preraphaeliteyawn

[preraphaeliteyawn]

John William Godward, A Priestess, 1894

[preraphaeliteyawn]

alla mingalёva

[preraphaeliteyawn]

enamasiama for paco rabanne

CG on twitter

[preraphaeliteyawn]

Today I realised I don’t like receiving arbitrary occasion gifts. I also don’t like giving them, but that’s a separate anti-consumerism thing. I hate receiving them because they come with all these expectations and obligations on me and make me uncomfortable. I remember being told off multiple times growing up for not being appreciative enough of gifts people had given me. I learned I had to perform high levels of appreciation even if the gift was thoughtless or insulting. I learned that if someone gave me a gift voucher I had to spend it promptly and let the person who gave it to me know what I bought and perform appreciation all over again. I learned I had to keep gifts even if they weren’t of use to me or weren’t something I liked. I’m nearly 40 and I still have shit people gave me when I was a kid that I disliked at the time and now actively hate and resent. I have gifts I was given by people who hurt me and I no longer speak to. I’ve been having massive anxiety the last few days because the store someone gave me a gift voucher for over a year ago is now closing down and I still haven’t bought anything. And honestly I think I’m probably really hard to buy gifts for anyway because my interests are all pretty specific in weird ways. I like cows, for example. I think they’re beautiful and I just like seeing them in fields and stuff. So ever since I was a kid people have been giving me cow themed gifts and mentioning how they know I collect cow things. I don’t. I hate ‘cow print’. I hate cartoony cow toys. I only ‘collect’ them because people keep giving them to me and I feel obligated to keep them. I literally just like looking at real cows sometimes. That’s it. And the one cow-shaped money box my sister gave me, but for very specific reasons that are unrelated to cows in general. That’s the extent of my interest in cows. Meanwhile I’ve actually collected art postcards since I was a teenager and no one has ever given me those. I also collect pottery now too and people have given me some pottery, but I have very particular qualities I look for and I think the process of searching for pieces is just as important to me as the pieces themselves so I’m not sure I really want them as gifts. I also really hate being asked what I want for a gift and then being told the things I want aren’t good enough which is a) pretty condescending, b) a waste of both our time, and c) usually how I end up with random stuff I don’t want or need. And to a certain extent I get it—what I usually want are things that are, or at least seem, quite utilitarian and practical and people have this whole idea that ‘gifts should be things people want not things they need’—but what I really want is to not have a load of unwanted/unused gifts that I feel endlessly guilty about.

[preraphaeliteyawn]

Doing a huge wardrobe clear out and there’s just so much stuff. Stuff that hasn’t fit in years. Stuff that never fit. Stuff that I told myself I’d alter or dye and never did. Stuff I hate, but wear all the time because at least it fits and I won’t care when it gets stained or torn or otherwise ruined. Stuff I love, but part of me says ‘it looks great! it’s not you though. you don’t get to look great. take it off.’ Stuff I love and actually feel confident in, but can’t wear because of arthritis. Stuff I love and feel confident in, but can’t wear because of hyperhidrosis. Stuff I bought as a ‘compromise’ because the things I actually wanted don’t exist in my size/my price range/at all. Stuff I bought online and then found out was a sensory nightmare, but kept anyway because I worried returning it was inconveniencing someone else over my own weird issues. And the whole time I’ve been sorting through all this stuff all I can think is what a waste. So much wasted money. So much wasted time and energy. So much wasted environmental impact. So much literal waste that will almost certainly end up landfill. I just hate it. I hate it all.

[preraphaeliteyawn]

Every few years I get upset that Pascall Fruit Bon Bons don’t exist any more because one time when I was little someone gave me some at a family party. It was the little paper wrappers with the pictures of the fruit that really sucked me in because they corresponded with the flavour and the pictures were so detailed and they were so nearly folded around the lollies. They were perfect and made me so happy. I literally never had them again, but I still think about them and how perfect they were and it makes me sad that they’re just gone forever. I wish I still had the little paper wrappers.

[preraphaeliteyawn]

I’ve been wondering for a while now if maybe I’m autistic and then recently my psychologist brought it up as a possibility, but I just can’t afford a diagnosis. Plus I’ve internalised so much and have potentially been masking for 30+ years, I’m honestly kind of scared I’ll just be dismissed. And there’s all these questions I have, but don’t know who to ask. Like I’ve been reading about echolalia and it perfectly describes what I do all the time, except I mostly do it internally so is it not really echolalia? From talking to other people over the years I’ve also realised that a) not everyone has an internal voice and b) I don’t know anyone else who has what I can only think to call an ‘internalised outside voice’. I have my regular internal voice that’s just narrating my thoughts moment by moment and then I have my internalised outside voice which is like me speaking out loud but silently in my head and it’s very much a different thing to my regular internal voice. I use my internalised outside voice to rehearse future conversations or writing, to repeat words and phrases I get stuck on, and to play out imagined scenarios where I have my needs met in ways that aren’t happening in real life. I used to do all this actually out loud as a kid, but between other kids bullying me and adults telling me it was weird and childish I just started doing it in my head instead. As an adult I’d occasionally catch myself doing it out loud then get all paranoid that someone might have heard and sometimes it’s so clear in my head that I’m not sure whether I’ve done it out loud or not (I’ve noticed sometimes I check my reflection to see if my mouth is moving as I walk past mirrors and shop windows). But I’m pretty sure if I bring this up with my psychologist she’s just going to say it’s not her area of expertise and suggest I see someone about a possible autism diagnosis. Which, again, I can’t afford. So I don’t know what I’m meant to do.

[preraphaeliteyawn]

Floral book cover ( Kashmir School, early 19th century).

Lacquer painted on papier mâché.

© The Trustees of the British Museum.

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license.

[preraphaeliteyawn]

Sometimes I think I’d make a really good spy because people are always just not noticing me or forgetting any and all interactions with me. All through school I knew all sorts of personal information about teachers and admin because they’d have conversations without realising I was right there. I’d get given catch up work I’d already done in class because teachers would mark me as absent when I wasn’t. At least three times I was almost left behind on school excursions. As an adult I’ve twice been missed by bus drivers who thought they had no passengers—once I was locked in the bus at a bus station and once I ended up having to walk home because they just started driving to the depot. I’ve heard all kinds of very confidential information in elevators, bathrooms and cafes. I’ve had to use the phrase “yeah I know, I was there too” a shocking number of times because people try to catch me up on things I was there for. One time when I was about two weeks into a new job I heard my coworkers talking about “that new girl who just stopped showing up after her first day” and I realised they were actually talking about me—it was a staff of maybe six people and I interacted with them literally every day. So maybe if I was a spy I’d collect all kinds of useful information and it would go completely to waste because the other spies would just forget I worked with them.

[preraphaeliteyawn]

[preraphaeliteyawn]

I think "how not be a eugenicist" should be more of a requirement for anyone going into medicine

[preraphaeliteyawn]

How are you meant to overcome trauma if you don’t really know what it was and someone spent 30+ years telling you their warped version of events and basically brainwashing you so you have huge gaps in your memory but also memories that cannot possibly be real?

[preraphaeliteyawn]

I cannot emphasize enough to abled people that the kind of pain I feel due to my disability is entirely different from the pain I feel after a good work out... that the kind of fatigue I feel is nothing like the kind of tired I get after staying up late the night before

These symptoms can look similar but they are worlds apart

[preraphaeliteyawn]

This was one of things I grew up thinking was a universal experience and I couldn’t understand why when I said things like “you know how when you first wake up and you’re exhausted and it hurts to move…” people would just stare blankly.

I woke up in so much pain

And I realised: this is why abled people don’t understand us.

They wake up after a sleep in with that warm, hazy, rested feeling that feels so very nice. We wake up after a sleep in and have to take inventory, immediately aware of our illnesses and pain, even when we’re supposed to be ‘relaxed’

The most basic things they experience & take for granted are the things that would change their thinking of our diseases, I’m sure of it.

[preraphaeliteyawn]

I respect the moon's unwillingness to be photographed on a phone

[preraphaeliteyawn]

Writing a list of stuff I need to work on with my psych and lying for no reason is on there so I was trying to think of examples and they’re all so fucking ridiculous. I started doing it in primary school and my thinking was essentially ‘people think I’m lying when I tell the truth anyway, so I’m just gonna fuck with them’. So all my lies were deliberately really obvious and I’d tell them knowing full well that no one believed me. Like one time I told my entire class that my nonexistent boyfriend had given me this ring and one of my classmates who was also my neighbour and had literally been there when my mum’s friend gave me the ring the day before called me out on it in front of everyone and I just went “no that was a similar but totally unrelated ring.” And I swear in that moment her frustration was palpable because of course I was fucking lying. Everyone knew I was lying. It was so outrageous and yet not at all worth the effort of getting me to admit it was a lie. Which was exactly the sweet spot I aimed for. Thinking back on it I was starting to wonder if maybe that was just a relatively normal teenage thing to do, but then I did the maths and realised I was 8.