#because my autistic ass is too gullible

[luciusspriggss]

i am a romantic at heart, i love love in all its forms

and i am trying really hard to focus on myself and not let romance cloud my mind

but that is very hard when you get a tattoo at a studio you have never been to with an artist you have never met

who turns out to be one of the most gentle, tender, earnest person you have seen in a long time

and he likes to hike, but prefers to take it slow so he can admire the flowers and geology

he likes to consume media the same way you do and is also cursed with having nobody want to watch with you

has the same morals and is a good listener and truly has beautiful outlooks of life that he has discovered because of the horrors experienced and witnessed

has made it so he looks for any potential partner to be in therapy and actively working on themself.

admits his own faults

and is one of the cutest fucking people you have ever seen. he was so proud of the bee he tattooed on me and how cute it looked.

he was happy that i wanted an orchid done and that i knew about common means of orchid pollination and we shared our knowledge for the different orchid's we are fans of and their respective evolved growth patterns and specific pollinators

he is an anxious guy who is scared if his clients don't talk to him he thinks they don't like him

like the universe is really throwing me a curve ball here

i want to get to know him more, but it is inappropriate to ask your tattoo artist out for a walk in the community forest

i don't even know what his whole face looks like, because we were both wearing masks

i chalked up the experience as a lovely moment between two souls who understood one another and left it at that

i dont want to enter a relationship, i dont want to date, but in another lifetime, had we met elsewhere, i would have been enamored.

and it makes me kind of sad

ive been having a lot of moments with strangers as i have been going out into the world

but none have stuck like he has :/

[creacherkeeper]

Welcome to the tOH fandom!! What do you think of ADHD! Luz (and maybe Eda too!) and autistic!Amity (and maybe Lilith as well)?

thank you!! okay listen this show is so so good for ND headcanons WEIRDOS GOTTA STICK TOGETHER and im like *cries* yea 

adhd luz is great. i love it. she’s eager and never runs out of energy, strong emotions & very expressive, can definitely act immature for her age (i saw something saying she’s 14 but idk if thats canon?), has a hyperfixation on learning magic & her azura books. her inability to choose a magic track i would argue could be read as indecisiveness or decision paralysis. and sometimes her own feelings cause her to miss cues from others (like with eda, amity, & king at the carnival). even the way she has to learn magic works as a metaphor - the way other people learn doesnt work for her so she has to adapt and have accommodations (something to draw on). we also see a few instances that suggest she’s not good at reading how trustworthy people are 

im totally down for adhd eda but i think i like autistic eda better. she has unusual style (the ripped dress, big earrings, gold tooth - not to mention the times she puts on ‘human fashion’). her speaking voice is unusual too, but is often at a flat effect (absolutely not a dig at the actress i’ve had a crush on her since i was like 9). special interest in owls & weird human objects. learns differently & thinks outside the box, but is still extremely gifted as a witch, she just has to do things her own way. uneven motor skills - very powerful witch & good at sports but also like, just fumbles her staff all the time. seems to get along better with demons (king, hooty, and i’ll count owlbert here too) over other humanoids. did NOT fit in at school. has trouble connecting to and empathizing with people, often says rude things whether she means to or not. tends to show affection through gestures (training, making the cloak) over words or physical affection. does NOT understand why she should have to follow the rules (school, witchcraft, society at large) because they seem arbitrary to her 

also - not an nd headcanon and FAR from a perfect metaphor - but my chronically ill ass was just sitting there like 8O SHE HAS TO TAKE HER MEDS OR SHE’LL GO INTO A FLARE and i was just pretty excited about that 

jury is still out on lilith for me. i can see autistic lilith though. she’s got flat effect, dulled emotional expression, gifted in her craft, trouble seeing eda’s pov, seems to be low empathy, and from what we see may be fairly gullible. i need to see more screen time from her before i make it an Official Headcanon though. 100% up to hearing other peoples arguments about this 

amity is a little harder for me but here’s my headcanon (cw child abuse) 

she very well could be autistic. i didnt get a strong Vibe from her one way or the other. but her behavior, to me at least, seems to line up a lot more strongly with childhood trauma. specifically parental abuse. granted we haven’t seen much of her parents yet, but that’s the vibe i got and i’ll explain why 

amity is extremely driven and perfectionistic, but it does not seem like she’s self-motivated. it seems like she’s trying to live up to her parents high and strict expectations of her. she wants to be friends with willow, and then later luz, but she can only keep the friends her parents deem are worthy - theyre controlling of her social interactions far more than is normal. she has very low tolerance for her own mistakes, and gets extremely upset when she’s embarrassed or gets into trouble. to me that’s a thing a kid learns at home - mistakes are a big deal (and could be punished in some manner). she’s very awkward at trying to make real friends, which makes me think she doesnt have good role models & her emotional development was not prioritized. in the beginning we see her bully people and gee wonder where she learned that. when she’s training, it’s not her parents or even lilith who are training her - its her older siblings who she doesnt get along with and dont even seem to be on the same track as her? so even though expectations for her as a witch are extremely high, the actual adults are neglecting to help her 

when both lilith and eda cheat at the covention duel - amity doesn’t get upset at lilith. she gets upset at luz who is not an adult and is an easy target. lilith and eda are really the ones that embarrassed her, but she doesn’t feel she can get angry at either of them and takes out her emotions lower in the pecking order. we also see that she quit grudgby forever because she accidentally hurt her teammates - which makes me think her anxiety & guilt in general is pretty high. when she does decide luz is cool, she gets Very Attached Very Fast which can definitely be a trauma thing - here is a Safe Person i am now incredibly invested in. when they go into willow’s memories, she’ll do anything to keep luz from seeing how she hurt willow, probably because she’s afraid luz will be disappointed in her (and what? abandon her for not being perfect?) and even her parents in the memory are just shadowy figures and not real people. her biggest fear (which, yes cute gay stuff was happening) is being rejected, which makes me think besides the grom there is an actual threat of that in her life

so ALL IN ALL yes some of these things overlap with autism & i definitely wouldnt argue against an autism headcanon, but to me this just is so strongly childhood trauma stuff that i personally wouldnt hc autism until i know more 

also LITERALLY ALL THE CHARACTERS ARE ND thank you for coming to my ted talk good day 

[kharmii]

Fresh Ideas On My Own

Was thinking of that bullying doctor gallade comic, how I said a 4chan autist claimed that RNs were like sheep and had contempt for them. Those same mentalities would also have contempt for an RN who actually stood up to a doctor. Suddenly, it would be like, “Oh, so you think you’re a doctor now, don’t you Karen? Who are you to question his judgement?” -Nevermind that RNs are often around patients 24/7, whereas the doctor might step in for five minutes and briefly look at a chart, possibly not even knowing who the hell...

Side note: I get the Karen meme because I deal with a loathsome Karen type at work. She’s an old 40-something party girl with a wedge-shaped haircut and hobbity body. Even though she isn’t even that attractive, the party guys will put up with endless amounts of crap from her and listen to her nasally voice complaining about minutia for days, just because she’s a sure thing. Decent women are invisible to them and considered ‘boring’ because they don’t put out. Some dead-beat ass loser on the forum I quit was like, *bong gurgle* “I COULD HAVE HAD ANY WOMAN I WANTED, BUT THEY’RE TOO DIFFICULT TO DEAL WITH!! FAPPING TO UNDERAGED LOLI CARTOONS IS CHEAPER!!1!1″ I’d bet a paycheck that guy is so shallow and stupid that he’s only approached Karen types who put out on the first date. Anyway....

Basically I dealt with a bunch of dudes who were sexually attracted to submissive women, but at the same time, they felt contempt for them. I constantly heard garbage like, “Women care too much about what people think of them” (most people of either gender do) -or- “Women are stupid and gullible!” (Coming from a clique of guys who believe every hair-brained conspiracy theory and will hysterically exaggerate a partial truth into the realm of fantasy). Then they also constantly badmouthed assertive women, calling them brainwashed harpy sjws. I had to tell them a few times that just because they had an instinct to be sexually dominant, it didn’t mean they were superior overall, and that an aggressive woman should not be seen as unnatural and a threat to their power. When I started questioning them, I was accused of being brainwashed by feminism by several dudes and one groupie thot who thought she was cool for being ‘anti feminist’. I was like, “No, actually, I’m coming up with ideas on my own based on what I observe around me. I don’t need to be patronized and ‘told’ the truth.”

They all sit around and complain about how the top 1% of alpha chad dudes bang 99% of the women, but really it’s the other way around. They’re basing this observation on gram ho and cam thot culture where loser guys sit around and watch a hot girl who looks like a model do dumb shit online, and that’s somehow interesting because she’s a 9 or a 10 in looks. -So really, incel culture is 99% of dudes thinking they deserve the top 1% of women, and they sit around idolizing pick up artists like Heartiste or Roosh who believe that women should be humped and dumped, until that perfect 10 comes around. That one would be a keeper and should be trained like a puppy through amygdala hijacks to be that ‘perfect wife material every man deserves’ (I’m not even joking. I’ve seen this discussed with my own eyes). I was like, “If only I could give a few of you assholes an amygdala hijack you’d understand very well.”

Fun story: I was on my way to do a bit of grocery shopping this morning and had the radio on Q101. The dj talked about how some woman who used to be a podiatrist quit her job because of Covid-19 quarantines and went on to make 100K a month doing what? The listeners were supposed to call in and guess, based on hearing some puppy whimpering. Finally, they told us the answer. She had become a cam ho who got men to pay her $20 per month subscription fee to watch her pretend to be a puppy online. She barked, rolled around on her back, chased a ball, etc. Some of those 4chan conspiracy theorists would tell you that she doesn’t really make that kind of money. Really she’s being favored by the deep state cabal who inflates the numbers of subscribers to make her appear more successful than she really is. I’m like, “Oh no....I guarantee there are that many incels paying to jerk off to that. I believe that as surely as I believe Jesus Christ died for my sins.”

[willowashmaple]

delusional but a (reasonably) happy life.

Narratives are everything in today’s society. Political operatives, marketing professionals, preachers of Prosperity Gospel, “Law of Attraction” promoters, and motivational speakers all run on this principle.

In many ways, I know I maintained my sanity by controlling the narratives about me, and by fighting whatever the narratives and labels society wanted to impose on me. 

I have survived more than a decade of homelessness and extreme poverty through this. As someone who was a product of the Word-Faith branch of Pentecostalism and a hopelessly gullible soul that used to believe anything (at least for a while), the most reasonable thing I would do was to deny the predicament I was in. That I was somebody, not nobody. Otherwise it was unbearably depressing: I was a literal bum, a chronic homeless, with obvious signs of severe mental illnesses, who was too anti-social and defiant to ask for help. And I managed to pass myself off like a “normal person” pretty well. I was able to successfully infiltrate the world that would otherwise never allow chronic bums to step a foot in, maybe out of fear or prejudice, or simply that they don’t belong there. 

In retrospect, I was very likely delusional and my life was almost entirely founded on make-believes, and this has been the case since my early adolescence. I used to believe in all sorts of fringe ideas, such as conspiracy theories and fringe legal theories. I was able to convince myself to be all kinds of somebodies even though there was no objective evidence to go with it. And by convincing myself to be that somebody, I was able to present that make-believe self to the world around me with a relative ease, and I was also adept at quickly learning just enough facts, jargons, concepts, and terminologies so I could carry a conversation and not be immediately seen as a poseur (but in retrospect I now know I was extremely arrogant and made a big fool of myself). 

Don’t take me wrong, this was a blessing. This was also a coping mechanism and survival mechanism. Because I was able to do this for many years, I was mostly able to stay away from the most depressing aspects of street life, such as shelters, jails, and soup kitchens. The downside to this, was that I lived outside far longer than 95 percent of all who have experienced houselessness, including nearly all of my 30s. 

I was delusional. But I was rather happy, to a reasonable degree, even when I was freezing my ass in the middle of snowy December at 2:30 in the morning trying to sleep. I had something to look forward to. I was resilient. I was capable of dreaming. I had life.   

I was pretty much a real-life Sara Crewe, constructing own make-believe world to maintain sanity until (in the classic Word-Faith/New Thought/Law of Attraction style) something comes to manifestation. 

This year, as I recover from the worst autistic burnout of all times in the midst of the COVID-induced social isolation, I became increasingly critical of this past. All that I feel lately are shame, embarrassment, self-loathing, guilt, regret, and anger at myself for being so delusional. I am deeply unhappy. And depressed. And hopeless. Suddenly it had occurred to me that I was just a nobody. 

The “conventional wisdom” is that this is good. Who should suffer from delusion, right? This has got to be a sign of healing. Growth. Self-responsibility. “Adulting.” 

But I wonder: which is really better, delusional but happy, or “sane” but extremely unhappy to the point I can barely get up every morning and do something? 

Atheists such as Richard Dawkins and Carl Sagan assert that religion and faith are harmful delusions. Yet, it is also true that these “harmful delusions” have shaped the history of the United States in a mostly positive way, provide ethical and moral underpinning for our social fabric, and even offer numerous health benefits. And religious people tend to be happier and healthier.

I don’t know. I could’ve done better, for sure. But now shame and regret are literally tormenting me and keeping me from moving forward. I feel like I have accomplished so much more when I was delusional.