Anghraine

This isn't really discourse (at least, I hope not!). I really wanted to keep backing up my Tumblr posts and keeping a lot of my content over here and linking or something, but a few months ago, I ran into a single terrible problem with Dreamwidth that I never before thought about.

Even the paid premium accounts max out at 2000 tags :(

"But Elizabeth," you might say, "you don't even use tags for commentary over here, just for organization. You shouldn't need more than two thousand, surely."

And to this I would say: "shut up."

I was already deleting less essential tags to get them below 1999—for instance, extremely minor Guild Wars 2 characters I had dutifully tagged even though I suspect vanishingly few of you have the slightest interest in even major GW2 characters/ships like Marjory/Kasmeer (my beloved MMORPG f/f ship canonized in 2013; if ArenaNet doesn't animate their wedding I will revolt harder than Separatists in Ascalon), much less a barely-named character who shows up in one chapter of a 70k stylistically odd and niche GW2 fanfic. I used to tack more generally, but I don't want to give up things like my Gondor-specific tag ... or my aasimar tag ... but after so long the tags have definitely accumulated. And I don't think you can even pay for a higher number of tags than the 2000 from the premium account (which I would do! take my money, Dreamwidth!).

Anyway, at this point, any post that uses a new tag involves combing through my old tags and making decisions about what tags are really essential and it pains my soul. :( :(

It feels a bit silly to measure time by fanfic, but according to AO3, it’s been over ten and a half years (!!!!!!!!!) since I finished First Impressions.

I’m just … it doesn’t feel recent, but it certainly doesn’t feel like that long, yet it was one of the last things I did in my all-Austen-fandom-all-the-time phase, before I jumped into SW fandom. And my earliest SW fics are ten years old now (somehow???).

But idk, it seems so strange.

Tagged: #my birthday is in ten days and i'm both looking forward to it and feeling a bit weird about it this year #idk i feel like i should be more ~accomplished at this point in my life #or more something #maybe because the things people point to as accomplishments whenever i mention it #are pretty far back too #in any case objective lengths of time just don't match up with how the passage of time feels and it's weird #might be different if my best friend were here (he was born 11 days after me) but we haven't seen each other for over a year #/sigh

Mental health complaining:

One of the things about having bipolar II + autism + generalized anxiety is that … sometimes, it feels like it shouldn’t be a big deal, and maybe is hardly even a thing (or things, rather). There are people with actual mania and/or major problems with “functioning” and/or full-on panic attacks, so making a fuss is just ignoring the people who have real problems. (It doesn’t really help that there’s a lot of rhetoric around them that says pretty much exactly that, especially with regard to autism.)

But also, sometimes the bipolar-autistic-anxious stew is so overpowering and disruptive that when people go on about how it’s all quite mild, really, not even disabilities as such, it sounds about as batshit as what’s going on in my head.

So, on the one hand: I have the milder forms of everything, am not truly disabled, am probably taking attention from people with Real Problems, and should be much more able to cope and do normal person things.

On the other hand: I have a stack of mutually reinforcing disorders, large dosages, a history of mental breakdowns + there are a lot of Normal People Things I simply can’t do or can only do to a very limited extent. I am a literally crazy person.

End result: I feel even crazier than I was already!

Tagged: #my psychiatrist pointed out that it's already taking more than the usual max dosages to keep me stable #(in an unrelated conversation) #and yet part of me is thinking... do i have real problems??? #obviously i don't /really/ think that but it is a daily tug-of-war in my head #between 'wtf? i'm bipolar AND autistic AND severely anxious of course i have real problems' #and '...but other people have it worse so i should really be more competent than i am...' #meh #anyway i cherish a special resentment against people who act like hypomania is just funtimes and sparkles #+ ones who say this kind of autism is just being awkward and intense about hobbies #ughhhhh

Today: showered etc, loaded and ran my dishwasher, got more mats brushed out of my hair (halfway done!), returned a call for a follow-up appointment, and got my voicemail set up in three minutes after five years of putting it off.

Tagged: #i'm going to post materials for my students too #and then idk #i very very seriously need to work on this thing for my committee but also... meh

Apart from outright bigotry and viciousness, there are few Tumblr trends I find more annoying than tagging anything related to social justice as #compassion fatigue. I don't know how widespread it is, but it's happened enough on my posts (even fandom posts that only vaguely touch on actual social justice) from enough different people that it doesn't seem like a fluke.

And I haaaaate it. That is not what "compassion fatigue" is about and characterizing any allusion to the existence of societal inequality as a matter of compassion fatigue is incredibly gross, IMO. Most people who have used the tag on reblogs of my posts do it when reblogging posts about autism specifically, though the most recent was completely unrelated to that, and it's approaching auto-block territory.

D:

jubaah responded to this post:

SAAAAAAME

beatrice_otter said:

Yes, this!

[ETA 5/9/2024: I'm not sure if I responded at the time—I didn't want to harp too much on this because I didn't want my post to be appropriated for anti-neurodivergence rhetoric or even anti-self diagnosis in an overly sweeping way. I was just frustrated with what seemed like blatantly allistic people cosplaying autism and my apparent inability to get across the actual severity of autistic symptoms in a way that could be understood as distinct from typical human variances.]

Angst is in scare quotes because it's just silly.

But anyway, I have this argument about how:

1) Historical context is profoundly important to consider when engaging with early modern literature and
2) This lens should not take precedence over the internal elements of a text and
3) Historicist critics should not only attend to the powerful influence of cultural context on early modern literature but also to the effects of critics' own cultural contexts, cultural anxieties etc on their literary analysis and their understanding of the periods they study and
4) It is not actually possible to understand your present "historical moment" and its impact on you with the same perspective you have on an era long past like early modern England because of uhhhh the nature of linear time and
5) You should still try.

The angst is that my first phrasing was "This is not actually possible because of the limitations of the space-time continuum" and then I was like "I don't think this is the project for referencing space-time or even the limitations of linear time lmao" and then I was like "I guess I could just reference 'human' limitations" and then I was like "but does that obscure the matter of chronological perspective that I'm trying to get at" and then I was like "this is a tangent of a tangent about at least trying to put in a modicum of critical thought about how you might be affected by your own culture and preconceptions so you're not a 21st-century version of the 1890s critics whining about the indelicacy of early modern drama..."

Now I kind of want to put the space-time continuum back.

I guess, theoretically, it's possible that there are allistic people who have some acceptable, non-shitty reason for their strong opinions about the removal of Asperger's Syndrome as a distinct diagnosis from autism.

But ngl I don't think I have ever seen a rationale that didn't come down to "now the diagnosis includes people who are disabled enough to annoy me but not enough for me to pity them." Maybe with a side implication of "if people who can mask are autistic then autism doesn't mean anything!!!!!"

The legacy of AS is complex and fraught among actual autistic people (especially given that the phasing out of AS for reasons of diagnostic unreliability was followed shortly thereafter by exposés of what an absolute monster Hans Asperger was). But allistic people who are super affronted about autistic people they consider insufficiently disabled are just—why do you care? In what way is this your business? What is the mysterious reason you're so very bothered by the wrong kind of autistic people?

Also, honestly, vanishingly few of these people seem to be a) psychologists in any sense, b) at all familiar with the diagnostic problems with AS vs HFA before the exposés about Hans Asperger's, uh, practices [CW Nazis], and c) sometimes have no idea what Asperger did or what purpose the distinctions between autistic groups served.

I'm personally in a kind of weird position wrt AS altogether because I was diagnosed as an adult and went through various tests over about 10 years between my mid-20s and mid-30s. Even the first suggestion of something related to autism going on with me happened right before the DSM-V was released and I had no involvement in AS-centered communities or anything. The suggestion that I might have AS or HFA didn't surprise me at all, though as a psych major I scrupulously avoided diagnosing myself or anyone else [the psychology students at my uni had been taught that those were The Rules and I've always been deeply concerned with Rules, I'm sure for autism-unrelated reasons]. But I was so overwhelmed by the apparatus of US psychological health care and just how many unfamiliar social interactions and transportation difficulties it involved that it took me a good ten years to navigate it all. I went from a university psychologist I was seeing in undergrad for anxiety/disassociation/depression who went "that sounds like it could be related to autism" to various clinicians repeatedly identifying me as autistic according to the DSM-V to "formally tested and diagnosed with a specialist's recommendation detailing support needs." So I was never actually diagnosed with AS or HFA or whatever, just ASD. The fact that navigating the system was such a lengthy nightmare primarily because of symptoms of autism certainly adds a fillip of irony to the whole thing, though!

A friend of mine was talking about how it took her a long time after her PhD to enjoy reading again, and it was such a relief to hear, because everyone I know is super into their research, and I feel like I could gladly live five years without ever reading another book or article.

At the same time, she now enjoys reading again, so it’s kind of reassuring to think that maybe, someday, I Will Be What I Was.

Also, every time I see some apparently-cool sf/f story going around on Twitter, it’s like … I couldn’t properly read it right now, but I’m looking forwards to the day when I’ll actually want to. Someday, I will be free!

Tagged: #i really do want to read and (kindly) review things that are relevant to my interests #but nothing is relevant to my interests rn #still... the end is in sight. sort of. #at least there is one