightly weird girl who is a little odd but not enough to cause alarm and if you’re pretty it’s often found charming or refreshing.

And so you’ve developed this insane hyper awareness and then you learn you’re autistic and life isn’t this hard for everyone else and masking is slowly killing you because it disregulates your nervous system so severely you can’t eat or sleep properly and you start developing all these chronic pains and health conditions so you have to start unmasking which means being PAINFULLY AWARE of how bizarre/weird/different you come off in social settings without the mask you worked on for decades and you just have to accept it!! You just have to be totally ok with other’s discomfort at your abnormal behavior that doesn’t follow social norms and take zero action to try and rectify the situation or prevent it in future unless absolutely necessary like to keep a job or keep yourself safe around unsafe people

and the thing is, when you’re hyper aware that you are different but you don’t know how/why as a kid you’re always trying to “get it right” by “humaning properly” and finally fitting in. Embracing standing out and letting everyone see just how different you are is one of the scariest things you can face - like I have to know they think I’m super fucking weird and do NOTHING ABOUT IT - for the sake of my health??? But standing out is dangerous what are you talking about??!?!?

The blissful ignorance to the social norms you’re breaking that occurs in your youth can be more peaceful in the moment but leaves you easy prey to being taken advantage of or manipulated. Whereas full awareness of the social norms you can better keep yourself safe but every moment interacting with others is a practice of radical self acceptance which can be extremely isolating in a world where so many want to fit in. Obviously I can’t go back to blissful ignorance (nor would I want to) but this radical self acceptance of my weirdness and others perceiving it is:

A LOT

[onceuponaweirdo]

what do you mean i'm a real person with wants and needs, responsibilities and obligations and not a 2D character

[belgian-tea]

”guilt”?

such a funny word

guiltguiltguiltguiltguiltguilt hehehe

[fingertipsmp3]

I will never have friends like the friends I had in secondary school ever again. And in some ways this is a good thing

[staticghoul]

mental illness is crazy <3

[quodekash]

Dogs are so much easier to understand than humans, like,

They’re predictable.

They have very solidified personalities that rarely waver. For example if you have an energetic dog then your dog is almost always energetic. If you have a shy dog, your dog will probably be shy all the time. It’s not like with humans where it sways and wavers and changes depending on the day. And I’m not saying dogs aren’t complex, they still have feelings and days where they stray from the normal, it’s just more solidified than it is with humans which means you can generally detect when they’re not okay

Adding on to that, dogs are better at communication than humans are. If they want a belly rub, they’ll lie on their back and expose their belly to you. But if you rub their belly in a particular place they don’t want you to, they’ll kinda move their front leg in a way that indicates: move your hand. Sometimes it’s like a swipe, trying to get you to move your hand. And they have particular ways of whining or barking that communicate emotions like loneliness or fear or hunger or anger. And if you try to hug a dog that doesn’t want to be hugged, the dog will do their best to struggle out of it and indicate: don’t hold me like that it feels restraining

Mostly, dogs just want three things in life: food, play, and love. And honestly I relate so much. Three things I hate more than anything are hunger, boredom, and loneliness, which are the opposites of food, play, and love.

Dogs just make so much more sense and are so much better at communicating and are so simple in such complex ways, it’s just easier to understand them than humans. Cos humans can mask their emotions and humans fail at communication all the time (and miscommunication is a huge destroyer of all kinds of relationships), and humans want so many things, and humans aren’t predictable, and humans often don’t properly show when they’re not okay, and humans can act differently around different people and it’s so complicated and confusing and hard to remember about each and every person. But with dogs, there isn’t any of that.

Basically, what I’m trying to get at here, is dogs are great. End of story.