#so thanks for that
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.
i keep trying to make a post about how objectively funny it is that Taika Waititi seems to have been the one who pushed for Rhys Darby to audition for Stede but it keeps sounding like rpf which ew no gross
but it is objectively funny imagine your good friend Taika Waititi who you’ve known and worked with for decades phones you up like “there’s this part on a show I’m working on and you’re perfect for it literally it needs to be you” and you look into it and the role is Kiss Taika
