#about my online friends judging me for it

[drdemonprince]

hey, so this is super random and I’m not sure if you have thought about this but figured I’d ask: (came to my mind after reading your story in *unmasking* about intervening in street harassment)

I’m audhd and it really affects my sensory processing, social/ situational awareness etc since it’s hard for me to discern which stimuli are important in any given situation. I’m also realizing that I never really feel unsafe as a single woman in a dense city environment, even when my friends feel unsafe. Makes it hard to trust my own intuition about that kinda stuff since everyone I know apart from myself has that experience.

Question is, do you happen to have any info/ best practices about situational awareness and judging the danger of potentially sketchy situations? Walking around the city at night, creepy rural gas station, online hookup, greyhound bus alone etc.

Everything online says “trust your intuition” but my intuition always says “ehh it’ll be fine” lol.

The truth is, it usually WILL be fine. Most people's *~magical crime and danger intuition~* is a combination of true crime slop, inaccurate media coverage of the crime rate inflating their anxieties, and classism and racism. The vast majority of crimes are not committed by random strangers lurking in the dark, but between individuals who know one another and in circumstances that are at least somewhat explicable, and so you do not need magic empath powers to determine if you will be safe somewhere or not.

The way you keep relatively safe is by informing yourself of the facts, not the hype -- look up the actual crime statistics for your area, for example, though be highly skeptical of them. These figures are collected by the police state and we cannot trust them to define what safety or unsafety even IS, as they are the source of the danger for the majority of us. What they classify as crime and where they bother to enforce crime is highly skewed, and itself can create massive misapprehensions. So make sure to also speak with people in the communities you are visiting about what happens to them and the general vibe. Also spend a lot of time out in your community yourself, observing things, talking to people, hanging out, maybe volunteering, and learning the lay of the land. You'll have more people around to help you if you ever need it, and you'll find more occasions where your help is needed, too!

Follow some basic, common sense advice to avoid making oneself especially vulnerable, but don't over-isolate yourself. Things like keeping one earbud out of your ear when walking home alone at night and not keeping a purse open on the train are always sensible maneuvers; carrying pepper spray or a gun that will more likely be used to harm you is not. Learn how to de-escalate people if you don't already know -- acting calm, making your posture non-threatening but confident, moving slowly and predictably, avoiding provocative eye contact, changing the subject of conversation, engaging a victim of harassment and pretending to know them in order to drag them away from a bad situation, etc. These things will be helpful to you if a situation arises, and the more prepared you feel, the less anxious you ever have to be.

Honestly, moving through the world with a "this feels fine / seems fine" energy is ITSELF massively protective. I have ALWAYS walked around alone at night, even when I was a small 18 year old "girl," including in areas where the majority of women of my then-demographic would have not felt "safe" going out on their own. By and large, I was completely fine. People really don't want to mess with you if you seem like you have a handle on your shit and are not afraid of them.

The worst that ever happened to me was a guy grabbing my tit -- in broad daylight on a sunday on a train packed full of people. It really couldn't have been avoided. And a guy flashing me -- again in midday in a family oriented neighborhood many would deem safe. I survived these things, and I defended myself by getting aggressive with the guys who did them, and physically attacking them, which scared them off. I'm glad I did what I did, and I'm glad I wasn't so intimidated by the possibility of scary stranger danger that I kept myself sequestered away.

The few other times anyone made me uncomfortable, it was things like leering comments or walking alongside me for a block, hitting on me (sometimes, yes, late at night), but because I was able to be assertive, unbothered, and stand my ground, the guys always gave up or were scared off (by me). And this reaction from me is one I largely credit to having no instinctual "stranger danger" crime intuition of the sort most white women are conditioned to have.

In short, I think your instincts might be more accurate to reality than your friends' are. It's good to look around and pay attention to things, to learn to recognize patterns, to study one's area, to speak to people in your community and know what's going on, and to prepare oneself for hard situations, which WILL happen to you sometimes no matter what you do. but the world is rarely as scary as it's made out to be.

[transmechanicus]

Kind of hard to ask as anon

But you doing ok?

Need to vent?

Hi very kind and thoughtful of you to ask, i am doing mmmmm suboptimal but i do not need to vent to a person per se, so much as i need to say absolutely insane shit in my tags and have everyone pretend not to see <3

[anghraine]

Aww, Ash admitted to me when we were discussing Star Wars opinions that she's not only thought about these things before, she's actually really feeling like using her advanced creative writing degree to write ...................... fanfiction, and has actually done so in the past.

me, shoving my 67 SW fanfics on AO3 under the bed: Oh hey, awesome! That sounds really interesting.

[thetisming]

im actually really worried that im not that interested in &j anymore like ivd been having a hard time writing about it and talking about it online and i mean i talk about it a lot irl but idk like people have been knowing more than me and im starting to feel so incredibly inferior that it's hard for me to enjoy it

[eternal-reverie]

got the posting anxiety bad tonight

[koka-mi]

bffhsvnkjs I kinda.don't see the point in waking up anymore

[aurosoul]

life continues to be stranger than fiction lately

(top pics are me having an augmented reality game night with my BF, bottom pics are from an AR party held in the same warehouse where they filmed Saw. I was there giving demos with the Magic Leap 2!)

[handern]

torn between "I want to commission someone to draw my ocs" and "what if they think I'm so so cringe"

[starlightwielded]

shout out to my friend who gasped when we went to cinderella’s castle and the fairy queen first said she was going to craft ella’s gift out of trappings of starlight promptly gasped and held my hand

[glass-expanse]

I think one thing God is trying to teach me rn is my own powerlessness and dependence.

[sweet-milky-tea705]

Been feeling lonely :(

[cryptid-on-a-string]

Occasionally I see people in real life who happen to look just like one of my ocs and I’m like 😳😳😳 ☝️☝️☝️☝️ HOLY SHIT ??

[twintailed-anyu]

if you're close with someone who has social anxiety, PLEASE.

what we crave more than anything is validation. when you agree with us in conversation or casually compliment or casual compliments, it means so much.

social anxiety likes to convince us everyone hates us and that everyone judges what we do, how we look, the way we speak, and it especially likes to do that with people we're close to.

so as someone who's friends with someone who has social anxiety, just remind them that you care, that you dont hate them, that you dont find their every move annoying and that you value them. it can help, so much more than you'd imagine.

[viovio]

i once had someone ask me what my intrusive thoughts were and I'm gonna be honest patrick i am not telling you that

[deprivedofbraincellsandsleep]

idk how this happened but atp I'm just afraid to speak to friends

[six-improbable-things]

.