#autism

[headspace-hotel]

scrolling past all the posts that are like "life gets better when you learn to get outside your comfort zone!" reassuring myself that it's okay that my life is progressing in an apparently opposite direction to everyone else

[autism-adhd-information-blog]

Autistic Traits

Link

[jellyfihs]

craig tucker Autism beam go

[hell0mega]

a lot of people reblogged that spoons poll from me with tags along the lines of "i have adhd but I'm not disabled" and i want everyone to know that adhd is in fact legally recognized as a disability in the usa. you have a disability/are disabled if you have adhd. or autism. or ocd. or depression. or anxiety. etc

these are all disorders. they disrupt our lives and make it harder to navigate the neurotypically-built society we live in just like physically disabled people existing in our able bodied-built society. they are disabling to your every day life and therefore are disabilities.

i say this because disability activism is for all disabilities no matter how invisible or "easily dealt with" because it's not a contest to see how disabled one can be. you're not disbarred from calling yourself disabled because "it could be worse" or "i deal with it well enough" or are "low needs" that doesnt make you NOT disabled!!!

don't sell yourself short and think your disability isnt "bad enough" to call it what it is. you deserve the help, recognition, and protection just like anyone else!

[wizardpotions]

i think its wild that autism is categorised as having restricted interests when i dont think ive ever met a neurotypical person who had anything more than vague positive feelings towards anything ever, or knew anything.

[beautyinthediss0nance]

[explodingstarlight]

clocking Donnie as one of those little kids who look vaguely concerned by everything. like he could be doing the most chill activity ever but he still looks kinda worried

[dreamdropsystem]

loud hands are happy hands

[irltwigoo]

Hello neighbors|| Wally darling is here<3

[autismswagsummit]

April 15, 2023

[awetistic-things]

HAPPY AUTISM ACCEPTANCE WEEK !!!

[headspace-hotel]

facts about The Fear, after 20 years of life with her

The Fear is NOT:

an intruder, invader, or some other entity from "outside" You

inappropriate, wrong, or incorrect

a responsibility

a punishment

"irrational" or otherwise able to be understood through a relationship to "rationality"

an "inaccurate" representation of reality

The Fear IS:

an innate part of you

extra-rational—she exists outside and completely independent from "rationality" and does not respond to being judged according to that lens

self-love—her purpose is to protect you and keep you safe

self-sufficient—fear is a 100% whole, complete entity that doesn't "represent" or "reflect" something else

earnest—fear is always a 100% real experience that is exactly as it is felt, and, needing no comparison or reference to any external reality, it is not "dishonest" or "inaccurate"— it asserts a claim about only itself

subversive [not quite the word I am looking for but it will have to do]— is not necessarily beholden to social and cultural norms of what should be feared, how much, and how you should respond. She does not stop existing in the absence or suppression of vocabulary to describe her.

a demand for care— she does not just communicate to you but to the community you are part of; she calls attention to an obligation that this community has toward you, to make sure that you are safe within it and that your experiences are heard and understood.

yeah, so, i've had severe anxiety for my whole life and the way it's been treated and dealt with, and the way I've been taught to understand it, has really fucked me up so I am trying to lay the groundwork for understanding it differently

I think it's pretty fucked up that we're taught to see anxiety as deceptive or inaccurate. Now, obviously the images or projections in my fearful thoughts do not usually "reflect reality," but I have come to see this as...not particularly important?

Teaching an anxiety sufferer to restructure their thoughts to dismiss and contradict "irrational" fear is, in my opinion, the same as teaching a chronic pain sufferer to restructure their thoughts to dismiss and contradict pain with no clear physical source. You might as well speak of "irrational" pain, and pain has the same relationship to rationality that fear has.

"Irrationality" is a quality assigned to fear that is judged by an outside observer, or by the collective cultural biases and hang-ups of a society, as not appropriate to a given situation. This is total fucking nonsense and we should be talking about that, because...well, the first reason is that it implies some kind of fixed standard for what fear ultimately is and isn't for. i like to tell people to watch one of those Coyote Peterson videos where he's going to get a tarantula hawk wasp to sting him, because he's obviously having a strong physical fear response, even though he knows it won't kill him. Is it "rational" to fear suffering and not just death? How much suffering? Sit with that one a little while.

The second reason, which is even more convincing, is that the "rational" brain is not consulted at any point, ever, when a person feels afraid. It's just a response. The fear response is not routed through the conscious, sapient, reasoning brain. And thank God, because if we needed to hear back from an upstairs executive before we could decide whether to run from a lion, our species would be extinct.

Techniques like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy were absolute fucking shit at making my life any better, but fantastic at wrecking my ability to identify my own emotions, because Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for anxiety basically amounts to trying to brainwash yourself into thinking you don't feel the emotions that you do. It's a really neat way to develop bizarre psychosomatic symptoms and start experiencing anxiety through constant body pain, swollen lymph nodes, and digestive issues.

For an institution that pathologizes having "alters," psychiatry sure loves to encourage a suffering person to view normal and ultimately good parts of themselves as distinct, intruding entities to be shoved in a closet somewhere.

And yes. Fear is ultimately a good part of you, a part of you that loves you.

What began to set me free was feeling that acid terror and sickness and rage course through my body and realizing—really realizing—that I was being illuminated with this ancient, powerful force driving me to LIVE.

I want us to make it. I want you to live.

And you know what, I want me to live too.

I abandoned the doctrine of calming down—Lord knows it had never worked anyway—and started really just exploring and existing in the Fear.

How did that feel? Bad. Very very very very very bad and really not productive or helpful at all initially. Which was unavoidable. Necessary. She had been frantically clawing to communicate with me for so long, and I had been shutting her away, silencing her, resenting her presence in my psyche. I started trying to show gratitude toward the signals my body gave me. I started trying to show gratitude toward her—and i guess the Fear was a Her now, this just seemed more respectful.

And it seemed like nothing happened, but several things happened.

I stopped searching for validation. That was a big one. At some point I just...stopped needing a "reason" or justification for the fear I felt (trauma???? neurodivergence???? neurodivergence trauma????) and the fact that I experienced it became completely sufficient and satisfying to me. So much guilt and confusion disappeared.

I also became steadily more confident about my own boundaries, particularly in regards to recovery.

It's awful now that I think about it, but I think I felt this sense of almost moral obligation towards "recovery," as if I needed to "overcome fear" to be Courageous and Virtuous. It made me feel crushing guilt to feel any hesitation about this.

But then this started to change. It became more real to me that was the only person affected by the steps I did or didn't take toward recovery, and there was no moral dimension to it. A therapist couldn't put me in a box I wouldn't willingly go into.

Freedom from these judgmental frameworks is really important to me. I think that I always hated the idea of getting "better" because it seemed like "better" would mean just getting better at submitting to things I was afraid of while everything felt just as bad as it always did on the inside.

And on some level—even though I could never put it into words at the time—I violently hated the idea of "recovery" from some of my fears because it seemed like the ultimate denial of agency. I didn't want to "become okay with it"—the possibility felt dehumanizing. It felt awful.

And I realize now that this is because The Fear represented something I needed to have a right to. Many of my most life-destroying fears centered around things being done to my body, and if I could have pressed a button and been no longer afraid, I wouldn't have, even though it would have spared me so much suffering, because...I needed it to be okay to want agency over my body. I needed it to be right. The Fear, in this case, was a demand that my body be treated as sacred.

I realized that there were many cases where The Fear was a territorial claim of sorts, a demand that certain needs be honored and met—She needs this. This is FUCKING non-negotiable.

And it really...prompted me to look backward on my life and see The Fear differently: not as a responsibility I had failed to shoulder (me?? a little child??? responsible?? Responsible for being brave, when every day felt like facing a firing squad?????) but as a collective responsibility

Because I was not alone in those memories—I was surrounded by adults that saw me suffering, and often dismissed, ignored or ridiculed it. The Fear grew larger and larger; why?—to protect me. Because teachers, nurses, doctors, and camp counselors did not do any of the thousand thousand things they could have done to make that little girl feel safe. Because my well-meaning parents praised me when I was "brave" but I, a little kid, literally couldn't communicate how awful it always felt.

The Fear was not there to torture me. The Fear was and is doing her best to keep me safe. It's not wrong, there's no need for guilt. It just is.

It doesn't feel good. But maybe one day it will feel better.

[azuremist]

Let’s clear some things up!

This is the rainbow infinity symbol. It’s the symbol for autism, and autism alone, as it was created for AUTISTIC Pride Day!

This is the rainbow butterfly! It’s intended to be an ADHD symbol. It was made by an allistic ADHDer, purely out of spite for autistic people who stated the rainbow infinity symbol was theirs. It’s not just that the creator is anti-autistic; it’s that the design was purposefully created to be similar to the rainbow infinity symbol, making it so that the anti-autistic bias is a key part of its design.

This is the black butterfly! It is also an ADHD symbol. Except this one wasn’t designed to spite autistic people.

The black butterfly is still somewhat similar to the autistic symbol, but that’s a-okay! ADHD and autism are similar! It makes sense that the symbols would be similar, within reason. The difference lies in if it was made similar from a place of negativity, or a place of desired solidarity. And the black butterfly is free from any negative intentions towards autistic people and their symbols.

Please take this information into consideration while using these symbols!

— an autistic ADHDer 🩷

[artofthetism]

non verbal autistic people are just as valid as fully verbal autistic people.

level 2 and level 3 support needs autistic people are just as valid as level 1 support needs autistic people.

early diagnosed autistic people are just as valid as late diagnosed autistic people.

low masking autistic people are just as valid as high masking autistic people.

autistic people who exhibit "stereotypical" autistic traits are just as valid as autistic people who do not.

autistic people who like "childish" or "childlike" are just as valid as autistic people who do not.

self-diagnosed autistic people are just as valid as autistic people who are professionally diagnosed.

poc autists are just as valid as white autists.

afab autists are just as valid as amab autists.

physically disabled autistic people are just as valid as abled bodied autistic people.

[autism-adhd-information-blog]

Hi everyone,

A few days ago, I posted about Autistic burnout. And a lot of you related to it. I wanted to share with you some ways to recover from burnout. These infograps explain:

These first two are about the cause of burnout along with ways on how to recover from it.

These next two are a “plan” you can make that can help you with recovery. The article will be linked below and goes into more detail. I hope many of you find this helpful.

Burnout Recovery

[thatadhdmood]

Working with Autism PDA (pathologic demand avoidance) by "strewing" (setting up an activity that u want to do for your later self even thought PDA wont do it right now)

Doing this removes barriers from doing the activity for later when the stress and pressure to do it has released without executive dysfunction of setting up the activity