#Reframing Autism

[nonspeakerlibrary]

I remember when a teacher yelled at me because I could not answer the question via a PECS card. It made me feel stressed and upset. I was six years old and it happened all the time.

I require a communication and regulation partner to help me voice my thoughts. They help me regulate by supporting the letterboard. They support the letterboard to aid my physical limitations and to help my motor planning. They change letterboard colours and stencils as it provides more stimulation and gets me back on track. My favourite letterboard colour is green because it is easy to see and it makes spelling easier.

The letterboard is not placed on the table because I need help with my hands. They have a mind of their own. If it was placed flat on the table my finger would point at the wrong letters because I need the letterboard up high to accommodate my needs.

[fucking-relax]

point of view: Spiral Time

adapted from Unmasking Autism by Devon Price

"...time [is] flowing and even folding back on itself, an overlapping series of cycles, periods of dormancy intersecting with growth."

Expand the time frame you use to gauge productivity and success -> don't be afraid to cycle back to old projects or let a passion go when it's not giving you what you want/need

Slow down. Stillness helps neurodivergent minds process the huge quantities of data we take in.

[my-autism-adhd-blog]

Signs of Overstimulation

On the Outside:

Angry

Irritated

Zoning out

Stimming

Difficulty speaking

Covering eyes/ears

Less eye contact

Slower response

Dissociating

On the Inside:

Stress

Anxiety

Trouble focusing

Sounds seem loud

Lights seem bright

Frustration

Distress

Overwhelm

Brain fog

Reframing Autism

[blueberrythefrog]

Got inspired from another user turning him into that one frog that stares at you. (Don't know who you are, but thank you for your service), so here, have autism kinitopet creature Alt Without the Text:

[moonshotpress]

new headcanon:

My grandad didn't love music so much that it flowed out of him and caused him to sing swing music all the time around the house. He was vocally stimming and that's just the music he grew up with.

It's functionally the same as me walking around the house singing Tiktoks. If he were born in the 90s he'd be singing Hot to Go like the rest of us but instead he sang Glenn Miller.

[kitshomeforwaywardsouls]

Broke: “You can accomplish anything you put your mind to.”

Woke: “I will do everything I can to help you accomplish your dreams.”

[writeitinsharpie]

I have come to the conclusion that the best headcannons to accept aren't the ones that make the most sense, it's the ones with the greatest ability to Be Funny

[trashworldblog]

something that helped me unmask in public and around other ppl has been thinking, if someone judges me for doing x autistic trait, that makes them ableist. and i dont care what an ableist piece of shit thinks of me. but i do care about my personal comfort and joy, so i will do x autistic trait.

this especially works with stimming, staring into space, wearing sunglasses indoors, etc.

[endearingfascination]

first episode down, i never thought i’d yell “I DIDNT KNOW GAY PEOPLE WERE ALLOWED TO EXIST” before in response to seeing queer mains in quite high up media. the power of representation people

[furnace-arden]

I noticed I was only saying "I feel autistic" when overstimulated and/ or upset, so I started saying it whenever I get pumped over something small. I feel autistic when someone let's me explain how cool ASL is for 10 minutes. Or when they ask about the book I'm writing and I can explain all of the details. I feel autistic when I can take some yarn and knit for a while and feel better or when I can read a book about being ace and come out of either experience feeling better

I've spent too long letting "autistic" mean "upset or difficult to handle" and decided that I now means joy, so help me

i honestly forget that autism mums say 'autism won today' to mean like their kid had a meltdown and that they are ableist. like nooo autism win means something like i found something cool out about my special interest or i managed to avoid a meltdown or i got to infodump!!!!! autism win is good!!!!!!

[my-autism-adhd-blog]

Reframing Autistic Burnout

Kristy Forbes - Autism and ND Support

[truckfreaks]

before u automatically assume that a blunt-speaking, seemingly spacey, sensory focused puppet guy is secretly evil, i implore you to repeat the following mantra: perhaps i should try to shift my view of this work away from the societal lens that paints autistic behaviors as unnerving and "wrong".

[traincat]

Wait, what IS Moleman’s problem slash obsession with Johnny???

Honestly I wish I knew. I feel like it's one of those things that comes up enough that there's a definite pattern here, but one that Fantastic Four doesn't really explore outside of the immediate instances in which it happens. The exception being Unstable Molecules, which reframes Johnny and the Mole Man as two teenage friends, both heckled with homophobic comments by the popular boys, with the Mole Man yearning to retain a stagnant situation where Johnny is all his in face of Johnny's burgeoning sexuality and yearning to escape their small town.

Unstable Molecules is not 616 canon, for the record. It's an extremely good, extremely meta comic about the fictional "real people" who inspired the Fantastic Four.

For an actual 616 example, let's look at one of the most Comics comics of all time: Fantastic Four #296.

This is an extreme transitional period in the Fantastic Four. John Byrne just left the book at a critical moment right before the 300th issue. Sue and Johnny are in their matching hairstyles era. Johnny's just proposed to "Alicia," who will be retconned as Lyja in like 60 issues. And Ben is handling it SUPER normally by joining the Mole Man's underground kingdom of freaks.

Fashion icon. I'm obsessed with the little moloid butler.

The Mole Man decides that, since Johnny is the cause of Ben's suffering, he should get revenge on Johnny, a thing that will definitely make Ben feel better.

Also Alilyja is here in another stunning example of how they pulled the "Alicia was a Skrull all along" retcon off perfectly by not writing Alicia remotely in character for about a hundred issues. Go girl give us nothing.

So anyway the Mole Man kidnaps Johnny and disfigures him and this is totally about Ben and not at all about the Mole Man and Johnny's beauty. Fascinating stuff going on here viz a viz goodness = physical beauty in superhero comics, but eh. I'm just here for the Johnny whump.

This of course snaps Ben out of his "Johnny's marrying my girl (who I dumped) (and was about to dump again)" funk and straight back into "I love Johnny" territory. Classic. I'm sure he'll be normal about the Alicia stuff now.

No. See the cover of the very next issue:

Buddy, again, you dumped her.

Anyway, Ben stays behind to use one of the Mole Man's machines to restore Johnny's beautiful face.

What's the Mole Man doing while his kingdom is collapsing? Oh, nothing. Normal stuff. Partying in his secret room filled with holographic beautiful men and women. Like I said. Normal. No reason to connect that with wanting to punish Johnny by stripping away his beauty at all.

Another example, and one I find less interesting, but I may as well include it.

Fantastic Four: 1, 2, 3, 4 -- YMMV with this one in general. Gorgeous art. The writing, well. It's one of those books that I find tangentially interesting but don't really incorporate into my personal characterization because it's not great at it. Readers be warned about an extremely 2002 comment on autism with regards to Reed. In it, the Mole Man captures Alicia (the real one this time) and Johnny and tries to get Alicia to maim Johnny with a pair of scissors.

Again, it's just interesting thematically to think about this, especially when Unstable Molecules reframed it the way it did.

[youcouldmakealife]

2024 Writing Wrap

Well, my goal for 2024 was 225,000 words, and I did exceed that, so I believe that is what we call a success. Never mind that my ~secret goal was 250k and that the 225k goal was just in case anything came up. And it did. So that is technically still a success! So I’m trying not to be grumbly about it.

What I’m not grumbly about at all is how, exactly, that final word count broke down by project (actual numbers below).

I don’t think the COTT and SAIT word counts could be closer than if I’d been intentionally trying to balance them. Which, I cannot stress enough, I was not. I was actually expecting a 2:1 COTT v SAIT ratio, mostly because, well, SAIT hasn’t been easy to write at times, and I was fully prepared for that to continue. But then something happened. I won’t investigate it too closely — gift horses, etc — but the floodgates finally broke, and a character that was so reluctant to speak honestly about himself and his life that it left him (and me) mute was suddenly willing to talk.

(We all know what happened. Robbie Lombardi happened.)

So, coming into this year I set myself a 13 part (approx 27.5k) goal for SAIT, and a 60k goal for COTT. They both ended up around 75k. Add in the SOTWs&Ms, which ended up around 65k combined (goal was 60k), and on all counts, I beat my individual project goals, and absolutely smashed the one for SAIT.

Considering this year I also got the TOTI paperback done and published the final installment of Between the Teeth, I think it was a pretty productive year, particularly considering I was finally diagnosed with Audhd in January, and have spent a lot of time and energy processing that, reframing a lot of things, and adjusting my work style to better accommodate my neurotype.

It's all been a big learning process, though one slightly derailed by the arrival of COVID and the…refusal to leave of COVID…and a fraught one at times, but it’s really been a relief to look at things like ‘this doesn’t work for me because my brain isn’t wired that way’ versus ‘this doesn’t work for me because I’m lazy/not trying hard enough/not living up to my ‘potential’, ad nauseum. It’s been…good. Tough, and emotional, and sometimes exhausting, but good. And I think that might be the other reason that Georgie started to speak again: how the fuck was I supposed to write him starting to move forward when I was still masking? How could I?

Meanwhile my other project was literally ‘okay, what if I worked through some of this by making my ADHD and my autism kiss? What if I did that?’ And COTT has been an absolute delight for me as a somewhat chaotic way for me to examine how these totally different beings co-exist. Throw in me shoving a ton of common romance tropes, gleefully undermining them (sometimes even intentionally! Though COTT can indeed be marked down as yet another failure in my quest to write some proper hate sex), a whole lot of ‘look, he actually gets me’ that is probably a liiiittle too close to home (and, I think, the home of most ND people), and everybody Doing Their Best (even when it fails, even when it doesn’t look like it, even when they aren’t rewarded for that), it is probably the closest thing I’ve ever written to pure Id fic, and I’m including the fucking Scouts here.

So thank you for all being very patient with me working through my ~stuff via narrative, and I’m really glad some of you (Audhd, autistic, ADHD, and otherwise) see yourselves reflected in Holden and/or James as well. Every single thing that annoys about them is probably something I do. (Uh. Off the ice. I don’t throw dirty hits. And I sadly don’t have a hockey room either.) I love them both a lot and I genuinely think my loving them, with all their faults (that are often my faults), has made my relationship with myself better, because I too am Always Doing My Best, even when it doesn’t look like it. And sometimes I forget that.

Okay, enough of the navel gazing, time for numbers!

These may seem slightly different than the word counts on, say, AO3, but at the end of each writing day I log my process. It’s always a little inflated -- some of it ends up on the cutting room floor, some of it applies to works currently still in progress, etc.

But, end of the year, here’s the breakdown*:

*rounded up/down to the nearest thousand, but that was the extent of the rounding, they're just naturally handsome numbers

Cards on the Table: 75k

Still Always in Tandem: 75k

SOTW/Ms and Extras: 82k

(Comprised of: SOTWs: 34k, SOTMs: 33k, Extras 15k)

For a combined total of 232k, squeaking in a mere 7k above my 225k goal.

But wait! There’s the misc (includes some Gritty work, last minute BTT additions, the bracket challenge, and other things that don’t fit the categories above), which adds an additional 13k.

So, in fact, it all adds up to 245k. Which is pretty damn close to 250k in my humble opinion, especially considering I spent a full quarter of 2024 sick. So I think we can call this year a success, at least on the writing front.

[maaarine]

Reframe Your Thinking Around Autism: How the Polyvagal Theory and Brain Plasticity Help Us Make Sense of Autism (Holly Bridges, 2014)

"Autists have not learnt to read social cues appropriately and have not learnt to give out social cues.

They do not easily smile or make appropriate facial gestures to calm people down.

It is normal for most people to operate with these cues. We need cues to understand our world, and we have receptors in our bodies that read and respond to these cues.

Dr Porges calls these cues ‘feature detectors’. Our vagal system – 80 per cent of which is sensory – is designed to respond to these cues and we unconsciously expect them from one another.

We feel safe in an environment that gives out the appropriate cues and we like people who give us cues that make us feel good.

Physically our sympathetic nervous system is soothed by safe cues from people.

At a subliminal, physical level our need for these positive cues has to be met.

We know who we are and we feel safe when we feel well met. When we do not receive them we can feel unsafe.

When people don’t give us these cues we can feel betrayed, insulted, threatened, unloved and uncared for, because we need them in order to feel secure – at a subliminal level.

We can feel disengaged and emotionally disconnected from the person without them, and we can go into our own heightened state of FFI. [Fight Flight Immobilization]

Dr Porges suggests that as it is a subliminal activity, we can be unaware that this is what is happening or why we are feeling this way.

He says that, as a society generally, we want to blame the person who is not emitting well – we view them as cold; we find it hard to trust them; we see them as mean, uncaring or stupid.

The interpretation of the person’s motivation is often negative. They are not to be trusted, something feels ‘wrong’.

If people were nice, they would smile, or laugh or look you in the eye.

Often we do not think further than this, we just listen to our automatic assessment.

The trouble with autists is that they don’t emit well, because they can’t.

Often they have gone into Immobilization, into shutdown mode, which is for them a very normal response.

They may be feeling hungry, distressed, or anxious – not at all mean or uncaring, just switched off."

The Bridge Season One: Behind the Scenes

[systematic-breakdown]

It’s almost as if plurality is a very broad spectrum and not all endogenic systems will have the same experiences or fit into the same box. It’s almost as if plurality is merely one symptom of dissociative disorders and it’s actually quite possible to exhibit a single symptom of a disorder without actually having the disorder itself.

Just because someone has an intense interest or passion, would you call them autistic? Of course not, because autism presents with a wide range of symptoms. Just like dissociative disorders. Just like any mental disorder. You need multiple qualifying symptoms in order to be diagnosed. And a lot of plural people (endogenic or otherwise) just don’t have the other symptoms necessary for a dissociative disorder diagnosis.

not that I'm obligated to entertain someone who doesn't have the balls to do this off-anon, but I feel like talking to a brick wall today. lucky you.

I want to let you know off the bat that nothing you or anyone says without linking at least one actual, proper research article (e.g. reliably sourced, no COI, no baseless claims, researchers cite their sources if they aren't directly referencing the study, unbiased, ecological validity, etc) will have any impact. I tell you this now to give you the opportunity to stop here and save yourself the time and effort of developing a counter-argument that won't be responded to productively or (potentially) at all.

I am of the belief that it is of great importance to be critical of everything you read, even if it supports your claim. a lot of y'all tend to just take these papers at face value without actually thinking critically about it or what it says because you're too focused on "this supports the thing I think!" to properly examine and analyze it for flaws.

I understand that non-dissociative plurality is fairly new to the medical field, but that does not negate the fact that classic AND contemporary research supports the idea that being a system is rooted in trauma. that does not negate the fact that most classic and contemporary research papers emphasize the fact that “plurality” is heavily tied to ACEs, lack of support, and the child's inclination towards creativity and use of imagination. your brain, like everyones, does not want to form barriers. it is forced into forming barriers. it wants to be as whole as it can get because that is how we have survived as a species. that's why integration occurs during childhood/before the start of puberty in the first place. the only reason some people have barriers and others don't is because their brain (our brain) recognized that it would be incapable of function and, in that, survival if it had integrated like it is biologically predisposed to do.

obviously older research papers have their own issues, but those are typically resolved after being re-examined and reframed contemporarily. even so, it's important to critique these older pieces in natural and regular settings to prevent a setback in the current understanding of research as a whole (not just in the context of systems). this same process needs to occur with newer pieces on "multiplicity" outside of OSDDID for the exact reason that it is a new field of study greatly impacted by the accessibility of the internet and the inescapable online influence that is present in most participants as a result.

you don't have to convince anyone that your point is the correct one, just as I don't have to convince anyone of that either. I just enjoy expressing my opinions and find it nice that there is direct feedback when posting publicly. it just so happens that my opinions are heavily based in research and medical fact, whereas the extent of "research" for many endogenics (and most people looking into online system communities) won’t go beyond blog posts and the 5-10 articles (all of which have their own issues) that are floating around your spaces. not unlike what you are exhibiting here. it is very easy to find proper articles on OSDDID, trauma, and dissociation, hence why I'm not including any here - you could fact check me all day long and still have things to read (I encourage you to do so). not so much for "plurality" outside of that. where are your sources? where is your evidence? making claims like this without having anything to back it up is a surefire way of spreading misinformation which, as I’m sure I’ve said before, is something I would much rather avoid.

I hate to be the one to break this to you, but “plurality” is not a spectrum. yes, it is possible to exhibit symptoms without having a disorder, but that's just not how it works with trauma-based disorders like OSDDID. comparing the symptoms of a trauma-based disorder to the symptoms of a neurodevelopmental disorder isn't the "gotcha" you think it is. and before you say "well, endos aren't trauma based disorders!" the suffix "-genic" implies a correlation between the two, there isn't a single source I've seen that proves beyond a reasonable scientific doubt that "plurality" the way it's described by endogenics outside of trauma is possible, and there are plenty of endogenics who do claim to have trauma but that their "system" occurred outside of that. given the current understanding of how “plurality” and it's direct correlation to trauma works, that simply isn't possible.

a lot of endogenics do actually qualify for dissociative disorders without realizing it. and the ones who don't just aren't "plural". there are a ton of disorder cocktails that mimic the symptoms of OSDDID (including feeling "plural") almost to a tee. and to address the “non-disordered” claim: it’s okay to have a big imagination and to find comfort in that. that doesn’t make someone a system. or “plural”, if we’re going with that concept.

recently, I saw a post talking about "median systems" and the "midcontinuum". I ended up going down a rabbit hole of sorts and found, unsurprisingly, that the "midcontinuum" was based in very old, very undeveloped research relating to DID (or MPD, as it was referred to more often than not in the MANY first person accounts I read through). I went through about 80-90 different links, most of them being blog/social media posts as there was very little research done into this, and every single one could be linked to some form of OSDD, P-DID, or a mix of trauma, autism, OCD, ADHD, etc. (all connected by their - need I remind you - self reported imaginative abilities and propensity for creative outlets) and that was just from the symptoms that they themselves claimed to have.

you're not required to educate people on something you so strongly believe in, but if that's what you want to do, it's considered good practice if you provide valid sources instead of varying first person accounts. even more so in this new age of internet, where anyone can be anything and theres really no way of knowing the truth.

in all honestly - if you want my opinion - none of these labels matter. in microlabeling every experience, every symptom, every presentation; in giving name to everything pathological outside of our personal experiences with healthcare, I think we’ve all ended up doing a lot more harm than good.

I had something in our drafts already talking about this but I guess I can put it here: everyone seems to have forgotten that the whole point of putting a name to these experiences was for classification and insurance. it's helped create community, of course, but whatever the name it has is unimportant as long as it's dealt with healthily. splitting is not healthy. dissociating is not healthy. forcing alters to form is not healthy. these things aren’t necessarily “bad”, but they aren’t “good” either. the existence of alters is not what is tended to in therapy, the underlying trauma and the "why" of their formation is. that is where the focus needs to be. "why".

sure, it can be fun coming up with new terms, playing with the concept of "plurality", or exploring adverse reactions to trauma - we as people are naturally curious, so of course we want to understand ourselves and our relationship with the world around us - but please do not let this discourse or the community take the attention away from that "why". this is about self exploration, right? then don’t let the ideas and opinions of others inhibit you from delving into yourself. don’t let the pathologising of every experience take you away from yourself. let it be about self-exploration.