#and think i might be on the spectrum

[inkskinned]

crows use tools and like to slide down snowy hills. today we saw a goose with a hurt foot who was kept safe by his flock - before taking off, they waited for him to catch up. there are colors only butterflies see. reindeer are matriarchical. cows have best friends and 4 stomachs and like jazz music. i watched a video recently of an octopus making himself a door out of a coconut shell.

i am a little soft, okay. but sometimes i can't talk either. the world is like fractal light to me, and passes through my skin in tendrils. i feel certain small things like a catapult; i skirt around the big things and somehow arrive in crisis without ever realizing i'm in pain.

in 5th grade we read The Curious Incident of the Dog In The Night-time, which is about a young autistic boy. it is how they introduced us to empathy about neurotypes, which was well-timed: around 10 years old was when i started having my life fully ruined by symptoms. people started noticing.

i wonder if birds can tell if another bird is odd. like the phrase odd duck. i have to believe that all odd ducks are still very much loved by the other normal ducks. i have to believe that, or i will cry.

i remember my 5th grade teacher holding the curious incident up, dazzled by the language written by someone who is neurotypical. my teacher said: "sometimes i want to cut open their mind to know exactly how autistics are thinking. it's just so different! they must see the world so strangely!" later, at 22, in my education classes, we were taught to say a person with autism or a person on the spectrum or neurodivergent. i actually personally kind of like person-first language - it implies the other person is trying to protect me from myself. i know they had to teach themselves that pattern of speech, is all, and it shows they're at least trying. and i was a person first, even if i wasn't good at it.

plants learn information. they must encode data somehow, but where would they store it? when you cut open a sapling, you cannot find the how they think - if they "think" at all. they learn, but do not think. i want to paint that process - i think it would be mostly purple and blue.

the book was not about me, it was about a young boy. his life was patterned into a different set of categories. he did not cry about the tag on his shirt. i remember reading it and saying to myself: i am wrong, and broken, but it isn't in this way. something else is wrong with me instead. later, in that same person-first education class, my teacher would bring up the curious incident and mention that it is now widely panned as being inaccurate and stereotypical. she frowned and said we might not know how a person with autism thinks, but it is unlikely to be expressed in that way. this book was written with the best intentions by a special-ed teacher, but there's some debate as to if somebody who was on the spectrum would be even able to write something like this.

we might not understand it, but crows and ravens have developed their own language. this is also true of whales, dolphins, and many other species. i do not know how a crow thinks, but we do know they can problem solve. (is "thinking" equal to "problem solving"? or is "thinking" data processing? data management?) i do not know how my dog thinks, either, but we "talk" all the same - i know what he is asking for, even if he only asks once.

i am not a dolphin or reindeer or a dog in the nighttime, but i am an odd duck. in the ugly duckling, she grows up and comes home and is beautiful and finds her soulmate. all that ugliness she experienced lives in downy feathers inside of her, staining everything a muted grey. she is beautiful eventually, though, so she is loved. they do not want to cut her open to see how she thinks.

a while ago i got into an argument with a classmate about that weird sia music video about autism. my classmate said she thought it was good to raise awareness. i told her they should have just hired someone else to do it. she said it's not fair to an autistic person to expect them to be able to handle that kind of a thing.

today i saw a goose, and he was limping. i want to be loved like a flock loves a wounded creature: the phrase taken under a wing. which is to say i have always known i am not normal. desperate, mewling - i want to be loved beyond words.

loved beyond thinking.

[time-to-write-and-suffer]

Henry Cavill just doesn't look like anything. He's just a generic handsome man. There's no charisma, no flavor. He's a man on a romance novel cover. He's a disembodied hairy torso. He's AI generated.

[aspecpolls]

I'm actually confused about if it's normal that other aromantics or asexuals have other preferences

I'm sorry these are all I can put, there are too many sexualities to add them all.

Aromantic and bisexual

Aromantic and lesbian

Aromantic and gay

Aromantic and straight

Aromantic and another sexuality

Asexual and biromantic

Asexual and lesbian

Asexual and gay

Asexual and straight

Asexual and another sexuality

Aromantic asexual

[s1lly-gh02tz]

I wonder what my computer teacher thinks of me. We had to make introduction slides when class started and this is what one of my slides looked like

And now we have an assignment where we have to recreate movie/show scenes in Scratch and I’m doing the Invader Zim pilot

[roguelemon]

Aro spec Alastor getting told all his life the best thing about romance is the thrill and that he's missing out on the excitement.

Alastor - sitting across the room knowing damn well nothing could ever beat the thrill of murder.

[catkin-morgs-kookaburralover]

yall who got late diagnosed/adult diagnosed as autistic. howd you cope with the stress around the feedback session and howd it go like did you walk in and they said 'oh yeah you're autistic' alternatively if they denied you a diagnosis howd that go too

[quietwingsinthesky]

I feel like opinions of John Winchester are less about how well you can interpret the show and more about how many daddy issues you, personally, have.

[dribs-and-drabbles]

What is the thing from your past (behaviour, thought, etc), after having had your sexuality Oh moment, that you look back on and go 'oh yeah, I should have known' 🤦🏽‍♀️?

[apparentlyautisticandanxious]

When I first started thinking I might be autistic I would ask my friends and family what they thought. I always got some form of “but you don’t have a schedule” or “you don’t do routines”.

This morning I was getting ready for the day and declared that I wasn’t going to wash my hair because I didn’t want to deal with it. What was the first thing I did upon entering the shower? Get out my shampoo because that’s the way I start a shower. So I was caught standing in the shower with a fistful of shampoo trying to decide if I should waste the not-so-cheap shampoo or just cave and wash my hair.

Then I was getting dressed and I picked up my top. I was immediately repulsed by the idea of putting it on before my jeans and threw it on my bed. Why? Because pants go first.

[rawliverandgoronspice]

oh nooooo not me forgetting to not go on zelda youtube and being forced to reckon with the sheer magnitude of its fanbase's unchecked racism

[fearandhatred]

okay i've had this theory stuck in my head for the past few days and i don't even think it's true but it would not leave my mind so i made it. here it is. does it make even the slightest bit of sense

if anyone knows how to ID this..... help

[queen0fm0nsterz]

just noticed almost all the "ships" I like are actually just queerplatonic relationships in a trench coat

[dollsome-does-tumblr]

the roy siblings + (mostly not) accepting care from their significant others in 4.07

[kasumingo]

So tired of mfs going "everyone wants to be lgbt/neurodivergent now!! stop using our language!!"

it's as if the internet gave people ability to explore themselves and realize there is something going on, especially when they congregate together in groups that share those traits

It’s as if these words describe their experience and helps them in one way or another

[the-meme-monarch]

swomp and jackie are aro. to me

[moe-broey]

Felt a deep need to forcemasc Moe (it/its, but it gets a little extra gender. As a treat) and. The doodle dump got a little out of hand 😅

Plus the textpost inspo!