#and my brother. very casually said ''it's the autism'' which made me so fucking happy that is the first time someone fucking believes me!

[sherlock-is-ace]

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[crimeronan]

i wanna hear more about your headcanon of declan as autistic (no pressure! only if u want to)

oh ariana we’re really in it now

not all of these bullet points are specifically related to autism bc this just turned into a post about how fond i am of declan.  however.  autistic declan lynch rights here we go

speech

declanisms

really, keeping a list of action-based conversation starters to meet your goals that all sound like something a caricature of a high-level business executive would say... honey

memorizing clever turns of phrase and the cadence of storytelling

and refusing to ever use this love of language in public lest it make him vulnerable or ruin anything he’s built

having practiced regulating his vocal tone and inflection to make them both as normal and as free of personality as possible

being unable to modulate his vocal tone and inflection when he’s Not actively concentrating on regulating them - speaking impulsively from a place of upset, getting excited about things, etc

physicality

having also practiced his physicality to appear as unthreatening and unobtrusive as possible

mirroring strangers, casual acquaintances, criminal associates

actively schooling himself not to talk with his hands; natural storytelling comes with gesturing and physical involvement

having pleasant conversations and being pleasant to exist around while managing to have absolutely no friends

anxious stomachaches

nervous tics

refusing to allow himself comfortable clothing or a comfortable living space despite seeming to want these things

deciding he can have nice shoes, as a treat (doesn’t have anything to do with neurodivergence i just think it’s cute)

internal emotions

Everything Is Horrible, All The Time, But That’s Fine Because That’s Just How Life Is For Me And I’ve Accepted It

deeply unhappy, deeply bored, deeply exhausted, deeply terrified

given up on dreams and ambitions because they will never be accessible to someone like him (one of those things that in-narrative isn’t autism-related, but sure can be a hashtag relatable feel)

happiness, excitement, joy, any positive emotions are all “dangerous” because they represent a loss of control

zero to one hundred IMMEDIATELY in terms of anger, manic excitement, terror, misery, self-flagellation

constantly self-regulating, compartmentalizing, putting aside, and refusing to act on emotions despite feeling Incredibly Deeply

anxiety

obsessing, catastrophizing, making contingency plans, exploring bad outcomes, regretting past actions literally every single second of every day

aforementioned physical anxiety manifestations

resigned to ronan and matthew’s eventual deaths even when things are Mostly Okay

convinced that if and when something happens to ronan or matthew, it will be his fault

none of these things are autism-related specifically, there’s just something in his repetitive thoughts / methods of self-soothing / ways of internalizing trauma that's..... a feeling

child development

one of those kids who would have been called “precocious”

had developed a system for watching/protecting ronan and trying to convince ronan not to dream things by age five

specific interests in things deemed uninteresting or unimportant

didn’t engage in the same play behavior most kids his age would

got overwhelmed and cried over liking a gift too much

consciously aware of niall’s disdain for him, aurora’s ephemeral nature, and ronan’s dangerousness to himself at age five

some of these things are definitely exacerbated or fully caused by a childhood of emotional neglect and endangerment; autism reading integrates with this rather than replacing it.  i strongly feel declan would still have been a “precocious” child with a healthy happy parental upbringing as well

sense of responsibility

extremely stressed by any situation he can’t control

will attempt to control situations beyond his jurisdiction to minimize this

studies so many parenting books after technically becoming ronan and matthew’s caretaker because he has no frame of reference for parenting and does not trust his instincts

“if you want something done right, do it yourself” a life motto by declan lynch

“everything is my fault, all the time” a life motto by declan lynch

“except when it’s dad’s or ronan’s fault” a pretty fair addendum by declan lynch

mental stimulation

so unbelievably bored with his life situation

THRILLED any time he gets to play games or engage in clever conversation - seen a little in his “crime makes me feel alive” vibes, his back-and-forth banter with jordan

won’t let himself get engaged in things because passion feels unsafe

enjoys himself for about one hour of one single night and then immediately starts cracking to pieces about how living in a constant state of mental dissatisfaction is killing him slowly

somehow manages to be surprised by this turn of events

interests

he hides art he loves in a murder attic like a feral cat who refuses to eat in front of people. i don’t even need to get into this

absolutely immediately enchanted to the point of self-labeled stupidity by watching jordan paint

infodumping about art history

trading art interests with jordan bc he’s legitimately interested and excited by what she knows and feels passionate about

this entire post should just be the murder attic. declan oh my fucking god

aforementioned collecting of language he likes

the whole tyrian purple thing.  again.  declan oh my fucking god

emotional intimacy

craves emotional intimacy but is TERRIFIED of being known and/or being rejected

is convinced he can never and will never have emotional intimacy in his life

has all the stamina of a wet tissue in terms of keeping his emotional secrets when jordan cottons onto them

gets annoyed by relationships with people who want emotional connection but continues playacting through the motions of said relationships in the hopes of being less lonely

comforting people / expressing genuine care

declan attempted to dispense comfort.  “everybody dies, matthew”

i have to put attempted to dispense comfort on the list again.  oh my god.  to declan’s brain, emotional comfort is a vending machine that’s eaten ten dollars in a row and is now falling on him after he made the mistake of shaking it

declan regretted saying anything.  [immediately says the worst thing possible]

write your routine, ronan. now. now. write it. write it down. (because i’m worried you’re going to kill yourself but have no idea how to say that so i have to focus on concrete action.)

every time he’s tried to say “i’m worried about you” and instead gone “why are you inconveniencing me this way.” king

having no sense of how to communicate feelings or solve emotional conflicts through talking despite attempting to do these things frequently, AFTER STUDYING OUT OF BOOKS, to his detriment

preferring to take care of people silently and subtly through protecting them and making things easier for them, extremely similarly to how ronan does

irritability

constantly in a low level fugue state of annoyance

runs on caffeine and fumes

very thin patience for anyone else’s inability to stick to plans, manage time, regulate emotion, do their jobs, follow through on commitments, etc

the unceasing “i’m not unhappy. i’m not unhappy. i’m not unhappy” while at work screams of “i am in sensory/emotional hell all the time and checking slightly out of this plane to deal”

loses control all at once, when he does lose control

drains energy like a broken cellphone battery from the effort of combating misery, anxiety, mental overload, boredom, masking all thoughts and feelings

bonus content: parents

the actual in-universe reasons for these things aren’t related to neurodivergence as far as we know, but

growing up as the unfavored child whose interests are constantly ignored or shut down 

seeing your siblings get preferential treatment for no reason

being silenced or punished every time you express dissatisfaction or unhappiness or anger

being considered disposable

internalizing the idea that you’re a burden unless you’re worth something to others

that’s a real common lived realty for autistic ppl

bonus content: brothers

i read all three lynch brothers as being on the spectrum and all having different experiences with it

i read matthew as having had the inverse experience of declan, in which he flaps and stims and chews loudly and talks a mile a minute and expresses himself with excitement and passion and bouncing

& he has Not been punished for it or made to feel like it should be hidden

declan’s ferocious protectiveness of matthew is in many ways bc he wants to keep matthew from suffering the same way he has

differing autism spectrum experiences fit neatly into that

ronan and declan’s experiences are in some ways wildly different

in other ways, though

going zero to one hundred on the emotional spectrum, defaulting to anger to avoid fully feeling internal chaos, being unable to understand the other’s feelings or thought processes / making wildly incorrect conclusions about them, preferring to show feelings through action rather than words, struggling to translate genuine emotion into expression without coming across as a dick

they are Very Similar

declan and ronan do a lot of “dog growls at its own reflection” about this because neither of them is more furious than when they see their own perceived shortcomings in the other

i’m positive i’ve forgotten some things and also positive i have not communicated all of these thoughts as effectively as i would like but i have been typing this post for a thousand years.  here you go

[perfectlittlesatellites]

October 3, 2018

I’ve had a really long day of running around. Grading during free periods, ending my day with 3 classes in a row and office hours, driving down to the hospital for a staff meeting and then back to school for the Freshman Parent Guidance Meeting, which I was asked to attended and have been hounded about for a month and have always received grief for not attending the evening session, only for Mark to ask me when I arrived, “What are you doing here?” because I was the only advisor to show up. The rage-filled live-texting  I did was an excellent sample of the pettiness of school idiocy and politics, (and the violence of my creative streak).

I get home and S looks very grave and says he has to tell me something, and he didn’t want to tell me earlier because he knew the type of day I was having. He starts talking about my grandmother, who beat breast cancer-but we found out a year or so ago (when she fell and broke her hip) that her numbers were up, and it turned out the cancer was back and had metastasized in her bones. It’s terminal. We know that. She has been slowly but steadily declining in the two years since she broke her hip, but she’s also 86. She recently began experiencing difficulties urinating, got catheterized 2 weeks ago, and her urologist told my mom and my grandparents earlier this week at their appointment that the bladder itself is fine, but the issue could be tumors in her spine compressing her bladder, so they now have another appointment scheduled with her oncologist to get a prognosis. 

All of which I knew-except, obviously, that last part, about spinal tumors and worse cancer news. Because despite telling me she’d keep me posted, when we talked this week my mother said everything’s “fine, nothing new.”

That information slipped out to S in a conversation with my brother yesterday morning, when when S let him know that our mom had specifically not mentioned that news, G turned white, looked sheepish, indicating to my husband that there was a reason I hadn’t been told, and that he had fucked up by sharing that information.

Needless to say, I’m fucking furious. 

This has been my relationship with my parents and G more and more since moving out, reaching a really noticeable point about 4 years ago. My mom had called my at work one night and told me the cancer was back and that it getting into her bones was terminal. My voice shook a little when I asked about prognosis and next steps, and my mom said to me, “There’s no use crying about it. She’s in her 80′s. She’s had a good run. However long we have her, we have her.”

Like she’s a horse we’re sending out to pasture or something, and like I was unstable to react otherwise. This is where the alienation began to shift, and slowly turned into secret-keeping.

Like the dozen or so times over the last 2 years that my parents and G would have dinner out with my grandparents (and sometimes my aunt, if she was down from MA) and were eating 10 minutes away from our house and never thought to ask if S and I would like to be included, only to talk casually about it the next time we talked. Or my cousin’s autism diagnosis, which I had called 2 years beforehand anyway as a possible explanation for his over-stimulation and social lag. Or my older cousin’s anxiety diagnosis that eventually came out of all the GI tests he had done. At their anniversary dinner 2 weeks ago, my mom super conspicuously ducked out to our living room to take a phone call. After a few minutes I got a sinking feeling it was about my grandmother, since they had cancelled with us last minute because of her ER visit, and she looked like she got caught in a drug deal when I entered the room, only to tell me that she was getting an update from her cousin on my great aunt, who had been in the hospital and was being discharged to a rehab. And even then, that day it had taken all sorts of awkwardness and borderline aggression to get the information about my grandmother. My grandfather left me a message simply stating he was canceling and wouldn’t answer the phone when I called back to communicate my regret about it. So I called home and no one answered. When I texted G and asked what was going on, he hemmed and hawed and pretended not to know anything (because he was buying time to text/call my mom), who then called me from the beach and still resisted telling me what was happening until I pushed. So this whole keeping me out of the loop about family business has been building and building, and now it’s got me pissed off. Because it’s like since I don’t live under the same roof anymore, that dynamic I had always pushed back against-like my mom, dad, and G are family and I’m not-has just escalated, and now I’m not privy to any information whatsoever.

It’s like I’m no longer family-or at least truly family-because I was married and out of the house by 26, and did what I was supposed to by leaving the nest. And while before when we were kids G woudn’t stick up for me, but cling nervously to his position as the favorite, he is willingly watching me be cut out of this family-like, surgically, participating in the secrecy towards me and not really questioning it more than a superficial shrug.

So my dad bullies me with or without an audience, my mom and brother allow it, and my mom and brother block me from knowing what’s going on in the family, like I don’t have a right to be a part of it.

What. The. Fuck.

All because I got a little choked up when my mom dropped the bomb on me at work that my grandmother’s cancer was back when she had been cancer-free for so long?

Or is it because I cry at all?

Because here’s the thing: I know my grandma will likely not be with us much longer, especially if this tumor hypothesis ends up being true. If she has to be permanently catheterized, she will become demoralized, depressed, and give up, and she will deteriorate even faster. I know her well enough to know that. I don’t need a medical degree to get that.

And when she eventually passes away, I will cry. I will mourn the loss of my only grandmother that I really knew. I will miss her. I will grieve the impossibility of her getting to meet the next Eileen, her great granddaughter, and it will suck that she, my mom, my baby and I will not ever get to all be together. That sucks. I will shed a tear for the fact that when she and Grandpa went to Florida, and when mom and dad made up their minds about me, this altered the course of my relationship with her for a long time, and what it could have been, which I’ve only recently been able to enjoy. That we weren’t closer, especially as I became a woman and an adult. Sure I will.

Because I’m a fucking human being.

But I’m not going to lose my shit. I won’t be fucked up about it. Because I realized a while back that my parents had their own version of me that they presented to other adults in my life. And that while my grandma sipped the Kool-Aid for a little bit, and has spent most of the last decade living a mile or two away from my parents and G, she has been at times vocal about her preference for G-not directly, mind, but the message was there. But she also never did it at my expense. She clearly preferred him because he was the one my parents deployed to help them with tech in their house, and he was the one at all those dinners my mom was telling them I was busy for but I was actually ignorant of, and all offers I made to chip in were brushed off by my mom. But when she and I were alone, when we had our time together, she let me know what’s what.

I remember back in 2009 she was the one who requested my mom invite me to join her Mother’s Day trip to New York for an evening dinner and show since I lived there. She insisted on coming to see my apartment-she beamed at how, “metropolitan” I was, and as she was getting ready to get in the cab at the end of the night, she hugged me tight, and she kissed her bold red lipstick all over my face, and she told me,

“I am so proud of the brave woman you are. Keep going. I want you to stay here and see this through as far as you can take it. Don’t let anyone tell you you’re not smart or you can’t do it, because you are! I love you for it, so much, my girlfriend.”

I obviously minimized and self-deprecated, just like I’ve always been taught. She whacked me in the leg with her cane and said, “Stop it. I love you, girlfriend. You keep all of this up-don’t you disappoint me by stopping too soon. I love you too much for you to ever settle. You got this.”

“I love you, too.”

“I know you do. You show me all the time by how proud you make me, every day.”

I cried so hard after that cab pulled away because that was the first time in at least a decade that anyone in my family had told me they were proud of me, especially without a qualifier (especially one that involved G), and it was the first time an adult in my family had said, “I love you,” in almost as long.

Since then she has often reminded S to, “worship” me because I am a catch, because I am her girl.

She gushed throughout the entire wedding process.

Every time I see her, she is happy to see me and she tells me how glad she is I continue to invite her for holidays (as if I wouldn’t?) and I get her her favorite snacks, and get her, “cool” gifts that help her feel hip and chic.

We had a long conversation when I saw her the 2nd or 3rd time after she fell, when she was in my mom’s nursing home for rehab. She was depressed and self-pitying and angry with mom for making her go to PT. I talked to her about the validity of her feelings and fears, but encouraged her to start the antidepressants that were being recommended by the staff psychiatrist-that there’s no shame in needing a little help-that her body and mind are connected, and it’s not as simply as willing the pain away. I encouraged her to talk to the social worker, to have someone on her side whose only agenda was to provide her with safety and validation and encouragement. And if she wouldn’t, to call me and yell and wail and bitch and that I could hold that for her. She got tearful and asked, “When did you become so smart, and so wise?”

I told her simply that it had been a while, but that mom and dad didn’t quite see it that way, and that it could stay our secret. And she took me up on it a few times, and she was always grateful for the ear.

So maybe she only sipped that Kool-Aid, and as much as she sings G’s praises and S’s in front of others, it will only ever earn an eye roll from me. 

I won’t have unfinished business with her when she passes, whenever that is. Will I wish she had been more public in her acknowledgement of me? Sure. But that’s about me, not about her. She is a black and white thinking, and can only have one favorite. It doesn’t mean she devalues me. I will wish we were closer. But she knows I love her. She loves me the way she knows how: by outwardly favoring the boy, and sharing her quiet, more vulnerable moments with me.

I will not have any regrets. Because she saw me, and I let go of the need for her proclaimed approval once I knew it existed at all.

You know who will be really fucked up?

G, when he loses his most vocal source of praise and one of the few people who, “needs” him.

My uncle, the favorite child who has been largely uninvolved with her care despite being 15 minutes away, and missing many opportunities for time with her.

My aunt, who is depressive and perfectionistic, and who will struggle with guilt and anger towards her husband for uprooting her and the kids to MA, and couldn’t be more involved despite desperately wanting to be.

The most fucked up of all will be my mom. The oldest child who was never the outward source of pride, who broke her own heart to get the approval she wanted and is bearing the brunt of her care now. Who rarely gets a thank you but gets bitched at simply because she’s there, because she’s safe and reliable to receive her anger. I know she’s internalizing this. She is already batshit crazy about all of the praise she’s not getting, the reciprocity that’s not obtainable so long as my grandma is as bitter and angry and lost as she is right now.

The woman scolding me for having a human reaction to a cancer relapse is going to need the most whenever Grandma’s time comes. She is going to be bereft and lost. 

And who does she think is going to provide her emotional support and hear all of this? 

My, “feminine logic,” emotionally retarded bully of a father?

My emotionally stunted, overgrown adolescent brother who still sleeps in the same twin bed and lets his dad make his bagged lunch?

Or her daughter, who can speak about and hold emotions and provide empathy and gentleness, not just because she’s a compassionate person, but because she’s a trained fucking counselor, and not a cyborg?

THIS. THIS is what makes me so insane about all of this shit with my family.

I’m never smart enough until there’s a question G can’t answer because it’s my area of expertise. I’m never wanted around until I heed that response and back away. No gift good enough. What have you.

And I’m unstable and emotional when I communicate that they hurt me, and ask for what I need, or am overwhelmed or stressed about how my family treats me. It makes me angry and unworthy.

But when you need a free therapist? That’s when you want me to provide all of the things you denied me for all of these years, even as you’re still excluding me and hurting and keeping secrets from me?

When do I get to become a fully operational person to them?

Maybe I need to cut away from my family for a while. Or maybe altogether. 

I feel like they just make me so angry all the time, and I hate the person I am in those moments.

I feel like with all of this, I’m being poisoned. I hate it.