#actuallyautistic

[autistic-af]

When I was a child, many of my sensory issues were used as the butt of jokes by my family. I had many phobias due to these issues, but they were laughed off as they were seen as "extreme" or over the top.

Examples would be I was terrified of pinecones as young as 3 because I thought they were visually disturbing and dangerous. So, at the age of 4/5, we were in a park and I handed my mum my jacket so I could use the public loo. She proceeded to fill the pockets, sleeves and hood with pinecones.

I had a meltdown in the middle of a forest. I screamed and collapsed and i was told I was overreacting.

Now, this isn't good behaviour for an adult for any child.

But when you're an undiagnosed autistic, you begin to learn that your sensory pain doesn't matter. It's too much, and needs to be ignored.

Holding the door closed whilst the toilet flushed, another sensory pain was one done to me "for laughs". I was told it wasn't that big of a deal and I needed to grow up.

So, is it any wonder that late diagnosed (and probably many early diagnosed) autistics ignore their own needs? We don't want to be too much. We don't want to rock the boat and endure being told that we're overreacting and to just shut up.

[monachopsis-11]

*I know there are other types of neurodivergence I promise but this question was specific to autism and ADHD

[five-thousand-loaves-of-bread]

“unreliably speaking” is coined by & for & popularized by nonspeaking (autistic) people with apraxia of speech and/or full body apraxia to describe a very specific experience. *see note at the end

it’s coined to describe the apraxic experience of brain body disconnect. it’s like your body have a mind of its own. someone with unreliable speech will be able to verbally speak (technically) but the words dont always match what they want to and meant to say. some unreliably speaking people may even have a lot of speech! but they often don’t mean to say some or many of the words.

unreliably speaking people either don’t have at all or struggle with having functional communication through their mouth. (because of that, some unreliably speaking people [ those whose everything or almost everything they say they don’t mean] do also call themselves nonspeaking because they don’t have functional verbal/mouth communication.)

an simpler example of this is when asked “is the sky blue,” an apraxic unreliably speaking person may answer “no” when they mean “yes.” but the unreliably spoken words can be more complex than that, like phrases and even sentences.

however, unreliably speaking does not mean you can speak sometimes but can’t the other, or you don’t know when you’ll have speech because sometimes you lose it.

the word you’re looking for is intermittent speech, or intermittently speaking. “losing speech” is more common.

i’ve seen people make this mistake a lot, some by both verbal & nonverbal/nonspeaking people. sometimes people use it by mistake when they’re trying to avoid another mistake (the mistake is using “nonverbal”/“going nonverbal” to mean losing speech). i try to assume good faith because of that since it’s clear they’re listening to nonverbal nonspeaking people.

“definitions change 🙃” this is an important distinction because misusing terms leads to misunderstanding and harm people with actual unreliable speech. it puts more work on the apraxic unreliably speaking person having to explain over and over again. it’s important for unreliably speaking people to have a word of their own that precisely describe their experience without other external people without similar experience diluting or changing the definition.

.

*the link cited heavily bashes the term nonverbal but i want to emphasize that some people who do not speak do prefer nonverbal. it’s up to individual who don’t speak’s preference.

** nonverbal & nonspeaking meaning all the time only.

(i don’t know if this made sense, idk why i’m talking so formal right now i’m sorry if this is hard to read)

[thebdsm5]

how did "medical bias leads to underdiagnosis of autistic girls" turn into "autistic girls go undxed because theyre never gross & awful & disruptive like boys, who are just allowed to get away with it" & how do we take it back

[autispec-hours]

ok autistic community , what’s one safe food that you absolutely love and would be perfect except for it’s one big flaw ?

mine is velveeta cup mac n cheese , which is easy to make and tastes heavenly

the only thing i hate is that they put the cheese sauce in the same place as the noodles . it ends up w that white powder on it n i have to constantly wipe my hands after touching it

[disconnectivetissue]

"autism isn't disabling, society is!" is not a hot and radical take.

it is the refrigerator mother hypothesis in sheep's clothing.

[theconcealedweapon]

Abled people don't realize that it's downright dangerous for disabled people to meet their expectations.

When an abled person expects something and a disabled person puts in the effort to accomplish what's expected, the single instance of meeting the expectation becomes evidence of it being effortless. It becomes expected more often.

Then, when they can no longer meet the expectation, either because there's something different this time or because they're already burned out from doing it many times already, the past successes are used as evidence that they're faking it now. Abled people will be like "you were able to do it before so you're able to do it now".

This causes disabled people to be afraid of succeeding at anything unless they know they can do it regularly.

[sadhoc]

I wish more people understood that most autistic people can’t choose whether or not something is overstimulating. No matter how cute I find a barking dog, for example, or how sympathetic I am to a crying person, that won’t make me less sensitive to noise. I can’t just turn off my autism when it contradicts what I want to be doing

[thesurprisinglyqueertoast]

please reblog for sample size

[catgirl-kaiju]

It's Saturday tho

NO

[hyperself]

The most insidious sort of social inequality, the most difficult sort of privilege to challenge, occurs when a dominant group is so deeply established as the “normal” or “default” group that it has no specific name, no label. The members of such a group are simply thought of as “normal people,” “healthy people,” or just “people”—with the implication that that those who aren’t members of that group represent deviations from that which is normal and natural, rather than equally natural and legitimate manifestations of human diversity.

— Nick Walker, "Neuroqueer Heresies: Notes on the Neurodiversity Paradigm, Autistic Empowerment, and Postnormal Possibilities"

[monachopsis-11]

When you’ve been so conditioned to ignore your own needs that your automatic response to being under stimulated is to sit still and not do anything, like I need to move or do something but I can’t. At least if I’m overstimulated curling up in my room where it’s quiet and calm helps but under stimulation is just impossible to fix, if anyone has advice on helping under stimulation I’d love to hear it because this sucks 😐😣

[lukmarc10]

i feel like i'm the only autistic person on tumblr who doesn't know jackshit about sonic and pokémon

[thebdsm5]

people try to separate autism from the concept of "weirdness" or "cringe" as if theres a normal way to be clinically socially impaired