#ie; a neurodivergent package | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

bigskydreaming · 4 years

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Hey friendly reminder that I honestly do not want anyone to follow me unless they actually WANT to which means they are free to unfollow, refollow, leave and come back and leave again or WHATEVER as many times as they want, for any reason whatsoever. Including if my posting styles of the moment get to be too much for them or are not to their liking, etc?

BUT I have been seeing a surge in comments in notes and stuff on various posts of mine about the length of my posts or the rambling of my posts and like....I know? This is not new information to me? But I post the way I post at any given time based on the resources I have at any given time and the fact that its often a matter of I can post a long rambling post or I can make no post at all.

Like, I really truly do not like going into specifics about my situation more than necessary or when not necessary, because like, my situation is boring to me, I don’t particularly care to dwell on it any more than I have to. But the fact of the matter is its still a thing that exists so here goes: yes I have physical issues like near constant migraines and pain and also vertigo, and yes I have neurodivergencies like C-PTSD and ADHD and yes I have circumstances that include near constant stress from eternally being in the negatives, financially, as well as being almost constantly hungry from a lack of money and limited options for eating due to the physical constraints of my jaw as well as being consistently sleep deprived because there’s only so much sleep you can get when there’s no such thing as a physically comfortable sleeping arrangement for you currently, all while existing in a constant limbo of I literally have NO idea when any of this will change for me because haha fun fact WE LIVE IN A PANDEMIC.

My point is like......all of these are things I’m not shy about, but they don’t exist as bullet points in a checklist of identity or circumstantial traits, they all exist at all times as points of fact that influence and inform and interact with each other.

So my financial situation and limbo of not being able to move forward with my surgery because of the chaos of the health care industry during a pandemic directly informs both the way stress impacts my mental health issues, but also my ability to treat my mental health issues by way of medication, nutrition, rest.....ie, almost every cent I make via work, etc, goes right back out the door to keeping up my insurance premiums of $850 a month, because even though my surgery is paid for, there’s still elements like hospital stay fees, anesthesia, etc, that won’t be paid until the day of surgery itself, and which I will not be able to pay without my insurance remaining current and active. Which means that I had to prioritize an insurance package that would net me THOSE benefits, which means I had to sacrifice parts of insurance that are no longer in that package, but which previously made things like my medications, refill appointments and therapy more affordable for me.

Which means that I have to prioritize my medication and therapy etc and maintain my therapy and PTSD, depression and anxiety meds as the most important to upkeep, while my ADHD meds are pretty much priced out of accessibility for me at the moment. Like, the specifics of my metabolism and various trial and error with different meds over the years and the way my body rapidly adapts to various meds and plateaus to a point where they cease to have any real impact on me means the only ADHD medication that’s consistently effective for me is Vyvanse, which there isn’t a viable generic form of that I can take, meaning a monthly refill of it is $350 without insurance, which I flat out can not ever afford anymore, which means its been roughly two months since I last popped an ADHD pill.

So yeah, that directly impacts things like my ability to self-edit, make a point briefly, or refrain from circling back to the same point several times over and over because I literally forget that I made it.

Now of course ADHD medication is not the be-all and end-all and its not like there aren’t various other life-hacks and coping strategies for working around ADHD even without it, after all, I didn’t even get diagnosed until I was 26. But these various other adaptations rely on things like good nutrition (which I can not regularly afford, or even consume....most leafy green vegetables for example, or fruits other than berries, are literally nonstarters for me because I don’t have enough leverage with my one-sided jaw to CHEW them in the first place, and the ingredients for making smoothies regularly are again, expensive). So nutrition as a hack for ADHD management is pretty much out - I’m too busy prioritizing eating anything I can, whenever I can afford to. Other adaptations involve getting lots of rest: something that again, physically isn’t all that viable for me these days, even leaving aside the effects of constant stress on attempts at getting meaningful rest, along with the constant stress and constraints of trying to work as much as humanly possible in my circumstances, in order to keep bringing in income to go to insurance, rent, and food and meds. Then there’s also the stabilizing effects exercise and physical activity can have on the brain and various neurodivergencies like mine, but the migraines and vertigo make most forms of exercise a nonstarter for me, with most of the rest invalidated by the fact that I’m pretty much always hungry, tired, and in chronic pain.

Now let’s examine work and the viability of obtaining more sources of income to help with all this. Well, my options are limited there too due to the ecosystem of factors in play. I’ve been trying for awhile to find even a part time job in my area I can do, but the problems are even though I can make myself mobile and active through my pain issues and migraines, and am even good at gritting and bearing it and acting like I’m smiling and laughing and happy even while in excruciating pain (yay, perks of childhood abuse making a career in retail viable even while practically dead on my feet, lololol)......there’s the simple physiological limitation that I just can’t stay upright RELIABLY for more than a couple hours at a time. Eventually, dizziness knocks me on my ass. Downside of a jaw that’s constantly hanging with all its weight from one side of your face, fucking with your ability to even stand up straight, not to mention causing inner ear and equilibrium problems at random whenever you open or close your mouth in the wrong way (or mere approximation of ANY kind of way).

So, standing upright at any kind of customer service or retail job is one issue. Stocking stuff, that sort of thing.....not really an option when you’re likely to drop all of it at any given moment. But then there’s bracing myself at cash registers, something like a job at Starbucks or hell there’s a Jamba Juice nearby, that’d also get me an employee discount for smoothies I can drink regularly. Course, there’s the whirring of blenders and such, which pair great with constant migraines. Etc. Etc.

BUT. I’m a well-rounded person with lots of skills....which lead to things like my freelance graphic design business as a book cover designer, as well as various writing endeavors, etc. And all of these are things that I DO do, currently. They’re how I make my income as is. There’s absolutely more jobs out there, but the fact is as a freelancer, FINDING additional jobs is a time consuming and spoon consuming process, that is additionally impacted by factors like ADHD, so not only does looking for work require time that’s not already being spent working, it also requires the management and expenditure of mental resources that I have to prioritize FIRST towards applying them to what work I already DO have, given the absence of ADHD medication and minimal coping or regulatory habits allowing for me to be all that productive WITHOUT said meds.

Not to mention the strain sitting in front of a computer all day for work in venues like graphic design, etc, puts on migraines, so there’s only so many hours I can devote daily or in one sitting to doing things like cover work. Much of my writing time is spent not actually writing, but me just dictating into notes on my phone and then copying and pasting all that into the appropriate formats for fiction, nonfiction and just random posts. Of course here then I have to prioritize applying my mental resources to first making sure the stuff I write to make money gets edited or properly pared down to size and isn’t repeating the same shit over and over and over, then doing the same to stuff I write fic wise as one of my few escapes from Real Life BS so I can at least point to having SOME kind of life (as this has been my daily existence for years, and uh.....people having things they like or like to do, as much as is humanly feasible, only becomes MORE of a necessity the more stress involved in their day to day life, not less).

Meaning by the time I even get to posting, like.....as much as it may look like I do a lot of it, the speed at which I write when I have any kinds of spoons to apply to posting or composing thoughts at ALL means I actually pour out a lot in a little span of time.....BUT that’s not like, a Skill so much as its a Fact. Its just the way I am and it comes with its downsides as well as its upsides....Im good at banging out a lot in a short amount of time, but ONLY when I just....let it go, versus try and regulate it all or squeeze it out bit by bit. I’m a sprint poster these days rather than a marathoner, even if the length of my thoughts makes it LOOK like the latter.....the reality is for me it tends to be all or nothing, its whatever I can get on the page BEFORE I lose my breath or train of thought. So that’s why it looks the way it does, because that was the only form it was coming out at the specific time and space when I had the energy and brainpower TO get it out, and going back in hindsight and editing it for clarity or brevity AFTER I gasp it all out requires energy and breath I do not have PAST that point, so it becomes a simple equation of well do I want a post to exist here at all or not at all.....and I err on the side of posting. This isn’t a defense because there’s nothing to defend, mind you, I’m simply explaining my way through my thought process, approach to things, and realities of my day to day existence for you to do with whatever you want. Its just a perspective you may not have had before. Whatever.

Of course, even this doesn’t exist in a void. Something that’s always a factor in my awareness when posting is like......I’m lucky enough to have a large enough following that cares enough about what I have to say for whatever reasons or puts enough value in what I have to say or the things I write and create, that I’ve been able to supplement my financial needs when absolutely necessary at times, by way of donation posts. I try not to lean on them more than necessary because I am keenly aware that they are a gift from people, many of whom I do not know and will likely never meet, and as such, not something I have any form of expectation for. I make donation posts when and where I do not in the anticipation of getting them met, but simply for a lack of any other options whatsoever. I’m limited in the work I can do, and the time and energy I can devote to finding more of that same work. There’s not a ton of other career paths I can pursue even from behind a computer due to my lack of a college degree, and the fact that even when I’m qualified skill or knowledge wise, I lack the specific credentials for verifying that I possess those skills or knowledge in a way employers are inclined to recognize and/or validate. Going BACK to school to get said credentials is an expenditure of time, finances, and other resources I do not have to spare at the moment or any time soon, especially not in the name of shoring up a lack of all that in the present term.

I dropped out of college freshman year after my gaybashing and rape. I never went back to it for a variety of reasons that were only half about resources and half about intent. My family is not a presence in my life and hasn’t really been in any significant way since I was eighteen, so college in the first place was something I had to be entirely self-sufficient about....I was only able to afford to go the year that I did go by way of academic scholarships that were dependent on grades I couldn’t keep up in the wake of what happened to me, and that I couldn’t exactly ever get back without a foundation to build upon, like high school and my initial academic career. Then in the half that was about intent, I eventually moved into pursuing my actual interests like writing, graphic design and acting. One of the things I’ve always loved about those is that output and portfolio nets you more than credentials most of the time....they ARE your credentials. I was actually pretty damn successful as an actor for years, not in the way that leads to being someone that people would recognize, but in the way that leads to being able to support yourself doing what you love. All the skillsets that I have but could not back up with things like a diploma were still useful to me as an actor in a way that they’re not in terms of getting things like tutoring or teaching jobs.....I speak multiple languages but I’m self taught, I have a black belt in karate, I’m a classically trained pianist, I know a whole lot of shit about random shit that I just learned because I wanted to, and all of that got me the kind of work that I was looking for and meant I COULD work and make a living off those things for years throughout my twenty....work that I would not have been able to get if I had been back sitting in a classroom instead. The primary currency of my years as an actor were life experiences and I had those in spades, and I was very good at what I did, if I do say so myself, and the reasons I never advanced further career wise tended to have less to do with whether or not I booked the roles I auditioned for and whether I got the auditions at all......

I’m getting a bit off topic here but I’m just saying there’s definitely a convo to be had at some point, about the roles and opportunities I turned down because I wasn’t willing to sleep with someone or put up with their advancements in order to do so. Something that’s a dime a dozen in Hollywood and the thing is.....I was a sex worker, for years, before I moved to Hollywood and started working as an actor. But there’s a distinct difference between the way people talk about, interact with and perceive someone who’s gotten roles because of sex, advanced up a corporate ladder because of sex...versus, gotten paid because of sex. I didn’t turn down offers of roles for sex because of my hang-ups about sex but rather other peoples’......I had a problem with various parts of the industry that would have thought nothing about me getting a role because a producer wanted to sleep with me, but would have turned up their nose at me because I slept with someone to get money for groceries before. Basically I’m just saying the specific bullshit Hollywood has not just about sex but predatory behavior got in the way of my career advancement because there were some games I just wasn’t willing to play....which hails from the very life experiences that oftentimes made me so good as an actor in the first place.

Which brings me back again to my main point......none of this exists in a vaccuum. Being the sum of our life experiences and variables means being the SUM of that, at ALL times, both in large and small ways. We are never just a LIST of identity traits or experiences. They all constantly loop back around and feed into each other and inform where we are at every second of every day and where we GO in each second, what we DO with our days and the choices we make.

Which is where so much of my discontent with fandoms, on social media in general, with PEOPLE in my day to day life comes from: this desire people have to compartmentalize, to ZERO IN on specific factors or variables or instances and act like it even CAN be divorced from all other influences. Its not that you can’t FOCUS on one thing at a time, its just even when you do that, that doesn’t like....snap all existing connections that thing has to everything outside of your area of focus.

As an example, my attitudes on being a survivor and various kinds of fiction get me a ton of pushback from various corners, and its all geared around the same premise: don’t like, don’t read. Put a wall up between you and it. Focus on just what you’re doing and forget what everyone else is doing.

But it doesn’t work like that. It CAN’T work like that. And this commitment people have to pretending it does just because that pretense has been working for them, THAT, I’d argue, is the true wedge in fandom spaces.

Everything about me is connected to something else. I’m a childhood abuse and incest csa survivor. When my therapist asks me to picture a moment from my childhood when I felt safe or protected, I got nothing. I don’t have that resource. I don’t know what that feeling is meant to feel like, because I never felt it. And that connects directly into the fact that when I was gaybashed in college, after they dumped me in a fucking park, bleeding and covered in writing, I didn’t even think about going to the hospital, the police, let alone calling anyone like my parents, I just picked myself up and walked back to my dorm, cleaned myself off as best I could, and went to class next Monday morning. That’s fucked up, I shouldn’t have had to, but its what I did, and there’s no divorcing that from any of the contexts of WHY that’s what I did, and why I didn’t think there was any other logical recourse or option for me then. Just like all of that also links back to growing up in the closet and entering high school the same month Matthew Shepherd was attacked, and then when he ultimately died two months later, and watching everybody’s reactions to that informed the fact that I did not remotely feel safe in the aftermath of my attack, disclosing what happened to people around me, or just like I didn’t take it on face value that even if they said appropriately sensitive things to me to my face didn’t mean that like when I was a freshman in high school and everyone was reacting to that, they wouldn’t revert to callous jokes about fags the second they felt a little less out of the spotlight or in the right company for those jokes.

And all of that directly links into my feelings not just when people write rape and gaybashing scenes that make no attempt at any kind of catharsis but rather only appear to exist for the fetishization, the glamorization, the VALIDATION of the idea that in the right context, those kinds of scenes can be hot to the right audience rather than demoralizing to the figure who’s pain and humaniliation is required for everyone else’s entertainment....but it also additionally plays into the reactions and attitudes I have when people look at me going “wow, really don’t like the lens you’re using here or the environment you’re creating around an experience that is never anything BUT painful and traumatic for someone who lived it, like I did” and choose to respond to that by saying things that amount to “well you’re basically just like conservative southern assholes who hate free speech when you say stuff like this,” cuz y’know.....that’s describing my literal oppressors. That’s lumping me in with the actual literal kind of people who are the SOURCE of my trauma there, all because you felt butthurt and defensive about how I said I wasn’t comfortable with the kinds of jokes and output you were making about scenes that aren’t that far divorced from my own personal reality, and that I shouldn’t HAVE to divorce from my own experiences just to exist within certain fandom spaces.

And just like the fact that being an incest survivor is directly relevant to the fact that my stepmother always made an effort to keep me at a distance because not wanting to admit to what happened to me and how it played into our family entanglements was directly linked back to the fact that she and my aunt were both incest survivors who never got the opportunities to deal with what happened to them, which in turn directly plays into the fact that ultimately my aunt ended up taking her own life a few years ago, which also very much informs my attitude towards people interacting with incest ships as something cutesy and uwu, as my aunt was literally the only person in my family I ever WAS close to or comfortable with. And there’s no divorcing any of that into nice neat little compartments that make it easier for anyone on the outside looking in to just peek through ONE window to see what they might see, and try and act like it doesn’t matter what’s in any of those other boxes because it has nothing to do with the only one they want to concern themselves with.

And my lack of resources and emotional state post gay-bashing led directly into my sex work for various reasons, which led in various ways to better things for me in some respects, while compounding certain traumas of mine in other respects, and there’s no divorcing any of that from the rest either. There’s no ‘my time as a sex worker was good’ even though some of it was and there’s no ‘my time as a sex worker was bad’ even though some of it really was. And a lot of the attitudes of some of the rich assholes who paid me for sex and viewed me as a plaything they could do anything to directly informs my resistance to letting powerful assholes in Hollywood hold roles over my head in exchange for sex, even though the latter could have advanced my career in huge ways and led to me being a lot more financially stable and self-sufficient by the time my physical issues emerged due to the jaw joint on one side of my head eroding through and snapping completely just like that in turn was a long-building repercussion of not just my gaybashing, but my decision to never go to the hospital and get checked out after it.

None of this can be cut away from the rest and trimmed into neat little pieces that don’t color outside the lines or impact anything else. Just like my gaybashing itself can’t be divorced from my white privilege, and the fact that it played into the fact that I survived that night in the first place. Something I say not in some weird white guilt kinda way like people try and project onto others for even acknowledging white privilege, like no its not like I fucking wish I died to prove some kind of weird point, what I’m talking about is just the simple basic AWARENESS that multiple and even contradictory factors exist in even the most extreme of situations. And its never anything BUT self-serving to pretend that you can frame it as otherwise.

And so when I talk about being a survivor, just like with all the rest of this, I’m not talking about some arbitrary status of survivorhood that exists in a specific point in time and is only relevant to some singular event I survived, its applicable to everything about my life big and small. I’m a survivor every single day I’ve survived, every day I wake up and keep moving forward despite the pain and stress and lingering trauma of what was done to me one night sixteen years ago, I’m surviving what they did every bit as much as I survived it that night and in the morning after as I dragged myself back to my room. Just like my status as an abuse survivor stemming from childhood directly informs everything about not just my coping mechanisms but my entire freaking worldview as someone who grew up throughout childhood learning to view the world through a lens in which he was simultaneously not safe due to the presence of victimizers in his own home, while at the same time still having certain protections that others don’t have in life in general due to not just again my white privilege but my male privilege, my cis privilege.

And that’s what makes it so laughable and so offensive when people act like I’m defining myself by being a survivor as some kind of singular identity trait whenever I raise it as something of relevance in fandom discussions that have EVERYTHING to do with stances of abuse apologism and homophobic ideas that directly play into why I was so unsafe in certain parts and times of my life, because who the fuck is anyone else to tell me how my experiences as a survivor and how they shaped me are or are not relevant to ideas pertaining to those very things, when brought front and center and face to face with me in various fandoms due to the insistence of fandoms at large on KEEPING these things front and center in almost ALL fandom discussions? Like, the hilarious irony of people who have so wholly centered certain types of ship and content in terms of their own personal fandom identities that they can’t help but feel personally attacked when someone so much as says “I don’t like the ideas you’re broadcasting alongside your choice to amplify and signal boost this kind of content because you’re not JUST signalboosting the content itself, but these specific perceptions of it and ideas in support of and in apology for it.”....like, turning around and saying IM too defined by my views stemming from my existence as a survivor. The call is coming from inside the house, lolol.

Again, none of this can be divorced from the rest. It can be focused on one piece at a time, but its connections to everything else that informs it in various RELEVANT ways, can not be made IRRELEVANT just because you don’t like the picture that forms when you’re forced to look at the WHOLE picture instead of just willfully condensing the frame to just the part you like or want to talk about.

And to bring it all home, looping back up to what I opened with:

Do you know how often I hear people say shit about the length of my posts or the rambling nature or in various ways act INCONVENIENCED by various things about how they have to interact with my posts when that interaction itself is still completely voluntary?

Taking in everything I said in this post, the way it all interconnects and informs other things, I’d like to ask anyone who has ever objected to some post somewhere or derided one because of something as ultimately nonconsequential as the length of it, something where its literally just like....scroll a few more seconds......do you apply the same energy and scrutiny to posts that cross your dash that are filled with various things like racism, transphobia, rape or pedophilia fetishization or abuse apologism, or do you let that slide by without acknowledgment before looking at a post that makes you sigh because of how fucking LONG it was and think...this, THIS is what I’m gonna choose to speak up about?

Because that’s ultimately what this is all about. Here’s the kicker with everything I said....my life could be better, I want it to be better, from the biggest aspects of it and pain issues to stuff just like.....the fandom communities I immerse myself in for my own attempts at having something to counterbalance real life stress. But at the end of the day, there’s no my life sucks or my life rocks....its still just...my life. And it has its good as well as its bad, and that ultimately hails from my choices, and the fact that like....even while there are choices I literally CAN’T make, I can be comfortable with the ones I DO make.

And so like......would my life be easier in some respects now if I’d gone back to school and gotten a diploma and had more job opportunities available to me? Yeah, for sure. But that awareness doesn’t mean I regret my choice NOT to go back to school when I DID have more opportunities for that, because the acting career I had at those times instead was the choice I made, with intent, and its one I’m still glad for making. Those experiences still matter, still meant something and still mean something to me.

And do I wish that I’d coped with what happened to me in college in different, healthier ways that would have given me more tools for how I interact with my trauma and who I became after that, rather than how I did? Yeah, sometimes, for sure. But not without losing my awareness that the choices I did make at the time were not made in a vacuum, and can not be edited in hindsight....there were reasons I made them, reasons that were informed by everything that had happened to me previously and stemmed from a lot of things I still didn’t have control over and as such always placed a cap on the range of choices that were available to me back then, because there’s a difference between choices that exist in theory versus choices that exist as something that might viably be chosen at a particular place and time.

The world is big and complicated. Life is big and complicated. WE are big and complicated. And nothing about understanding any of that is IMO benefited by putting most of our effort into SHRINKING our worldviews, constructing artificial frames that don’t just focus us in on specific aspects of it for finite periods but attempt to then treat that as its own individual thing utterly disconnected from anything else that might be going on OUTSIDE that picture frame.

So if you’ve read this far and you’ve taken anything away from this big long rambling post that could be a lot shorter, could be a lot less rambling, but could also just not have been posted at all and I’d rather have it exist in this form than let everything in it go unsaid.....

My request would be that your takeaway be this: to look at your choices in regards to some specific finite interaction in even just one of your fandoms, and see what happens when you open the frame back up. If you widen the scope. If you let other things into the picture. Are you still comfortable with the choices you make or don’t make in light of THAT image, are they any different from the ones you made or would have made when keeping things as small and contained in your awareness as possible, just because that was easier for you to conceptualize, easier to navigate around, just....less COMPLICATED?

Because things aren’t made less complicated just by the mere fact of WANTING them to be.

And if your choices are more born of what you’d say or do IF the world were as finite or as limited as its sometimes easier to pretend it is......is that really the approach you want to go with and the reasoning you want to stand by?

And similarly, if there are choices you make and that in ORDER for you to feel comfortable making them, you feel a need to tighten your focus or shrink your worldview around one specific element or area and leave out all the rest and only then are you truly comfortable with doing or saying something, like......

Its important to remember that this isn’t the only option you have for making yourself more comfortable with things you say or do or think, or even just have in the past.

The other perfectly viable option exists: you can simply....make different choices.

#this is a post #im not entirely sure how else to describe it #just that it is not necessarily the post that it looks like beneath the cut that it looks like above the cut #so all I've got is: this has been a post #make of it what you will #lololol #its....whatever #ANYWHO

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