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reasonsforhope · 10 months

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Thank you, stranger, for making this blog. You are truly a kind, beautiful soul. Thank you for existing for the world. Many of us appreciate you!!!! Thank you!!!!! /vvvvvvvgen

...now to me. I'm sorry for adding for your huge askbox as is, genuinely...

I naturally, without thinking, don't act like my real personality because it's been shunned dozens of times across my entire life. It's not fundamentally flawed (I know that, 100%--we all have flaws, ad I absolutely wasn't a terrible person for expressing them). Nonetheless, all I know is that the person I act like everyday of my life since I finally snapped and started doing this whole thing two years ago -- almost three -- is not who I really am. You know when you put on a shoe that, while your foot can fit inside and you can walk around just fine, you know it's just not your size because it doesn't feel right at all? That's me and my "personality"...people thought I was weird when I showed my genuine personality. I was just...pretty different than most. some comments I've got on my old personality:

"You're ...... Weird." (said with a thinly hid derogatory tone)

"Stop. You're not one of us."

"Why are you talking like that?"

"Sensitive. No one likes you."

And the one that finally made me snap:

"Stupid." (the person who said this then continued top he conversation as normal. Not acknowledging my stunned reaction.)

In addition, for a couple months I got treated like a dog. A literal dog.

I basically got treated like an outcast.

I know the personality I've left buried for so long has grown on its own, with me. It wasn't totally neglected and in fact is still here. It's just hidden behind this mask...which I can't take off. Because I literally don't know how. It's become such a habit to be someone else that I don't even fully, consciously know who I genuinely am today...it's hard. I hurt. A lot. I'm terrified of being vulnerable in any way, now. Just curled up in a shell.

...what am I to do? Where am I even going to begin? I feel lost. All I know, in the depths of my heart, that there is hope. There is always hope yet. That is something I've always known.

So what now? I'm scared, tired, and unsure. Is there anything I can do, anymore, at all? To figure out, and then be, who I know I am, deep down?

Thank you for reading, if you did. From the bottom of my heart--thank you. Thank you.

Sincerely,

#🎈🌠🐘

<3 <3 <3

Thanks so much <3 And fwiw for anyone wondering, it's not HUGE huge, I've got like 45 asks and dms to get to, but it still feels pretty big for me, a person who has def never had that happen before. Hoping to try to answer a batch of 2-4 of them on the weekends

Also, in terms of the rest of it.... Sorry if I'm overstepping, and definitely not to do that "diagnose people over the internet shit," but have you ever looked into whether you might be autistic or some other flavor of neurodivergent. Because as an autistic person, I see a Lot of my own experiences in what you've written

Regardless of whether you have or not, and whether you're autistic or not, I definitely know what it's like to deal with that kind of shit and bullying, and how trying to mask your own differences can twist you up inside. I had a problem with compulsively lying for a while in high school because of how ingrained "covering for myself" became - so I get how unsettling it feels when this shit becomes something you can't consciously control

Because there's so much overlap, I'd actually recommend looking into books and resources from the autistic community in masking and the difficulty of unmasking, regardless of whether you're autistic or not. A lot of the traumas are similar, too, so if you're at that level of "burying," I really think you'll be able to get something out of it no matter what

(This applies to anyone reading this who has also had to deal with that kind of shit or has found themselves doing something similar.)

Also, you should definitely look into trauma work (and "complex PTSD") and see if there's anything helpful to you there--there's a lot of really effective, evidence-based stuff out there about how to untangle your nervous system, because that kind of social rejection and isolation is absolutely/inherently traumatizing

Some Resources

Masking stuff:

Seven Steps to Unmasking as a Neurodivergent Person

What Is Complex PTSD (C-PTSD)? from Healthline

Autism Masking: To Blend or Not to Blend from Healthline

This is an assessment for social masking. It's written about autism, but I think a good amount of it would be applied to other types of masking like this.

Trauma stuff:

What Is Rejection Trauma? from TherapyMantra

Healing from Rejection Trauma from CPTSDFoundation.org

The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel van der Kolk

What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma by Stephanie Foo

And if none of that helps you...there's definitely a lot of other stuff out there. There's things like journaling, which are a huge help with this sort of thing. Figuring out who you are underneath it all takes time and feels super weird and it's not easy, but I have faith you can do it. Don't give up, just keep moving forward

#Anonymous #neurodiversity #trauma #cptsd #ask #me #advice #resources

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qweerhet · 2 years

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I agree with you that it's ableist to interpret inability to understand social norms as predatory, but I'm bothered by "not reading people's body language that says not to touch them" as an example because surely the solution there is to not touch anyone unless they explicitly say you can if you're not 100% certain you can read their body language? As an autistic person who frequently has neurotypical people touching me when I don't want it because they don't understand my body language I think it would be good for everyone - neurotypicals included - to ask for explicit consent before touching people.

(this got long; i added bold text for attempted improved accessibility, but it's a text wall no matter how you look at it. apologies.)

mm. i understand why this seems, intellectually, like a solid solution, but i have a lot of issues with its actual implementation, and i also have some experiences that raise concerns about its efficiency in destigmatizing autistic behavior. i subscribed to this rule of thumb for a time myself, and it resulted in two things:

i became hyper, hyper vigilant about my own body and actions in a way that basically traumatized me wrt social interaction. i trained myself to view my body as a weapon, which was likely to, if i did not precautionarily restrain myself, invoke horrific trauma on anyone it touched. touch became nothing but a nuclear bomb i had to prevent from going off; if i so much as brushed a friend's skin by accident while walking by them, i viewed it as a failure, and more importantly, a failure that had the potential to horrifically traumatize them for life in a way that was entirely my fault.

it did not help me at all in interpersonal relationships, because there is a threshold past which it's considered annoying and rude to continue to ask for explicit verbal consent at every single individual action, and to some extent, even as an autistic myself, i also found it annoying, rude, and quite honestly a massive energy expenditure. seriously, if you have a partner who's willing, try it out sometime--but specifically try it out in a way that would be an accessibility tool for an autistic assuming literally 0 body language fluency. before a quick peck on the lips, ask "can i kiss you," before tapping their shoulder to get their attention ask "can i tap your shoulder," before sitting next to them on the couch ask "is it okay if my thigh touches your thigh," and make sure to do this in each individual instance no matter how often the answer is "yes" or how long you've known each other.

the latter bullet point has a tendency to be taken in bad faith--it tends to be associated with people being "purposefully obtuse," and get eye-rolls and "of course you don't need to do that, you're taking this to an extreme on purpose, just be normal!" this reaction is part of the fundamental issue i see with people's treatment of autistics in discussions around consent, body language, and sexual interactions; a significant portion of autism is not having the capacity to understand social context and integrate that understanding naturally into our relationships. many autistic people can't understand when it's time to universalize a particular interaction; if the impetus is on us, then in order to avoid violating a social more, we will have to expend that energy and take it upon ourselves to be obnoxious to literally ask consent for every individual interaction, every single time it happens, regardless of context, because that context is inaccessible to us.

ok, with all of that said: i think these two points work together to paint a depressing picture of autistic engagements with consent culture/body language. most language barriers wrt nonverbal communication do not happen in one isolated instance with a stranger; these are patterns and long-standing relationships with the people in the spaces that autistics occupy daily. this includes close relationships like family and close friendships, sure, but i'm mostly referring to spaces like weekly club meetings, mutual aid groups, the same people that show up at the gay bar every week, the people at the library every day, etc.

the depressing fact is: with these re-occurring and important social relationships, putting the onus on the autistic person to self-modulate without any leeway for miscommunication both sets the expectation that if someone is made uncomfortable, it is the autistic's fault (which i believe is where my "body as a weapon, touch as abuse" neurosis stemmed from), and also locks autistics out of fairly normal prosocial bonding behaviors because, on a larger scale, leaning into this solution makes neurotypicals just about as uncomfortable as misreading their body language and hugging them when they don't want a hug! autistics are regularly referred to as "pressuring," or just simply "creepy" and excluded from social bonding, for asking for permission "too many" times. being "standoffish" and not engaging in "normal" amounts of physical affection with friends is often considered just as creepy as engaging in "too much."

i also want to add that this sort of body language/nonverbal cue language barrier doesn't just apply to physical touch that is theoretically possible to get explicit verbal consent for in every instance. i've seen autistics called out (in the true sense of the term callout, where they are legitimately referred to as predatory) for consistently standing "too close" to others, making eye contact for an uncomfortably long period of time, looking at the wrong parts of someone's body (like "staring at my feet"),

also, i'd like to add on that some people are entirely nonverbal and only communicate via body language/nonverbal cues; any one-size-fits-all consent culture/communication norm is going to harm some group of people who can't communicate in that way, and the new norm becoming "solely verbal communication of boundaries is acceptable, and any touch that is not requested verbally is assault" is going to have harmful splashback on those who solely communicate nonverbally.

i think that a greater cultural focus on both setting explicit boundaries and accepting boundaries is the best we're going to get in terms of navigating consent in ways that are disability-accessible; i also think that more education on varying communication styles and anti-ableist community work is the best we're going to get in terms of cutting down on the amount of active language barriers. i think that plenty of allistics can be taught to use verbal communication a bit more than they do--the fact that allistic culture is the dominant violently-enforced hegemony indicates to me that there is probably more space for allistics to learn to "speak" autism-adjacent communication than there is for autistics to learn allistic communication. i also think that greater forgiveness and leeway once a language barrier is recognized is the thing i'm advocating the most for here; if you recognize that someone is not understanding your nonverbal language, for example, a societal pressure to acknowledge this and go your separate ways would be a massive improvement over the current pressure to view this as inherently a predatory action.

in order to get there, though, i think we have to openly and vocally address the culture that we are currently in, where language barriers wrt body language/nonverbal cues get responded to with incredible social and even physical violence, even (and sometimes particularly) in leftist and nominally anti-ableist spaces. i have repeatedly seen autistics socially ostracized, cut off from vital material support, and even physically attacked, for failing to recognize a nonverbal cue, failing to understand and integrate social context into an interaction, and numerous other cases of failing to "speak allistic." i have, in fact, repeatedly seen this happen in neurodiverse spaces, including with the aggression coming from other autistics who have higher social competence. part of what has prompted me to start talking about this in the first place, tbh, is the proliferation of autistics on social media who have moderately-to-very high social competence and project their capabilities onto all autistics, even rejecting the idea that there are autistic profiles that include the very things they're decrying as universally "creepy" or "red flags," and who have hijacked the autistic narrative in leftist spaces to a massive degree.

anyway: thank you for your ask, and i'm happy to have the chance to talk about my thoughts on this topic on a less defensive and more "generally here's some things i'm mulling over" level.

i don't have a good call to action or a way to end this post neatly, but i'm very happy to have this discussion, particularly out in the open where it can be engaged in by The Public, and would highly appreciate more autistic engagement on this topic, particularly from other low-social-competency and 0-nonverbal-fluency autistics (who i've been fairly isolated from irl, sadly, and rarely run across a fellow one on social media due to how much our voices are buried).

#i WILL turn reblogs and replies off on this post the moment someone decides to be a clown #i swear to fucking g-d engage in good faith. please. i beg you.#anonymous #ask #long post #VERY long post

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mozart-the-meerkitten · 1 month

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POV: You're the Gaang just now finding out that the whole time he's been chasing you Zuko has also been looking after a baby... lizard kitten?

This is the other funny Avatar/The SOS Chronicles (my original story) crossover idea I had. Sometime during season 1 or shortly before it Zuko finds 5-year-old orphan Silvie and adopts her. Silvie at this point is largely non-speaking due to both trauma and being autistic so it's unclear when exactly he finds out she's fully sentient but he learns it eventually just by paying attention to her and her actions/reactions.

Silvie and Zuko are a lot alike actually! Their moms both disappeared when they were young, they're outcasts that most people dislike, they have anger issues and tend to act before they think, and their dads were both horrible people! :)

Baby Silvie is very clingy- literally. Baby Aguithans like to climb their caregivers and cling to them like baby koalas. By season 3 Zuko's used to it- and probably using it to his advantage to try and win the Gaang over. He tries to keep baby Silvie out of his fights and stuff as much as he can but the Gaang has likely seen her around some, especially during season 2 since Zuko no longer had a ship to hide her on. But they kind of assumed she was just a pet like Momo.

Taking care of a smol creature is good for Zuko and makes him much more responsible and thoughtful earlier on because he has to think of the BABY. Iroh is very amused and delighted by the affect Silvie has on his nephew.

Despite trying to keep her out of trouble, Silvie is not helpless and proves it whenever she has the smallest opportunity. She's very defensive and protective of Zuko! If he gets attacked and Silvie is around she's likely trying to tear the face off of one of his assailants with her very sharp claws and teeth. She's nervous in the picture, but you'll see she's got her tail wrapped around Zuko a bit- that's a protective gesture! She's telling the Gaang, 'I might be scared of you, but if you hurt my dad I'll gouge out your eyes.' or something like that, anyway. She's a very fierce little kitten.

Silvie does not trust most people but she trusts Zuko very quickly. Everyone else takes much longer, but she eventually trusts Iroh and the whole Gaang. While Zuko's taking members of the Gaang out on their life changing field trips, the rest of the group is trying desperately to befriend his weird alien child. Silvie does NOT make it easy for them. She does like Appa tho, and will often climb him and hide in his fur. She befriends Toph first because Toph's personality is similar to Zuko's and Toph is trying less than everyone else. Aang is next because while he's trying waaay too hard he's also very nice and good with animals. She holds out distrust for Katara and Sokka longer but eventually after they make friends with Zuko they win her over.

Alright, I'll stop now, but I love this silly little AU so if you want to hear more about it feel free to ask!

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gloriousmonsters · 1 year

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it's fascinating to see people running the exact same scripts as trensmeds/exclusionists but for mental illness.

I just crossed paths with a post that was a screenshot of a tiktok where someone was clearly frustrated because 'I thought I might have autism but when I tried to bring it up with my therapist she said she literally wouldn't discuss it with me because 'everyone thinks they have it because of tiktok', and the original poster/about 90% of the notes were... celebrating this. Either variations on 'lol based psych' and 'she was right' or people explicitly saying shit like:

'Well, I was trans diagnosed with autism/adhd before it was cool and trendy! I can't believe that the diagnostic criteria is getting made stricter, it's the fault of those transtrenders tiktok kids who pretend to have mental illnesses. I get to gatekeep because I really suffered!'

(Shoutout to the confusing outlier who sagely was like 'and usually they just have bpd' in the tags. just???? just, my fair sir? also source???)

And like. It makes sense and is also so incredibly frustrating for the same reasons as transmed/exclus stuff. When you're a hurt person stuck interacting with a system that makes a lot of decisions about your personal autonomy/function, it messes with your head. It taps into that particular reaction to trauma that there was that one great post about--the mindset you get in when you see people get help when you didn't, and get furious and often default to 'it shouldn't be so easy' or 'why should they get help when I didn't?' And if you're struggling with a system that is, lbr, way more about luck in what specific people you got to talk to than any kind of well-built system, which is historically very flawed and still very flawed... well, a lot of people don't want to admit the system is a crapshoot and the people in it can be wrong so, so often, because then what about my diagnosis? my confirmation that I am what I am? fuck kids with stargenders and self-dxed teenagers with autism, I suffered for this, you can't take it away from me.

Which they aren't. If diagonistic criteria for anything is being made stricter, that's not on tiktok teens, it's on the people who write the criteria and decided that this was how they were going to handle an uptick in people thinking they are/might be autistic. If people are passing anti-trans legislation, that's because they're transphobes, not because of demigirls and non-op trans people. And are all of these kids queer, or mentally ill/ND, in the way they think they are? Probably not. Being a teenager is fucking confusing and often traumatic, and it's also a time when most of them are investigating and trying to build their identities. But I'm willing to bet that almost all are genuinely struggling with something/deviate from 'the norm'; if you want to stop kids from 'believing they're something wrongly' maybe focus your energy on putting the message out that it's ok to be wrong about things, that self-discovery is a process-- in this specifically, how to interact with mental health diagnoses and manage your symptoms, no matter where they stem from, in helpful ways, etc etc.

But please do the bare minimum and don't let personal pain turn you into a bitter, smug asshole who celebrates when they see kids experiencing gatekeeping that could really, really fuck them over, OK? Like physical disability and queer identity, the few 'fakers' you'll 'catch' by being cruel and suspicious will in no way be worth the people dead because only people who REALLY need help should be able to get it.

#long post #sorry lol I just #I can get the emotional/mental place this attitude comes from but as always i feel like i'm the padme meme #'and then we realize those feelings are unreasonable and don't act on them right?'#'....'#'and then we realize those feelings are unreasonable.... and don't act on them #right???'#also just *pulls out another smaller soapbox for a moment*#'kids these days think all their problems and quirks are due to mental illness!'#kids Back In The Day died. or struggled all their lives. because the understanding of mental illness was even more fucked than it is now #do NOT be a fucking 'EVERYONE THINKS THEY HAVE DEPRESSION YOU'RE JUST A WEAK BABY' conservative guys #'oooooh everyone thinks they have adhd and autism'#everyone started 'thinking' they were trans or queer or whatever after learning that it was a possibility #and learning how to recognize whether that was the case with themselves.... fucking crazy right?#I LITERALLY SAW SOMEONE SAYING #'oh they're seeing how symptoms of autism are socially contagious due to tiktok'#do not make this another ROGD! do not make this another ROGD!#mental illness #pro self diagnosis #AND FINALLY. 'lol based psych' PSYCHIATRISTS ARE EXACTLY AS RELIABLE AS ANY OTHER KIND OF DOCTOR.#SLIGHTLY.#THEY CAN BE AND ARE WRONG A LOT #i say this as someone who's benefited a lot from therapy (although i've had to educate my psych on some things)#and who is on medication. doctors and psychs can be lifesaving but they can also #really truly fuck you over because they are human and sometimes idiots or jerks and we should not be trusting them solely #with our mental and physical well-being #ok ok my arms are hurting i shouldn't have typed this much

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troonwolf · 1 year

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thank you for speaking up about the cult tactics used in the pro endo community. even though i Was mostly syscourse unaligned leaning anti, the pro endo community gave me a really bad vibe. seeing a lot of shit they say screamed “cult” to me too but i didn’t feel comfortable enough calling it out because i’m not a cult survivor and i don’t know a lot about cults. i was also never pro endo so it’s not like i could speak from personal experience either. so i kind of brushed off my gut reaction and told myself i’m overreacting about something i don’t know a lot about. so i’m glad to know more now and know that the pro endo community does harm beyond what i even initially thought. i’m definitely more anti endo now because the pro endo community is absolutely the anti vaxers of the neurodivergent community. also notice how many of them support the demedicalization of autism too. idk if you remember that but i’m referencing specifically the time a few months ago when some prominent pro endo bloggers were jumping down the throats of autistic anti endos because they called their autism a disability.

Ty for your input anon! Interesting to read other folks perspectives and experiences on all this.

The funny thing is I literally only started talking about how I myself am a cult survivor because everytime I try to talk about cults in the system community, people have this knee-jerk reaction of having to respond to you with essays on how unless you're a cult survivor, you shouldn't be talking about cults.

Now first off that's obviously not true and pretty stupid. Tons of academic professionals and researchers and etc who are involved in widening our understanding of cults, were not themselves victims of cults. That's like saying I can't talk about the black plague because I wasn't there.

But literally just to make people stop having that response to me I was like welp guess I'm gonna have to talk about specific details of my trauma of being lured into a doomsday bunker in the mountains by my mother even tho both sides of this debate are constantly talking about how we shouldn't pressure people to have to talk about or reveal their trauma.

The idea of cults and cult victims have a weird status of reverence in the community, we're almost treated like a mythological creature. "Oh no, don't talk about cults! There might be a...*whispers* cult victim here...." It's very very bizarre.

Cults are an age-old phenomenon with tons of research put behind them. We actually know a fucking lot about cults. Saying you need to have been in one to be able to understand them is ridiculous.

Comparing this to other things: you don't need to have been abused as a child to have a good understanding of child abuse. We have a pretty informed understanding of what child abuse is and how it functions by this point. You can still call something out as being child abuse without having experienced it yourself.

With that said I'm glad there are people who understand my point, but honestly after this experience I've concluded both sides of the anti/endo discourse are a bunch of clowns who just want a tumblr pvp social club. People are involved literally just to be part of the community, whether anti or endo. Folks actual reasons for being against endos is dumb shit like "they're just dumb teenagers who don't know what they're doing", when if that's really the case then why are you "anti" in the first place? Idc what dumb teenagers are doing, why do you?

I hate endos because they cause harm but most people in this discourse legitimately seem like they're just anti-endos because they think it's cringe and want to be a cool tumblr hater.

#anti endo #syscourse #endo cult #also peoples response to me finally dumping my trauma after being accused of not knowing what I'm talking about over and over #was just to then ignore my existence and vague me #while pretending to be for cult survivors lol #this community is genuinely very full of shit #like just cliquey mean girl shit because no one actually believes in what they're saying #they just want to have a blog where they're a cool tumblr hater or wtfever #also I don't like how the community treats us cult survivors like we are delicate fucking flowers #that cant even skim by a post about cults #or we cant have an intellectual objective discussion on cults #because we are just so weak and fragile yknow :(((((((((((#we need them to protect us from stuff like having thoughts and sharing opinions :(((((#it is literally just ''survivors I agree with'' vs ''survivors I disagree with and therefore don't exist''

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grison-in-space · 3 years

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I have been spending much of the past few weeks drowning in ancient Sentinel fic. (It's a real trip when you read a contemporarily-set-as-written story that flashes twenty years into the future, note the year, and then note that said far flung future year is 2019.)

Anyway, one of the the things that keeps standing out to me as I read is just how much Jim's canonical superpower is basically just neurodivergence, and just how much of this body of slash (and the odd smarm) fic is also about coming to terms with the disabling aspects of neurodivergence. But--and this is the thing that fascinates me about it--both dialogues are absolutely and completely out of sync with contemporary dialogue about what we currently call autism and ADHD.

Hear me out! The big things Jim is struggling with are hypersensitivity, overload, and executive function--that is, he frequently snags on sensory inputs with which he can't disengage. He's got to be careful about what he consumes or interacts with because he has outsize reactions to certain stimuli, often in unpredictable (to him) ways.

Y'all, I literally refer to that experience--that is, getting stuck on a sensation or activity with which I can't disengage without external input, say like my partner nudging me to check in, as zoning out. Have done for years. (Also, to be fair, as "freezing up" or "getting stuck", and there's an emotional component to all that which is basically just PTSD, but you can also effectively argue that Jim displays both the simple PTSD you expect out of an Army vet and also the complex PTSD you expect out of a baby neurodivergent kid trying to fit into an unyielding world etc etc; what do you think Jimmy's childhood trauma and daddy issues about approval actually come down to?)

Now I say this is all totally disconnected from contemporary dialogue about ADHD and autism because, bluntly, both at the time and even to a lesser extent today, these are both highly gendered categories, and Jim ain't the right gender. Yeah, he's male, but you gotta understand that there's a whole bunch of gender categories under "male" and "female," all of which are inflected by things like race and class and culture and subculture, this isn't a binary thing--if it helps to think instead "Jim isn't the right kind of guy to be the kind of guy we talk about with respect to autism especially," it's the same concept. Diagnoses and labels are socially constructed categories; we define who fits in those boxes based on mental pictures of what kinds of people fit the image, and at the time these labels were really, really inflected by focus on a specific kind of guy. (Well, the larval form of that guy, since largely we were talking about children and still are, without contemplating that out of the hideous chrysalis of adolescence shambles an entirely different sort of beast--fuck, it is real obvious this morning I have had neither meds nor breakfast as I write. A n y w a y.)

My point is that Jim is a) too athletic, b) too military, c) too quiet, and d) too concerned with masking and camouflaging himself and not revealing that he's not like everyone else to fit most of our modern schemas of these labels and all of our contemporary ones. And, if you look at those last two notes, Jim actually displays a developmental response to neurodivergence and finding out that you are not the kind of kid that everyone around you is expecting that we associate with neurodivergent girls: try not to need help, do not on any account let it be known that you are Different except for that weird Village People phase of his right after the military and be quiet if you're struggling. (In a weird way, gender nonconforming behavior is part of the diagnostic metapicture for especially autistic people: boys who aren't into sports enough, girls who aren't good enough at makeup, and so forth. So one of the common things you see in people who are trying to mask neurodivergence is a hyperconformity to whatever gender presentation is considered most culturally acceptable--and, er, also a very common thing you see in closeted queer and trans people, there is a reason a lot of these things co-occur....)

Ooh, hey, you know what kind of person fandom is chock full of? Queer, neurodivergent women. You know what kind of people were writing a lot of Sentinel fic--? Keep that in mind.

Actually you know who is the right gender--the right kind of guy--to have run into autistic people and ADHD people and delights such as myself that meld both experiences into a single cobblework brain? Blair. Blair is exactly the kind of kid who would have gotten diagnosed, if he was about ten years younger and Naomi sat still long enough. Blair, the bookish child genius who went to university at sixteen and then apparently stayed there accruing degrees bizarrely slowly until we meet him ten years later as what appears to be a fairly new PhD student, or at least one who hasn't gotten very far. Do you have any idea how dense on the ground neurodivergent people are in academia? I mean, mostly they're not identified as such, you wouldn't believe how awkward people get when I casually disclose that Yes, I Have The Labels, but you do eventually recognize patterns in the sorts of people you interact with every day by the time you've been knocking around them for ten years.

A while back I was talking on this blog about how coded portrayals of characters are often just depictions based on types of people that authors have observed without necessarily conceptualizing or recognizing them as part of the group they're coded as belonging to. And I really do think that this is a massive factor in both how Jim is portrayed in canon but also in how Jim is depicted in fandom. Which is what makes the dialogue of these stories so interesting to me, because we think about the same groups of people and the same experiences differently depending on the frameworks we apply to them. So here I see this whole fascinating dialogue in fandom that is approaching the experiences of the same sorts of people as we see labeled one way, but constructing their own frameworks to understand, often with reference to but largely (fortunately) avoiding the framework of canon, which is kind of cartoonishly racist in a very 1990s way.

(Look, the downside of intersectionality is that sometimes you interrogate an interesting thread that is doing something novel and fascinating on Axis 1 and something incredibly boring and frustratingly harmful on Axis 2 and being deliberate and thoughtful about neither of them.)

I have more, but I've been chattering all morning while I walk the dogs and feed the cats and at some point I have to start packing, but look:

I just read a fascinating two-part set of short stories on the potential transcendent joy of hyperfixation and zoning and the ethics of trying to intervene in someone else's tendency to zone in the interest of not, ah, accidentally zoning at a bad moment and dying or being unable to accomplish one's basic goals. A set of pieces that is thinking fairly explicitly about themes of practicality and choice and how one might choose to moderate and control one's mind to balance ecstacy and independence, ending on a note of choosing to indulge in hyperfixation and zoning occasionally, at times of one's own choosing.

Written in goddamn 2002.

What a world we live in! What a lens with which to interrogate a body of text!

#the Sentinel #fandom #meta #neurodivergence #history #gris original #sentinel #actually autistic

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