im starting to think that so much of being autistic is just your whole experience of the world and things is just so different and when things hurt you no one understands and you don’t know why something so minor or insignificant bothers you and your entire frame of reference for what a level of discomfort worthy of needing care is gets skewed and you never really can figure out if you’re suffering or if it’s just you.
and what if it is just you? how do you prove that your pain is real? If no one else around you is saying “me too,” how do you confirm that you aren’t just exaggerating a feeling your Autistic Brain is fixating upon? What objective reality is there to pain, anyway?
and the world seems so hostile. Things that everyone else just accepts are unbearable to you, and you can’t understand why you are so much less strong than everyone else, or why no one else is so scared, or why you can’t just accept that this terror and pain is a part of life.
and you seem wildly irrational when you talk about it. you’ve always been writhing and burning with anxiety and fear and anger, you were always so sensitive. and you don’t know how to put it into words when you are feeling something that seems like it could annihilate you.
You don’t know how to let the people around you know when something is serious because the people who know you best have seen you in hysterical tears over things that seem insignificant to them and fixate on upsetting things and it’s all old to them. By the time you’re an adult you’re just out of words that adequately express your pain because you spent your entire childhood and teen years reaching for the most vast and terrible language to describe what was going on inside you and you’ve cemented your emotional reactions in their minds as overreach.
How do I describe what I feel? How do I describe what it is doing inside my body? If I begin to describe it, how do I know I’m not making things up? How do I know that the symptoms I’m having aren’t interpretations imposed upon my body by my over-dramatic brain?
Trauma is externalized. It’s made objective in many people’s minds. This Bad Thing happened, therefore this person is traumatized. But what if you can’t point to a Bad Thing? What makes your fear, your feelings of being unsafe, your anger and panic attacks, what makes those worthy of being addressed? What makes them real? Are they real? How can you tell?
I’m noticing more and more how what’s an “allowed” trauma is so heavily culturally bound. Or just what’s a trauma. Certain things are allowed to be traumatizing, and certain things are “normal” and not traumatizing, and it’s incredibly difficult, from my point of view, to understand on any level where the line is. Some things are “trauma,” and some things are “a phobia you got because of a bad experience” and are expected to be “overcome,” or downplayed in self deprecating jokes, and are supposed to be funny, they’re comedic or quirky or amusingly weird. I don’t understand how we draw the line. I don’t understand why it is where it is.
I’m permanently ensconced in the assumption that my feelings are irrational and that they’re a product of “obsessive thoughts” or a phobia or anxiety, all of which I must be doing an insignificant job of controlling. It’s all on me. It’s my responsibility to control my anxiety and the worse my fear gets the worse of a job I’m doing.
I don’t know where the line is between a thing that’s allowed to hurt you or frighten you and a thing that’s an “irrational” fear and that places the burden on you to “overcome” it. Maybe I could learn to accept literally anything that happened to me. It’s blurry. Some types of pain elicit sympathy, some force you to shoulder responsibility. I don’t know. I don’t know how to find out what kind I’m experiencing. I don’t know how to Prove that I’m experiencing something real.
I always try to describe emotional distress in terms of physical symptoms because that’s the only thing that feels valid and grounded. I feel like I’m way too stressed from school, but i don’t know what an unacceptable level of pain is. I have no idea, objectively, how to assess if I’m just a Little Bit Stressed or if I’m on the brink of death unless I’m starting to physically lose weight from not eating, grades start slipping, etc.
You know how with neurotypicals there’s Honesty People Want and there’s Honesty That Upsets People and when you’re autistic you can’t fuckin tell the difference so you either just say what you think people want to hear all the time or become known as an asshole?
It’s the same thing with Pain You Can Deal With and Pain You Should Probably Get Help For. The things that hurt you, and how much they hurt you, don’t even remotely align to the patterns they usually follow with neurotypical people, and as a result you’re constantly forced to (or force yourself to) Just Deal With things that are horrible to you because It’s Not That Bad, and by the time you’re an adult your mental “pain scale” is so unbelievably jacked up that you don’t know how to just take an objective look at how you’re feeling.
As a bonus, you’ll start to judge yourself as wildly unpredictable in your responses to everything because you survived a Bad Thing just fine but you were deeply scarred and hurt by a Not That Bad Thing and so you kind of think of yourself as being some weird fucking landmine that is fine sometimes and blows the fuck up over something small at other times.
But you’re not. You’re responding to things in a consistent manner according to your brain, which experiences things very differently than other people. But you don’t know that, and by the time you figure it out, you‘ve totally and utterly and royally fucked up your ability to be like “I’m feeling this and it is moderately/highly/whatever level of distressing to me.”
in my experience, this results in the development of some Exotic physical responses to anxiety and stress because you lowkey judge your own anxiety level on whether you’re in a situation where it’s Acceptable to be afraid rather than like, what you’re actually feeling so your brain is like “what about if you get phantom pains every time you smell something associated with your trigger, bitch”
…or my brain was
I’m actually crying right now, because this has just explained the vast majority of my remaining struggles with autism. Not having the words to describe my feelings, random things just “hitting me wrong”, going totally “no thoughts head empty” whenever I really feel something, genuinely questioning if I’m just a weak-ass crybaby bitch who needs to grow the fuck up, and eventually deciding my feelings are stupid and invalid, because at least if something is stupid, I’m not supposed to waste my time or energy on it and I most definitely shouldn’t tell anyone just how stupid my feelings are.
im starting to think that so much of being autistic is just your whole experience of the world and things is just so different and when things hurt you no one understands and you don’t know why something so minor or insignificant bothers you and your entire frame of reference for what a level of discomfort worthy of needing care is gets skewed and you never really can figure out if you’re suffering or if it’s just you.
and what if it is just you? how do you prove that your pain is real? If no one else around you is saying “me too,” how do you confirm that you aren’t just exaggerating a feeling your Autistic Brain is fixating upon? What objective reality is there to pain, anyway?
and the world seems so hostile. Things that everyone else just accepts are unbearable to you, and you can’t understand why you are so much less strong than everyone else, or why no one else is so scared, or why you can’t just accept that this terror and pain is a part of life.
and you seem wildly irrational when you talk about it. you’ve always been writhing and burning with anxiety and fear and anger, you were always so sensitive. and you don’t know how to put it into words when you are feeling something that seems like it could annihilate you.
You don’t know how to let the people around you know when something is serious because the people who know you best have seen you in hysterical tears over things that seem insignificant to them and fixate on upsetting things and it’s all old to them. By the time you’re an adult you’re just out of words that adequately express your pain because you spent your entire childhood and teen years reaching for the most vast and terrible language to describe what was going on inside you and you’ve cemented your emotional reactions in their minds as overreach.
How do I describe what I feel? How do I describe what it is doing inside my body? If I begin to describe it, how do I know I’m not making things up? How do I know that the symptoms I’m having aren’t interpretations imposed upon my body by my over-dramatic brain?
Trauma is externalized. It’s made objective in many people’s minds. This Bad Thing happened, therefore this person is traumatized. But what if you can’t point to a Bad Thing? What makes your fear, your feelings of being unsafe, your anger and panic attacks, what makes those worthy of being addressed? What makes them real? Are they real? How can you tell?
I’m noticing more and more how what’s an “allowed” trauma is so heavily culturally bound. Or just what’s a trauma. Certain things are allowed to be traumatizing, and certain things are “normal” and not traumatizing, and it’s incredibly difficult, from my point of view, to understand on any level where the line is. Some things are “trauma,” and some things are “a phobia you got because of a bad experience” and are expected to be “overcome,” or downplayed in self deprecating jokes, and are supposed to be funny, they’re comedic or quirky or amusingly weird. I don’t understand how we draw the line. I don’t understand why it is where it is.
I’m permanently ensconced in the assumption that my feelings are irrational and that they’re a product of “obsessive thoughts” or a phobia or anxiety, all of which I must be doing an insignificant job of controlling. It’s all on me. It’s my responsibility to control my anxiety and the worse my fear gets the worse of a job I’m doing.
I don’t know where the line is between a thing that’s allowed to hurt you or frighten you and a thing that’s an “irrational” fear and that places the burden on you to “overcome” it. Maybe I could learn to accept literally anything that happened to me. It’s blurry. Some types of pain elicit sympathy, some force you to shoulder responsibility. I don’t know. I don’t know how to find out what kind I’m experiencing. I don’t know how to Prove that I’m experiencing something real.
I always try to describe emotional distress in terms of physical symptoms because that’s the only thing that feels valid and grounded. I feel like I’m way too stressed from school, but i don’t know what an unacceptable level of pain is. I have no idea, objectively, how to assess if I’m just a Little Bit Stressed or if I’m on the brink of death unless I’m starting to physically lose weight from not eating, grades start slipping, etc.
You know how with neurotypicals there’s Honesty People Want and there’s Honesty That Upsets People and when you’re autistic you can’t fuckin tell the difference so you either just say what you think people want to hear all the time or become known as an asshole?
It’s the same thing with Pain You Can Deal With and Pain You Should Probably Get Help For. The things that hurt you, and how much they hurt you, don’t even remotely align to the patterns they usually follow with neurotypical people, and as a result you’re constantly forced to (or force yourself to) Just Deal With things that are horrible to you because It’s Not That Bad, and by the time you’re an adult your mental “pain scale” is so unbelievably jacked up that you don’t know how to just take an objective look at how you’re feeling.
As a bonus, you’ll start to judge yourself as wildly unpredictable in your responses to everything because you survived a Bad Thing just fine but you were deeply scarred and hurt by a Not That Bad Thing and so you kind of think of yourself as being some weird fucking landmine that is fine sometimes and blows the fuck up over something small at other times.
But you’re not. You’re responding to things in a consistent manner according to your brain, which experiences things very differently than other people. But you don’t know that, and by the time you figure it out, you‘ve totally and utterly and royally fucked up your ability to be like “I’m feeling this and it is moderately/highly/whatever level of distressing to me.”
in my experience, this results in the development of some Exotic physical responses to anxiety and stress because you lowkey judge your own anxiety level on whether you’re in a situation where it’s Acceptable to be afraid rather than like, what you’re actually feeling so your brain is like “what about if you get phantom pains every time you smell something associated with your trigger, bitch”
It never hit me just how much physically disabled autistics are erased from all discourse and even advocacy for the autistic community until I saw someone mention us in a very brief shoutout to autistics who’re not your low needs more stealth and able-bodied ideal. But that thought has been living in my head loudly banging pots around me 24/7 since I saw that post.
Don’t you just love it when even disability advocacy caters to the stealth, able-bodied and without intellectual disabilities ideal? Haha. Well, that sort of explains why ever since I came full into being vocal about my physical disabilities I’ve felt like, “forbidden” from commenting on anything related to autism or taking any space within autistic communities.
I didn’t suddenly become less autistic. Same impairments and differences that I’ve always recognized in myself in relation to autism are still there, unchanged. The trauma of having grown up autistic around abusive allistics as well is very much still there.
I’m the same autistic person I’ve always been, I just no longer feel like the larger autistic community (at least the loudest parts of it) wants me around anymore, simply because now I recognize myself as physically disabled too and that is a little too much for them to want to deal with, let alone give a voice to. I’m not the embodiment of “normalcy” with just a bit of a quirk on the side that low support able-bodied autistics want to present to allistic society in order to save their own asses only.
I want more community with high support needs autistics, autistics who’re intellectually disabled, and autistics who’re physically disabled. I’m tired of autistic self-advocacy being dominated by the most socially acceptable members of our communities only and of them trying very hard to hide us.We matter too.
Who decided we have to give up pure and wholesome things just to grow up? Sleeping with a little Pikachu plushie does not mean I don’t also make my own doctor appointments.
reblogging because I think there needs to be more notes and more people comfortable with the idea that adulthood is a lie.
Hello friends! I am very excited about how well I feel my blog has been doing and am very proud. My notes have hit new peaks in the thousands and I never dreamed that I would finally be doing what I have wanted to do for years.
I don’t know who really checks my blog or if I have any frequent people but, I talked about the things I wanted to do with this blog during the summer that I haven’t delivered on. I Feel disappointed that I haven’t been delivering my original content like promised and I wanted to talk about some personal things that have been effecting me recently that aren’t really blog theme related.
First, although neurodiversity related issues such as adhd and autism are the theme of this blog my issues don’t end there. One of the issues I have struggled with very hard is anxiety; I have multiple anxiety disorders that impact me a lot.
I want to do well with my blog and make an impact. I want to not only make you laugh but help everyone understand these issues and maybe themselves a little bit better. But, writing a blog can be a bit daunting. What you say are things you can’t take back and are a reflection of your blog and even you that can carry on.
When my anxiety spikes, this blog can be stressful for me because I don’t want to screw up and say something wrong. I don’t want to give the wrong advice, or offend someone, produce ignorant facts or any number of other things. Sometimes this makes me tentative to post new material. Not only this but trying to keep up the quality control I try to have.
Secondly, something that I don’t think gets talked about in the neurodiversity community enough is how hard it can be for some of us to produce written content at all. By the time I post content I have rewritten it anywhere from 3-12 times over.
From the inability to summarize information or differentiate irrelevant information from critical details to spelling and grammar mistakes it takes a lot of tries to produce good content. Half of the time mistakes aren’t the kind Word can catch, such as skipped words or conjoining words etc.
This means that I have to continuously re-read over and over and even have others check my details for me to make sure what I am saying is accurate and coherent. Even then I often find simple errors in my writing after I post them.
Third, recently there has been a very serious concern in my family that has had us all stressed. I don’t get along with my family the greatest to begin with, but I also wanted to be there during what could adequately be called a family crisis. I don’t want to go into detail, but it has been a very stressful couple months, but thankfully everything is okay for now with regards to that.
Lastly, I have had my own stressful adventure with physical health concerns. I have a number of strange issues which have gone unaddressed for a long time and last month it felt like they all sort of boiled over at once. I have been in the E.R. (nothing serious don’t worry.) and trying to get different doctors appointments so I can finally get some answers and hopefully be far less stressed out about it.
All and all, this have impacted my content on Tumblr. which is by far the biggest sadness for me at current time. I just wanted to let you all know that I have no intention of leaving Tumblr. Or taking a leave from my blog at current time. It may be a bit sporadic for a period, but I have a whole file of posts I am wanting to make but need help editing into “final edit” quality and so they can be posted.
This blog is meaningful to me. It may be small right now, but it is important to me and I have ambitions that I intend to carry out at some point soon. I hope anyone reading this is understanding and will continue to support this blog. I look forward to my return into full swing.
I hope you all have an amazing day!!! You are all great! <3
So there’s a lot of posts differentiating between laziness and executive dysfunction and that’s all well and good but can we please acknowledge that lack of motivation and interest can also be symptoms of things and they don’t necessarily mean people are lazy either
when i watch other people my age, i see that they have this kind of effortless way about them that i don’t think i’ll ever have. the way they talk to each other and the way they go out and pursue what interests them without having to think twice about it. the way they know how to conduct themselves, the way it all comes so naturally to them, like breathing or swimming or riding a bike. it’s like they all have something ingrained in them that i just don’t have, and it’s so embarrassing and it’s fucking killing me. i wish i knew how to be okay.
How do neurotypicals not have a set spot at their table? How can they sit in different spots every time??? How??? It feels so wrong and uncomfortable!!
Edit: I made the assumption that as I left the original posters name on the photo and the fact it is a photo people could deduce that it was not my own.
I found this image on Pinterest and thought it would be helpful, I attempted to find the original to reblog but the name @ceebycee does not come up when I search it and I was unable to find the original.
I do not claim this is my post and I am not trying to steal someone else’s just thought that it could be helpful.
I’m sorry if I have caused any issues or offend anyone in sharing this information.
To myself. lol. Some of my posts have got over a thousand notes and that is fantastic!!! I am so excited to see anything I made get so many and its a big personal achievement for me so. <3 Thank you!
