#i fucking hate seeing posts like this it males me viscerally uncomfortable.

[princ3y]

Get off my fucking page if you talk about hating men.

[sad-sour]

hello again, it’s me, here to word vomit before i make myself crazy but this time it’s about the barbie movie 🤩

the barbie movie sincerely was one of the most incredible movies i’ve ever seen tbh. it was beautiful but it was painful and tbh that’s the essence of being a woman

there were several different themes throughout the movie and fuck i really didn’t think this movie would cause me such incredible amounts of psychological damage 😃

what happened between ken and barbie when ken just starts being fucking MEAN and he’s so mean and it just broke my fucking heart and had me sobbing in the fucking theater because my “ken” was so fucking mean to me and to see this innocent barbie get a verbal thrashing for the first time for the boy who means the fucking world to her just sucked so bad because once he hurts you like that the relationship never recovers. what barbie and ken when through is EXACTLY what it’s like to have a close male friend in childhood who eventually grows up to objectivity and crucify you for not loving them back

“where i see live she sees a friend, what will it take for her to see the man behind the tan and fight for me?”

like he’s SO obsessed with barbie and she DOES love him but he refuses to accept the love she does have for him because she doesn’t want to be in a relationship, like barbie wants to be her own person and she wants that for ken too

it was genuinely such a surprisingly visceral reaction to ken being so fucking mean to barbie, as a little girl you don’t ever get that innocent friendship back once he starts being fucking MEAN and i think that’s so fucking heart breaking bc as a woman who has experienced that kind of thing the it’s just so fucking upsetting to look back on what should be such fond fucking memories only for them to be tainted with what “ken” threw in your face and said

the other plot point that really really got me was the mom shit, like damn everybody said if you got mommy issues fucking watch with caution and they were NOT lying

i’ve got mommy issues bc i’ve got a mom that bullied me and even tho i know she loves me bc she’s my mom it always fucking felt like she hated me, the barbie movie made my heart ache bc it made me feel empty. i have a mom and i’ve always ALWAYS wanted what other girls had. i wanted the mom that wanted to play with me, I wanted the mom that made snacks and picked me up after school, parents that didn’t leave me home alone for an entire weekend when i was only fucking eight years old

i saw this tiktok that talked about how this girl and her mom went to the movie together and they were hugging and crying during the beautiful montage of mothers and daughters and i just felt empty

i couldn’t ever imagine watching that movie with my mom, honestly the thought makes me uncomfortable and that makes me really sad

you know i’m kinda surprised by how much this movie really fucked with me,

doesn’t help that my cousin’s 22nd birthday was a few days before this lmfao

even better she posted a video on insta of her from when we were younger, i saw it and i burst into tears bc that’s my big sister, even if we always wanted to pretend we were twins

we were girls together

we played barbies together and on day that just disappeared…

one day we put down our barbies for the last time, packed them up in those big stupid barbie travel cases for the last time and watched them get sold at a yard sale

we still played together, we played animal jam, poptropica, animal crossing, just dance wii sports but none of that feels as sentimental as when we played barbies together…

i never did that with anyone else

doesn’t help that speak now (taylor’s version) just recently came out as well and listening to a 33 year old taylor sing never grow up just kinda really slapped me in the face you know

she was 9 and i was 8 the first time we ever listened to that album together and it was really special getting to listen to the new version with her too and i’m just in this really weird fucking place in life wondering when the fuck i grew up and how i missed so fucking much of my own life because i don’t really have any memories prior to the age of fucking 16

i turn 22 in 2 months…

and all i’m left with is this yearning for simpler times, times before i knew anything about the world when all i was worried about was my barbies and some new fantastical adventure that we were going to send them on

i’m left with this vague impression of memories from times i don’t fucking remember and the only shit i do remember is the traumatic or sad shit

but you know what i’ll keep my rose tinted glasses on for the few precious memories i do have because if fucking refuse to let reality have all of my girlhood, some of it i get to keep for me

[theexistentiallyqueer]

Sorry to bother, but where do autistic and adhd brains overlap? Because both are neurodivergent (and beautiful, I agree) But how can I find out which behaviour belongs more to me being autistic (got diagnosed this year) and which is adhd? (No Matter What Deadline, after several years in hostile environment (failed university, then call center work) I panic. Hard.) How do I disentangle adhd and autism to find out what strategies to use to function better?

Please don’t feel like you’re being a bother, because you’re not! Honestly the fact that someone is coming to me to ask ADHD questions makes me teary-eyed, because I’ve fought so hard to learn to function with ADHD that people Asking Me Things like I’m a trusted expert just makes my heart grow three sizes, the opposite of the Grinch.

I’m probably not the best person to ask about how ADHD and autism overlap specifically, especially if you’re taking this from an autistic POV. And I’m also not a behavioral expert, which is a very strong preface. But I can (and am very happy to) talk a bit about my experiences with ADHD and how I’ve learned to make things work for my brain.

I’m going to put this under a cut, if that’s okay with you, anon. It got kind of long and I don’t want to overrun anyone’s dash. And you can always, always ask me ADHD questions, and I’ll try my best to answer.

My ADHD tends to manifest specifically in the following ways:

Extreme hyperfixation that has its own varying degrees (e.g., I’m really into Fire Emblem: Three Houses, but I have so lack of interest in Byleth/Claude that my lack of interest feels like an actual void)

An inability to process feelings regarding things other people care strongly about that I don’t. If we’re using the same fandom example: I could rant forever about how Byleth/Edelgard gives me ALL THE FEELS, but if I friend I care about started to talk about Byleth/Claude, I would immediately lose all interest in the conversation and struggle to react in a way that doesn’t present me as a selfish monster who doesn’t care about the person I’m talking to.

I tend to monopolize conversation if I’m given the opportunity because I LOVE getting the chance to talk about my hyperfixations. If someone cuts me off when I’m really into a topic, I get incredibly irritated and have to try to restrain from myself from acting petty in response. The number of times I have smiled my mouth is a knife and said, “ANYWAY, as I WAS SAYING…” is beyond count.

I don’t recognize or remember people until I have something meaningful to associate them with. I also don’t tend to notice things that don’t clock themselves as Important in my brain. I usually describe this as “background furniture.” Even PEOPLE become background furniture. A girl I work with mentioned a person on her team had quit, and I’d literally walked by that person’s desk earlier that day and didn’t notice it was empty, because that person and the entire space they occupied was background scenery.

If something affects or touches me personally, it hits me Very Personally. I had a complete fucking breakdown watching the video of Philando Castille’s shooting, because I heard his daughter crying while she watched him getting shot and went down onto a spiral of personal loss over my own father to gun violence and started to immediately correlate the two. Separating ADHD brainness from my  whiteness is complex and hard and (said sarcastically) so, so much fun.

The direct inverse of that are things like: I’m talking to my mom, who’s telling me about a high school friend of hers just got into a horrific vehicle accident and is in the ICU. My mom then goes on to give me regular status updates on this woman I don’t know. I get out of work, and she talks about this woman’s surgery. I get out of work, and she talks about this woman’s family’s attempt to find an adequate rehab center. They find a rehab center, and my mom shows me how her friend decorated her daughter’s room. My mom shows me a video of the girl working with a physical therapist, who gets her to push herself upright with a walker and take her tentative steps. “Awesome!” my brain thinks. “Great!” my brain thinks. All of it spans over several days, weeks, months. I have nothing to do with this constant influx of information. I don’t know how my brain should file it. I don’t know this woman who was injured. I feel for her in theory because no one should ever have to go through that even though so many people do, but I haven’t ACTIVELY PRETEND like I personally am invested in the situation or else my mother gives me Concerned Eyes because I seem to be In A Bad Mood Today.

When it comes to organization, I tend to lean towards hyper-organization rather than hypo-organization. By which I mean I over-organize to combat the fact that ADHD often results in disorganization, and disorganization results in chaos, and chaos gives me COMPLETE PANIC ATTACKS. At work at one point, I had my emails auto-tagging every incoming email based on the email type, on top of tagging for my clients. Every label had a different color, and it all made sense to me, because I’d made it. When my team had cover my stuff on a day I was out, my inbox was such a horror show that it left them feeling drained and distressed.

Let’s talk about socialization! I have a rocky relationship with my childhood best friend. When I discovered social justice in college, I started picking fights with everyone over everything Problematique. The first major fight I had with my best friend at the time was because she felt I was over-aggressive towards a mutual male friend of ours. She was probably right, because I know the kind of bullying behavior I later developed. I thought I learned from it. After the 2016 election, I messaged her on FB, thinking I had a sympathetic ear, to say that seeing her mother post constant messages of support for Trump and sharing stuff dismissing Trump’s sexual assault allegations was particularly hurtful considering I’d told my friend that my mom had been sexually assaulted.. I’m not going to share what she said, but she wasn’t in the wrong. We didn’t talk for several months after that.

Speaking of her! When she started dating the guy she’s now married to, at one point I asked her if they’d had sex yet. I asked it because I thought it was a thing you were Supposed To Talk About as friends, and also because I was, in a way, morbidly curious, because I’m grey-ace and queer. She confirmed that they had, but I still felt so icky and uncomfortable about that for so long afterwards. It was only after I started to understand that I’m not cis and not allo that I really understood why: I was forcing myself to perform what I thought female friendship was based on how it’s portrayed in media, and it’s only once I began to understand that I’m on the ace spectrum and that I’m nonbinary that I really started to understand how forced mainstream conversations of attraction are.

I’m loud! I’m loud! I’m loud! I’m loud all the time! I live with my mom and I socialize with my mom and when we’re in public spaces and I’m talking about something that interests me, she always, always, always feels like she has to shush me. What makes it ironic? If there are other people being loud around me, I can’t function. I can’t process the noise. It’s EVEN WORSE if they’re speaking in another language, because if it’s English I can process the words at least, but if it’s another language, it’s just pure, inescapable sound that I know has meaning but can’t intuit, and if I can’t understand something, that’s as bad as dying.

From what I’ve read about autism, here are ways I THINK my ADHD traits overlap with autistic traits:

I can’t read facial expressions. I think I have a better concept of emotional nuance in facial expressions than someone who’s strictly autistic, but I’ll still panic when I see a smile that isn’t bland enough. RDS (rejection-sensitive dysphoria) will kick in. They hate me, they hate me, they hate me, is the track my brain will play on repeat until I’ve drunk myself into oblivion. Whenever someone smiles, I mistrust it immediately.

Eye contact is incredibly fucking frustrating. I understand that it’s expected, but it’s SO UNCOMFORTABLE. Why do we need to stare into each other’s eyes to understand one another? How can you people write whole treatises on the sanctity of locking gazes and finding an instant intellectual bond without realizing that eye contact that’s not called for is personally invasive?

I can’t understand flirting vs not flirting to the point that I’m absolutely paranoid someone is flirting with me, at which point I usually become hostile if I think they ARE, because DON’T FLIRT WITH ME. TALK to me!

I hate, hate, hate unsolicited physical contact. If I’m in a state of over-expression, I hate it even more. I’m not physically withdrawn, because I love hugs, and cuddles, and human touch. But when I’ve spent the entire day listening to other people talk and I have to walk into a room where people continue to talk, if someone touches me, it’s fucking No-Oh-One.

Someone is interested in a thing I’m interested in. We’ll use Persona 5 as the concept, because this honestly happened recently. I talk with the guy whose desk is across from mine about Persona 5 all the time. He’s also excited about Royal. I started going into my Sophia theory that I’ve really only lobbied at @softspokensansa. I could see, I could viscerally see, the interest drain from his expression. BUT I HAVE AN IDEA SO I WILL TALK ABOUT IT ANYWAY, and then afterwards I felt incredibly resentful that I was being filtered through a cookie-cutter drain.

It’s painful–it’s really painful!–to try to talk about my spiritual ideas with other people. I have a side blog I just started and am preppy myself to share, and I’m absofuckinglutely TERRIFIED everyone is going to write me off without looking at what I have to say. IT’S THE RSD AGAIN! Nothing I ever said has actually mattered before, so why should it now?

I feel, constantly, like I’m halfway between a point of reality and a point of something. What that something is is indefinable, but regardless of it, I exist.

I’d like to direct you to two very positive youtubers I know; I meant to do this earlier, but now feels right in terms of how I’ve written: How To ADHD and Amethyst Schaber.I credit both of them in helping me find a safe place with ADHD before diagnosis. There are stories other than yours that matter.

I wish you the best, anon! If you think you’re autistic and ADHD: given the comorbidity between the two, you probably are! And ADHD is just as beautiful, complicated, and misunderstood as autism is.

If anyone reading this can speak to living as both autistic and ADHD, please respond so I can lift your voice. And to my anon: you’re beautiful completely. I hope my story has helped you in its anyway, and I hope that you find yourself at a place of peace. It’s a struggle to get there, but it’s worth it, every step of the way.

[usamyzonians]

Q Redux

And I’m just going to go ahead from the start and say that I’m going to be using a certain q-word, because it’s unavoidable.  I’m also going to bring up trans violence in media.  If that bothers you, don’t read below the fold.

I probably undersold my issues with the word “queer” before, in part because I actually try and avoid conflict until the anxiety kicks in and then I will fight people for almost anything.  And it’s sort of fitting that I’m talking about anxiety, because that’s what this is about.

I literally have an anxiety response to the word “queer,” because I have been the victim of violence under it as recently as a couple of years ago.  When people insist I’m “queer” to meet their worldview that we’re all one big and happy umbrella group, they’re not particularly different to me from the edgelords who go around opposing “political correctness” by using racist or sexist or homophobic words because they like hurting “liberal” feelings.

If you insist I’m queer, or all LGBT people are queer, then I see you as an asshole.  Not just to me, because there’s a ton of other people who have the same response for the same reason.

It amazes me that people who themselves have experienced trauma and need “trigger warnings” for all sorts of things I would find innocuous suddenly become edgelords over this one word and tell other people with a history of trauma to “deal with it” or similar because they lack any sort of empathy.

In short, people who demand that I show them consideration are suddenly all “lol snowflakes!” over this issue.

This raises a pretty important issue:  many of you who insist on calling people queer are hurting people as you wouldn’t want to be hurt, and you don’t care.  The word is precious to you, moreso than the well-being of the community you clam you’re encompassing.

Honestly, I distance myself from people who say “queer.”  This is a word that has been used to abuse me, a word that invokes anxiety and trauma responses in me, and if you can’t be arsed to care, I don’t want to be anywhere near you.  I have a tendency to block people who say it on here, and I tend to not reblog things which use the term, and if you have a problem with that, you can simply not follow me.

I stopped following Steven Universe when I saw the article where the show runner planned to make the show “as queer as possible.”  I am unlikely to resume the show, and no longer really care if it stays on the air.  And no, I will not support someone who says “queer” just to support LGBT representation at the cost of my own mental health.

You can argue whether or not this is the “right” thing to do, but here’s the thing.  It’s not your choice.  It’s mine.  You don’t have to live in my head.  I do.  I stopped watching Law and Order after a transwoman was beaten in prison, and when people start throwing “queer” around I have a similar response.  Both evoke memories--visceral ones--of the violence I have experienced in my life.  I have no desire to humor peoplke at the expense of my own well-being.

And if you don’t like that, I don’t want you around.  If your desire to use a word is more important than the people it impacts, you’re probably a shitty person.

And since I’ve seen posts like this bogged down with notes and reblogs literally abusing and berating people, allow me to preemptively say a blanket “fuck you” as I will be blocking you without response.  It’s amazing to me how quickly LGBT individuals, who hate it when straight and cis people talk over them, will talk over victims of abuse.  Well, other victims of abuse.

This really is one of the biggest problems I have.  In a community where you have to  “trigger warning” everything, people are outright abusive when you have a trauma response to the word “queer” because they want to use it and they are apparently incapable of acting better than a petulant two year old or a gamer.  If you have a trauma response to the word “queer,” suddenly the LGBT “community” turns into a bunch of edgelords who will tell you to deal with it and not be so offended/fragile/sensitive.  “You’re too easily triggered” is not a phrase the LGBT community should have in common with Milo (I’ve updated this since Milo went on Realtime).

I sometimes get messages because I forgot to tag something like homophobic language or misogyny.  Fair enough, I often forget to tag things, especially my own writing.  It’s worse when I’m writing about something that stresses me out, like...most of the stuff I write about.

But then when you say you’re uncomfortable with “queer,” especially being branded it, the tide turns.  I’ve had a couple of the same people asking me for consideration (which I think is fair) turn around and be all “you are queer, deal with it” or words to that effect.  Now, where have I heard that before?

Oh, right.  The straight people who are upset that they have to consider others.  The cis people who are upset that they have to consider others.  The men that are upset that they have to consider others.  The radfems.  The people who complain “cis” and “white male” are slurs but will use pejorative terms for women and LGBT people unironically.

They’re hypocrites.  And so are you, if you take this route.

I have continued to include content warnings out of a consideration few will reciprocate.  I will continue to do so for as long as I run this blog, because there are some lines I won’t cross.  It’s just a shame that the “queer” community so so narcissistic it won’t hesitate to not only cross those lines, but abuse people who have lived through trauma and have a negative response.  If you expect me to “get over” my trauma so simply, first get over yours.  And if you’re really sincere, stop asking me to tag my work.  Oh, I’ll still do it, but by the “queer” argument, you should all just “get over it” like you’re asking me (and others, but this piece is not to speak for others) to.

So, a blanket “thank you” for the reminder of why I will never feel like a part  of the LGBT “community.”