#ask to tw | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

xxlovelynovaxx · 3 months

Text

An uncharitable reading on a population of largely traumatized neurodivergent kids that I found, that I responded to assuming OP was acting in good faith to try and open a conversation on the subject:

(Plaintext: An uncharitable reading on a population of largely traumatized neurodivergent kids that I found, that I responded to assuming OP was acting in good faith to try and open a conversation on the subject:)

to be honest i generally dislike the term "gifted kid". when people talk about being an "ex gifted kid" it's usually just to talk about burnout, which isn't anywhere near unique specifically to children who were part of some local gifted and talented program. when people talk about not learning the skills they need as an adult, that isn't unique to being "gifted" as a child. this happens to most people.

i think what is actually happening is that, as a child being treated better than their peers, their self worth was determined on academic success and being seen as smart and clever. but people develop at different rates and have different skills and the sort of abilities, skills, or intelligence you need to use isn't consistent throughout your academic year. so they "fall behind" when actually they're just average and not particularly worse than most other people. what they didn't learn was how to not hinge their self worth on academics and being better than other people. and how to see everyone as equal regardless of academic ability. people get caught up in the idea of only being "good" if they can be better than others and get top results with less efforts. which is really insulting to other people's efforts. this isn't getting over being labelled "gifted" and moving on with your life. it's clinging to that label that has long expired, and using it as a reason for why you are not as good as you would like to be.

and it shouldn't be insulting to say so if you've truly let go of the idea that people who are good at academics are better. that being smart and talented makes someone better. i really wonder how you think people who were bad at academics growing up feel about people saying that they should still be better than them, because they were better as children, and being on the same level is the worst thing ever. the moralising of intelligence and grades is so deep rooted you need to really dig in to get it out

My reply

(Plaintext: my reply)

The thing is, this is not how we use it at all.

continued below the readmore, please make note of the content warning/trigger warning tags on the post. we added both cw and tw tags to hopefully have as many people's filters be able to catch it as possible

The label "gifted kid" itself we view as a form of violence forced on kids.

It's not being told you're only "good" if you're "better than others". It's being told your sole, entire worth is wrapped up in your personal academic performance. It doesn't matter how other kids do, because they're "smart in their own ways" and "even if they're not smart, they're good at other things". It's still violently ableist against severely disabled kids, don't get me wrong; the message needs to be that all people inherently have worth, not that everyone is good at something.

But it's not about anyone else's performance, really. It's about yours, and only yours. I remember telling my parents "but [friend] gets Cs" and their response was "[friend] isn't you". Other kids were allowed to not get perfect grades in school, but if I didn't, I wasn't just not good enough, I was no longer a person.

This didn't just lead to "being average". This led to being severely, likely permanently, cognitively disabled. The burnout and trauma associated with it has made me incapable of doing many of the things that even the average adult can do. While the extent varies, especially after several years in recovery, for multiple years I couldn't do elementary level tasks. I've wondered for a while now if it caused actual brain damage (not due to traumatic injury, but that's not the only thing that can cause brain damage).

I still struggle with extreme executive dysfunction, worsened by the severe burnout and subsequent breakdown I endured - not just to the point where I struggle to fill out disability paperwork and make appointments, but even to the point where I need a caregiver in order to do things like make food and so laundry, and to the point where I sometimes have to wear diapers because task inertia and executive dysfunction make me unable to move to get to the toilet.

(This is worsened by physical disability, but if I'm being quite honest, the primary ways the two intersect is that pain further worsens executive dysfunction as well as ironically my lack of awareness of my bodily needs - forgot the term for that specifically; as well as increases frequency and urgency of bathroom needs and both cognitive and physical effects of missing meals.)

It's not and was never about "other people's efforts".

It's also hard to understate the severe negative impact of being taught to hinge your entire self-worth on something you become no longer capable of doing. This is the precise type of withholding conditional love and support in early childhood development that can later cause cluster B personality disorders. It's not really even about what you can be "good" at. It's about being taught in your most formative developmental years that you, and only you, are not deserving of love or even life if you don't earn it.

I'm not "on the same level" as most others. I'm far below their level. I'm severely disabled, and the experience of neurodivergent burnout as a result of being treated as a gifted child is what caused a good portion of it. Even the subsequent abuse by my parents after dropping out of college was in large part for these reasons, and could be partially responsible for the development of my physical chronic illnesses, even.

I don't see those without "academic ability" as worse than me. Why would I? They don't have to earn their worth. They never have. They were always allowed to exist as they were, however they were.

The messaging I internalized, as I began to fail to meet the high requirements expected of me, and eventually became completely unable to meet even what are considered basic requirements for others, was that I was uniquely broken. That there was something fundamentally wrong with me that wasn't present in anyone else - that I was born tainted in some imperceptible way.

The only comparison that I did ever internalize was that I, and I alone, had not earned the right to be alive if I wasn't "the best". My intelligence didn't make me better than other people; it made me almost as good as a real person. The only reason it was even being celebrated at all was for how I could "help other people".

I had a duty to be a doctor or a scientist because since I had been born "smart", if I didn't use it, I was basically depriving suffering people of relief and was therefore evil. I was told, explicitly, repeatedly, that I owed this to the world because I was "gifted". When I became more profoundly neurodisabled, I wasn't actually incapable, or if I was, it was just temporary. I needed to "work harder" to overcome it. When "working harder" made me suicidal, while actively being abused, I was told I was selfish for wanting to take away what I could "give" to the world. When I wanted to do anything other than a STEM field viewed as directly benefitting humanity - even arts or social sciences or pure mathematics - I was similarly selfish.

Don't get me wrong, I despise the term gifted kid. To me, it will only ever be the phrase used to teach me that my only worth was in what I could do to advance science for humanity, and that anything less than that made me a selfish burden not worthy of life.

It's quite possible that the other people you've seen who were once labeled as such didn't experience the extent of trauma that I did. They might also lack awareness, having not fully unpacked it yet, or not be able to articulate it. I don't know.

But I do know the people who were labeled as such that I've spoken to have had similar experiences. Making it just about being "better" than others or being "average" or "the moralizing of intelligence or getting good grades" isn't just severely downplaying the trauma many of us have endured, it's wholly inaccurate to many of our experiences.

I'd also add - even in cases where it is about that - there's still a component of kids being taught during developmental years that being "better" is the only way to earn love, worth, and the right to live. Being taught you have to be "good at" vs "better than others at" something are two different things.

But even in the case of the latter, in order to convince a severely traumatized, formerly neglected or abused person that it isn't true... you have to lead with the fact that they are still deserving of love, have worth, and are allowed to live, if they are average or below average.

Because yeah, if you say "you shouldn't think of yourself as better than others because they have worth and deserve to be treated well, and you're hurting them if you do", all they're going to hear is "they have worth and deserve to be treated well, and you're hurting them".

Even setting aside whether they think being "better" means they deserve to be treated better, or if it's like most trauma and mental illness where they are far harder on theirself than anyone else and are horrified at the very idea of anyone other than them needing to earn worth and good treatment...

Blame and shame will simply be less effective at convincing them to listen. Being effective in convincing people to examine their internalized ableism and ideas around the moralization of intelligence is what affects material reality and helps make changes. I've been as guilty as anyone of simply ranting about how people treat those they view as "unintelligent", especially since entering that category myself. It's what feels good!

But I also think that addressing the concerns and fears of people who have actually been hurt is necessary in convincing them of your point.

I also think that the conflation of even seeing yourself as "better than" others and thinking that therefore others deserve to be treated as "lesser than" is wholly inaccurate. I mean, we have NPD, and we do sometimes think we are better than others in other ways (often either in highly abstract or highly specific ways - so just "I'm the best" "at what" "the best"; or "I'm one of the best knitters ever for figuring out fair isle knitting on my first try").

That doesn't mean we think that anyone else deserves to be treated worse than us - to the contrary, it only convinces us that everyone deserves to be treated with the fullest amount of kindness and compassion possible, because we want everyone to feel as good about themselves as we do, and to recognize how deeply inherently worthy of that feeling as we are.

Conversely, when we have crashes, and this is probably an even bigger factor in how we feel about every human being having inherent worth and deserving respect... we never, ever, ever want anyone else to feel even a fraction of what we feel when we feel we aren't good enough.

Because we rely a lot of words of affirmation and verbal reassurance, we find exactly what the people around us take pride in and then find every possible thing we can to compliment about it. We remind acquaintances and strangers we strike up a conversation with that they don't have to earn decency if it even comes up at all.

We even had a conversation with our abusive mother, who we've chosen to continue a relationship with due to marginally improved behavior, that being able to support them while her mom has dementia, is a privilege and joy, that she deserves all the kindness and support I can give, and that she should give herself the grace of rest and letting others help.

Mind you, supporting her is a struggle and sometimes one that I question if it's worth it, because she and my father are sometimes petty and mean in return, take me for granted, and take out their frustrations on me (likely as much because I'm one of the only people they trust enough to do so, weirdly). But I don't want the literal abuser that nearly drove me to suicide multiple times to feel unworthy of love or support or just generally not good enough.

(I don't judge others who do hate or feel indifferent towards their abusers. This is not an "I'm better than any other victims for this, because this is a conscious choice I am making. Ironically, some of how my parents continue to mistreat me is because of a lack of self awareness that they have a choice in how they engage with their parents too, even if it's one that they would only ever choose one way. But point being, this is to illustrate the full extent of what I mean when I say "I truly believe everyone has innate worth and deserves to feel worthy of life and kindness and love". I know plenty of other victims are capable of believing that while not being able to feel it towards their abusers - I'd even say many of us fall into that category of believing it but not being able to feel it emotionally towards our abusers.)

(Also, as a secondary note, we switched to "we" language specifically for our whole system to take accountability for our thoughts, beliefs, and actions here, not because I specifically am excluding myself from it in any way.)

I do think you're right about how a lot of people moralize grades and intelligence. It's something many of us had to deeply examine in ourselves.

I also think that it's a bit unfair, however, to assume that "former gifted kids" think other people are less worthy or deserving of love, support, and life in general if they are less intelligent, just because they've internalized those messages about themself specifically.

Trauma and mental illness don't work that way. They're rarely rational, and even more rarely focused on other people like that. Many "former gifted kids" specifically struggle with severe depression and anxiety.

One of the most common experiences of depression and anxiety is the mental illness convincing you that you are uniquely horrible for doing things, not doing things, or not being able to do things, that it's perfectly fine for other people to do, not do, or not be able to do.

The logic isn't consistent, because mental illness is not logical in the first place. It's even more illogical when those same ideas are further supported by adults treating your past self as uniquely bad for things they actively say and show are fine for others to do - because now you have "evidence" that these thoughts are true. You have to earn your worth because you are uniquely unworthy - you must even be worse than everyone else, because they don't have to earn their worth.

Being on the same level as everyone else isn't bad. It would be great to not struggle with self-esteem issues (the root and one of the symptoms of my NPD, actually) constantly trying to tell me that I alone do not have worth and am in fact a burden on existence just for being alive. I've spent years trying to convince myself "I'm not lesser than literally everyone else, even the most evil figures from the darkest periods of history. Everyone else doesn't somehow have some innate quality of worth that I wasn't born with and therefore uniquely have to earn. None of that is true."

(If this seems to contradict what I said about the symptoms of NPD highs, those are themselves a reactive overcorrection to that trauma to try and cope with the low self-esteem. The truth is, I'm not special. I'm neither uniquely bad or uniquely good. Thinking of myself as the best does help, as long as I manage it to avoid severe crashes, and it's not harmful. It doesn't affect the way I treat people, except perhaps in how it makes me wanna help others feel the same way. Thinking of yourself as "better than" others or "the best" is harmless unless it causes you to mistreat others, in which case the problem is still the mistreatment itself.)

And yeah, I'm not "as good" as I would like to be. I lack basic functionality, and it causes a lot of struggles and hardship in my life. It often directly or indirectly causes trauma.

I've cried in my partner's arms, terrified she'd want to leave me or would hate me or think I'm disgusting because I made a double mess in the bed while feeling too unwell to move, or because I wet the couch repeatedly as a reaction to processing sexual and related trauma. We live in abject poverty because I am incapable of working - due primarily to my neurodivergent disabilities, much more even than my profound physical disabilities - and that is a source of ongoing complex trauma. Another source of ongoing complex trauma is the reevaluations I have to spend the entirety of every third year panicking over the possibility of losing my entire meager income from.

I have to constantly field "advice", judgment, and questions from people convinced there is some part time job that plays to my strengths, when I spend between 50 and 90 percent of every day simply being disabled or recovering from being disabled. I am constantly fatigued, sick, in pain, dealing with panic attacks, flashbacks, dissociation, and a plethora of general symptoms of both trauma and chronic illness, and spend multiple hours a day either doing those things or resting after.

Most people seem truly incapable of comprehending the true extent of my disability - how I can talk and seem "normal" (even though doing so with most people can mean I have to recover for the rest of the day, or longer if I have to do so for longer than a few minutes); how going to a single store, even while using a motorized cart, two days in a row can leave me bedridden for several days and housebound for several weeks; how I seem eloquent and well-spoken and "intelligent" but even writing this post is making my brain feel like mush and it's entirely possible I won't be able to do anything at all for the next several hours at least.

I'm not saying all this to seem dramatic. I'm admitting - yes, I'm not "as good" as I want to be. I can't even do the things I enjoy most of the time, despite having what looks externally like "free time" and appearing "normal" and "functional" to the average person I interact with. I'm saying I don't judge anyone who also can't do the same things, but that doesn't make the experience of profound disability any less frustrating.

And yes, having been previously comparatively abled absolutely plays a part in that frustration, because I know what it was like to be at least average, if not in some areas moderately better than average. I know what it's like to exceed my own personal goals, not in comparison to anyone else, but the own measures I've set for my success. I know what it's like to even meet them. I know what it's like to meet only some of them, but to be able to at least work on the ones I didn't meet.

I know what it's like to be able to even try, to not be trapped silently screaming from both physical pain and emotional anguish in a body that's falling apart and it seems is actively trying to kill us half the time, where what little energy we do have becomes a choice between directing it at the few things we can still do that make us happy, or chasing down and begging doctors to stop being massively ableist egocentric pricks and actually do their jobs (or at least, not actively prescribe things that have a good likelihood of killing us via actively worsening one or more of our health conditions).

So I don't think, even for people who are now "average", that it's bad for them to mourn their own personal capabilities. It's still not even necessarily bad if they do feel it makes them "better than" other people, as long as they don't think other people deserve to be mistreated, don't mistreat other people themselves, and don't think people have to earn worth/the right to live. But it's also not always even about that, because being "good at" something in the sense that it comes easily to you, and then hitting a wall where you struggle with or are unable to progress further, while other people still do, is difficult!

It's difficult in sports, if you hit the limits of your athletic abilities but some of your peers start outperforming you - even if others don't, you probably joined sports BECAUSE you were competitive and wanted to push your limits, and finding you can't push them further is difficult. The existence of disabled people who can't do sports (like me, I am quite literally allergic to exercise; my MCAS causes exercise induced anaphylaxis) doesn't make it ableist to want to be good, or better than average, at them.

It also doesn't inherently mean you think you're better than nonathletic people or that nonathletic people. Some people do think that and treat people as such, advocating for the mistreatment of "physically lazy" people. That's both generally bad and very ableist. But that's an entirely separate issue from just wanting to be good at or better than average/better than others at sports.

Idk, to me, the experience of being a "former gifted kid" is not at all about any kind of pride or superiority complex or any of that.

It's about having love, support, sometimes physical needs, and being treated as worthy of life, all withheld on the condition of performance in academics, being treated as worse than worthless if you fail to perform, and internalizing that if you can't perform you're better off dead and even doing people a favor by destroying yourself so that you won't be a burden any longer. It's about the inherent violence of teaching a small child that they're horrible and selfish for doing things that make them happy, and that the only way they can earn the right to exist is to sacrifice their own feelings for the "greater good" of everyone else who is worthy of love and support.

It's about the combined isolation of undiagnosed neurodivergence causing your peers and often authority figures to treat you as weird and reject and mistreat you, while also having it repeatedly reinforced that you are uniquely unworthy of love and only by being perfect (or in some cases, performing better than others), can you even earn the basic decency and support and love they already possess being deserving of just by simply existing.

It's about the way that this trauma and neglect and often abuse is downplayed if not outright erased, how we are often blamed for the ableism and mistreatment that was perpetrated against us. It's about how despite acknowledging that most "former gifted kids" are neurodivergent, the fact that neurodivergence is typically disabling and that neurodivergent burnout often has severe, lasting disabling effects is brushed aside.

It's about how we're treated as abled or basically abled - mildly disabled but still retaining average functionality - when most of us simply don't have even that much ability or privilege. It's about how when so many of us are unable to work - many of us having been determined by the infamously ableist and gatekeeping disability divisions of our governments to meet their extremely stringent requirements of disability allowance, and many more pursuing it - we're still treated as basically "average", or as if it must actually be physical disabilities mainly contributing to that level of severity of disability.

While I'm using your wording, OP, I'm not saying you're doing this. I'm reusing it for lack of better phrasing, but this is what I have faced in general, repeatedly, from people and from society. These experiences are reflected in the accounts of friends who grew up having basic decency dangled over their heads to make them perform like little monkeys in the field of academics only to be discarded as soon as they couldn't dance anymore.

People do downplay the severity of neurodivergent burnout, the way depression, anxiety disorders, and personality disorders are directly caused by neglect and abuse that result from the expectations placed on "gifted kids"; that parents, family, and other important figures in child development making love and support conditional and withholding it in the first place, and berating and punishing the kid for the smallest of academic "failures" even IS neglect and abuse; and how this plays into the extremely high rates of complex trauma in neurodivergent adults.

They ignore how neurodivergent burnout is not simply burnout. They ignore how it causes extremely high rates of self-harm and suicidality and is often comorbid with depression as well as anxiety and trauma disorders. They ignore how it is heavily influenced by executive functioning, and how burnouts are usually progressive in severity and profoundly and often permanently affect overall executive functioning. They ignore how because of differential development, the vast majority of "gifted kids" are neurodivergent (though plenty of neurodivergent people are not gifted kids - neurodivergence can be significantly disabling at any age and for any given diagnosis).

They ignore how autistic burnout at least, and iirc to a lesser extent ADHD burnout, is an actual studied phenomenon acknowledged as serious and severe. They ignore how most other forms of neurodivergence can't be diagnosed at a young age except in cases of ableist violence being used to force "compliance", and are therefore less studying and also kids receive significantly less treatment for. They forget there's still a stigma of kids being "too young" and having it "too easy" to be depressed, anxious, or suicidal - and how depression and anxiety are treated as mental illness on "easy mode" by many people anyway despite being deadly.

Again, I'm not saying OP is doing any of this. This seems to be a vent post about their own personal experiences, which of course is going to only cover their own personal experiences and perspective.

But I am saying this. If your immediate thought is to say "it's not downplaying it to say that most 'former gifted kids' are just average people having to deal with not being better than the rest of us", you have several things to examine -

about your moralization of thoughts and feelings,

about your subsequent projection onto them of the idea that people thinking themselves better than others at a specific activity causes them treat other people as less worthy of respect and dignity as human beings,

about how you're not listening to and erasing the experiences of more disabled "former gifted kids" and basing your view of the majority of the community on a small minority that is most vocal precisely because of their privilege,

about how your anecdotal experiences are biasing you in general,

about how you may not be listening to what the people you're describing are even actually saying, but might be ascribing your own ideas of their feelings, motivations, experiences, and even material realities onto them,

and about how when people say "you don't need to downplay my trauma to talk about how bad yours/someone else's was", they're not even saying you can't ever compare the two, but they are saying not to assume what an entire group of people has gone through simply because you don't THINK it could be anywhere near as bad as your/another experience.

Because here's the thing. I actually agree that SOME "former gifted kids" are relatively privileged and dealing with comparatively minor setbacks in their own performance, and perhaps even comparing themselves to people they think are "less intelligent' in a way that is derogatory and possibly ableist to those people. I've met a few myself.

I think they still deserve a space in these discussions, especially when they are disabled, but I also think they currently do sometimes take up a disproportionate space - precisely because they are not even most of the subset of people considered "former gifted kids", let alone most neurodivergent/disabled people.

But I also think that "I think that what is actually happening" is carrying a WHOLE lotta weight in that post. I vehemently disagree that that is what is actually happening. It's a whole lot of assumption, projection, and judgment, about an experience I don't know if you claim to have, but one that is not accurate to the vast majority of the people who were labeled as "gifted kids".

And I think maybe you think the negative emphasis when people call themselves a "former gifted kid" is on the word "former", when actually, for most of us, it's on "gifted".

Former "gifted" kid. Yeah, right. Former neglected, mistreated, and abused kid, who was taught they were "gifted" with the responsibility to spill their last drop of blood to feed a bunch of thirsty vampires.

It's an entirely different kind of mistreatment from the kind that other neurodivergent and disabled kids go through. Those who get sent through the special ed track in fact endure a particularly awful kind of hell, one that even from an outsiders perspective does seem worse to me.

It's not saying "others didn't have it bad" or even "others didn't have it worse" to say "we had it bad", or even "we had it worse than you seem to think we did". My own little brother ended up homeschooled from third grade on due to his learning disabilities. My mother, by his own words, was never abuse to him (and I never witnessed such, she seemed to be a good teacher for him and a good mother to him) but I did see a small fraction of why he got pulled out of school in the first place, and it was horrific.

So I'm speaking from the heart when I say that all I'm saying is that both can be bad.

Even if one is always significantly worse (which, "at what point does actual abuse of gifted kids even become comparable" is a pointless and harmful argument, so I think "always is significantly worse" is probably not accurate either, but even if it is), it's still wrong to assume that because one is worse, the other is just basically easy.

It's wrong to assume that therefore only "xyz" ever actually happens to "gifted kids" because you've already established that they have it easy and so only easy things CAN happen to them. That's a logical fallacy (circular logic) and can cause you to reject every account to the contrary due to your own bias, and say there's no evidence otherwise because obviously, there appears to be no evidence when it keeps getting circle-filed.

One example I use, because people recognize it as "objectively one of the worst kinds of abuse" is my infant CSA. Other people are still allowed to talk about other CSA, adult SA, grooming, emotional incest, sexual harassment, and everything else within that category. It's all able to be recognized as significantly bad - even if you can put "degrees" to it, it's recognized by decent people to start at "very, very, very bad" and only get worse from there.

Though I will say, precisely because of downplaying certain types of sexual violence specifically, it took me so much longer to realize the way my adoptive mother groomed me about coming to her about sexual material in media and sexual thoughts and feelings, and how she exercised a chokehold over my sexual agency well into adulthood by means of this emotional control.

This is why I am so vehemently against downplaying ANY form of harm - because I, as a victim of the "more severe" harms, have been directly harmed by downplaying the "less severe" harms.

This post has dragged on long enough already. That's the compulsive hyperlexia, trauma around past (sometimes malicious, more often not) misinterpretation of my words as a neurodivergent person, the emotional flashback that initially occurred, and general PTSD symptoms causing me to try and explain exactly why I don't agree with the original post.

I'm open to an explanation of your own perspective, OP, but I'd also like to be clear that if you do just want to argue with me about the severity of trauma or frequency of significant trauma of people who are labeled "former gifted kids" - or about what you think I "actually" think, feel, or am saying - I'd rather you just block me. I would hold no ill will towards you over that, but that is a hard boundary for me.

I absolutely respect that my perspective is not one that you've previously encountered, and I admittedly neither have the studies nor the spoons to find them to back up where I talked about how prevalent mental illness and trauma are in contexts relevant to this conversation.

I am firmly against the exact kind of ableism and moralization of intelligence that the point of your post was to address. In that, we are very much on the same side, and it is... really grossly prevalent in our culture and society, both in abled/neurotypical and disabled and neurodivergent spaces. I absolutely agree that there are even people within the "former gifted kid" conversation that do this.

I also personally don't use that label because "gifted kid" and "former gifted kids" were labels forced on me, and forms of violence done to me. I have only ever used them in reference to other people calling me such.

I disagree that most people who do use the label actually think others are less deserving of respect or basic existence in general, or that it's even about other people for most of them at all. I hope you'll also consider what that label can mean for those it was used against, beyond just a "superiority complex" over people it was never about and who often weren't even a factor.

And we do agree that in either case, effectively fighting that ableism and stigma around (lack of) intelligence is the most important thing. That's the most important thing, I think.

Their reply:

(Plaintext: Their reply:)

it's not appropriate to bring up such personal traumas on someone else's unrelated post such as grooming. also sorry you're assumptions about me are wrong

also block me because i don't wanna talk to someone who is "proship"

maybe delete your reblog too. i'd hate for other proshit people to interact with me

My reply:

(Plaintext: My reply:)

Ah, so a label we use to indicate we are against harassment over fiction and against censorship is apparently enough to tell us we are not allowed to share our opinion on something that does affect us.

Also, personal traumas being used as a point of comparison, being directly related by a person who has experienced both, are not inappropriate. I tagged the post according to what I brought up that might be triggering, but my trauma from grooming is wholly relevant as something that, like my being treated as a gifted kid, was treated as less serious than other traumas I've been through in a way that seriously hurt me.

You don't get to start a conversation with an uncharitable and frankly somewhat ableist narrative about (other people's?) trauma and then define what trauma is palatable enough to be related for survivors themselves, nor what survivors are themselves morally "pure" enough to have a voice in the conversation.

Finally, it's on you to block if you do not want to interact further. I have blocked, but I will not delete a reply to a post I made about something entirely unrelated to shipping discourse, that never broached the topic of shipping discourse, because you don't like survivors being against something that is typically used to censor them talking anout their experiences.

Ironically, if you blocked me, it would make me unable to reblog this, AND unable to see your little comments about what you think are acceptable boundaries around what other people can discuss and what other people can believe when having an unrelated conversation with you at all.

Anyway honestly, I'm leery of making fun of reading comprehension because I think it can be really ableist. But clearly this is an example of the people who use the term "proshit" not bothering to actually read or even try to understand other perspectives. I will make a separate version of my reply and original context so people can further comment without getting harassed by OP or people they follow - don't worry, with OPs username redacted and everything - but weirdly, it's almost as if very few people who claim to be fundamentally anti-harassment will bother them when they wave a giant red flag saying "I do not use a label or interact with people who use a label that means 'we believe harassment is wrong'."

One of those groups is dangerous, and it's not the people saying "hey, don't tell other people to kill themselves because they can tell the difference between what's moral in real life and what's okay to depict and engage with in media".

Obvious statement to leave OP alone is obvious. They're already blocked, so they won't see this. They have a right to ask me to take down my response. I have a right to refuse. If they block me, it will no longer show up in notes, but if you wish to circulate my version, I'd suggest either blocking them first or doing it with the alt version I will put up. I encourage people to block OP for their own safety, more than anything, to avoid harassment, since it seems they may harass you if you interact and have views on shipping discourse they disagree with.

OP, you don't get to have a monopoly on the conversation on "former gifted kids", a subset of traumatized largely neurodivergent people, though, just because you find something to attack about anyone who disagrees with you.

I also don't know what assumptions I made that are wrong. That you may or may not have been labeled a gifted kid, which I acknowledged I didn't know? Or that you find effectively addressing ableism to be the most important part of this conversation. Because if it's the latter, you should be sorry, but I don't accept your apology. Care more about actual marginalized people being hurt than your moral superiority complex, be better, then maybe you'll have actually done the work of changing your actions to earn forgiveness.

If it's about something else - something I said I "hoped" you'd do or similar, I'm lost. Go learn what appropriate boundaries actually are and when you're just weaponizing therapeutic language to control other people somewhere else.

Oh and OP, if you block evade and see this: you can still block us on desktop. If you navigate to settings and blocked users, you can add our username to the field there to block us. It's a bit of an extra step, now that we've blocked you, but we don't mind helping you maintain a boundary that is your responsibility to maintain.

We have redacted OPs username to keep the larger conversation from reaching them. It is easy to find them due to our original response being kept up, but of course we ask that they be left alone, blocked at most. I would honestly prefer if people circulated this version.

Also, I'm now wondering if the "assumptions" in question were us saying "hey IF you think this, you PROBABLY need to examine these other things". We wouldn't be surprised. We also note that we neglected to tag grooming specifically on the original post, likely as a result of the exact problem of just categorizing it as a subtype of SA, which isn't wholly accurate. That's on us, and we have added the tag to this version. That is, however, why we had the "ask to tag" and "ask to tw" tags on the original post.

#ableism #neuroableism #suicide mention #cw suicide mention #tw suicide mention #burnout #“gifted kid”/“former gifted kid” labels #CSA mention #SA mention #cw CSA mention #cw SA mention #tw CSA mention #tw SA mention #grooming #cw grooming #tw grooming #ask to tag #ask to tw

20 notes · View notes