Anghraine

tree responded to this post:

i have a different mix of disorders but the exact same thoughts/feelings. and it fucking sucks. <3

I replied:

It does! I appreciate the solidarity, though :)

yavieriel replied to this post:

Ugh, that therapist sounds super unhelpful. Good luck with finding a new one! In theory I would say that if there are multiple therapists available, they should understand a request of "I didn't find [therapist] a good fit, is someone else available?" but I realize in practice that might be less workable.

I replied (on Jan 24th):

Yeah, definitely very unhelpful. I wish I could remember her name so I could specifically request not to have her, lol.

yavieriel responded:

They might have a staff page with pictures and names, if that would help.

tree said (on Jan 23rd):

this is the kind of thing that the "just ask for help!" brigade never seems to understand. it's work and it's hard and it never stops. *solidarity fistbump*

I replied (on Jan 24th):

Exactly!

southsidestory said (on Feb 10th):

I'm bipolar II like you, and I also have PTSD and GAD. EMDR therapy was literally life changing and life saving for my PTSD recovery. But. I've found therapy very minimally helpful for my bipolar. Medication is the only thing that has truly improved my mood swings. So I understand your hesitancy, and also, that last therapist you had sounds incompetent at best and invalidating at worst. I hope you find somebody better! ❤️

I replied (on Feb 17th):

Thank you! And yes, that’s largely my experience—when I had severe disassociative depression, therapy helped some, but it kind of reached a point where the depressive side wasn’t as bad, but nothing except mood stabilizers+antipsychotics really seemed to prevent it. And in general, it’s pretty well under control these days unless there’s some significant strain (as now). I mean, knowing I could snap into cycling at any moment isn’t a fun way to live—even setting ASD and GAD aside—but it’s much better than before, therapist or no therapist.

Re: the last therapist … yeah, exactly. Thanks!

Tagged: #honestly therapy has been most useful when there's some insight that doesn't actually make my symptoms better #but lets me recontextualize them in a way that makes it easier to live with them #i think that's part of the reason i liked my previous psychiatrist so much #even though she wasn't a therapist per se

My uni’s Zoom teaching advice is like “create eye contact with your students :)” and shit, and meanwhile the autism brain is just RED ALERT RED ALERT

They were explicit this semester that not having any synchronous meetings isn’t an option, and of course, not teaching isn’t an option, so … the special hell awaits :)))

Tagged: #accommodations are ... band-aids basically #necessary! when you need them you want them on hand! but there's a wealth of situations they don't cover! #aghhh

I talked a few days ago, under f-lock, about some painful RL experiences around being perceived as deeply boring and incapable of feeling pain (or feeling most emotions, really). And I wanted to make an addendum to that, one that I don’t think really needs the f-lock.

I’ve made many complaints about various fandoms + multifandom spaces and trends over the years, and I still consider most of those complaints valid. Nevertheless, fandom has typically been a much less bleak environment for me.

If someone in fandom finds me boring, they usually do not tell me so, or treat me in a way that makes this apparent. They simply don’t interact with me. And people who do follow me or interact with me don’t do it because of my family’s involvement, or because I’m a package deal with more interesting/attractive/charismatic friends, or because of some other figure in my meatspace life at all. In fandom, none of that matters. At least, it hasn't for me.

Even the followers who don’t particularly care about me as a person are following me for my own sake in some capacity, rather than for the sake of someone else. Sure, some of these will leave if I get super into something they find dull, or stop posting or whatnot, but their interest in my opinions about the thing they’re into is still about my opinions of that thing, or how I express my opinions, or something about my online persona.

And there are also people who don’t share my preoccupation with a current fixation, or don’t find my take on it interesting, and are thus kind of bored, but they like me personally enough to stick around, anyway. This doesn’t usually trigger my “oh no I’m being boring” issues, because if they’re invested enough to stay, despite disinterest in my current thing, they’re evidently still engaged at some level with me.

Beyond that, people in fandom don’t typically lecture me on my general demeanor. It’s happened, but not often. In fact, while fellow fans sometimes express respect for my—let’s say, often rather severe manner of presenting myself and my opinions, they don’t generally act like it is required of me to be that way or that it somehow precludes a capacity to feel. We’re all in fandom because we feel things!

And that’s been very powerful for me. I wasn’t diagnosed as autistic until I was well into my 20s, while I’ve been directly or indirectly excluded or distanced from many RL social circles ever since I was a child. I’ve certainly been treated as if I and the things I care about are objectively dull and emotionally unengaging.

But throughout my entire adult life, there has always been one glaring exception to this. There really was a social sphere in which my experience of others and of myself could be different. There was fandom.

For all of online fandom’s many, many flaws, this has been part of my experience of it from even before I was an adult—in fact, from the time that I made my first post. At the time, I was extremely shy and anxious, so I lurked a lot, and was very worried about breaking some rule somewhere if I actually said anything on the big scary Internet. But I had feelings. I was in high school and I had such feelings.

Many of these were Pride and Prejudice feelings. In high school, I started collecting copies of P&P just so I could read the introductions/editorial content and see what other people thought about it, since nobody I knew IRL cared about it the way I did. This was both my first step into academia proper and a sort of proto-fannish activity. But my Austen feelings were not actually the ones that propelled me into breaking my self-imposed Internet silence and detachment from online communities. A lot of Austen fandom didn’t really seem like my people. I was also into Harry Potter, but HP fandom similarly did not seem like my people.

Actually, speaking of boring other people, I’m going to be really self-indulgent and rewind even further for THE FULL SAGA of what brought me into fandom.

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I am very deeply tired of the posts about how no one is neurotypical actually, everyone is disabled if you think about it, mental disabilities are just poorly conceived associations of traits and you shouldn't limit yourself with a label, blah blah blah.

I get that some of this is spurred on by inaccurate generalizations and assumptions about neurotypical people from neurodivergent people who may not fully understand the variations and nuances of NT experience, or who are simply wrong about certain things, or whose venting is imprecise, etc. But some of this so patently arises out of a visceral resentment at not being centered in every form of disability discourse and advocacy, and refusal to countenance the idea that neurodivergent people a) exist as such and b) are marginalized in a way that many NT people are not.

Some of these posts/commentary are coming from other neurodivergent people with whom I simply disagree. But most that I have seen are pretty clearly written from the POV of someone who knows they would ordinarily be considered neurotypical and resents it in a birdsrightsactivist kind of way:



[A screenshot of a Tweet from the user ProBirdsRights, aka birdsrightsactivist, reading "I am feel uncomfortable when we are not about me?"]

Autism on any scale but the most severe (and that only sometimes) does not seem real to most of the people writing these posts, additionally. That's part of the thing that makes this so frustrating for me, personally. This line of discourse is overwhelmingly dominated by allistic people who all but say everyone is autistic in their own way, while revealing a mind-boggling lack of comprehension or basic empathy about what it is actually like to go through the world as an autistic person. They very evidently regard autistic self-advocates as, at most, slightly eccentric but basically normal, self-indulgent people whom they just find kind of grating for some mysterious reason that they do not interrogate at all.

It's like ... even when I'm ranting (like now!), I try to put things in a careful way, in large part because I am very easy to misunderstand IRL and I don't like it. But so many of these posts that I see being reblogged (by well-intentioned people who just ... don't get it) make me want to start screaming. Often the frustration takes me hours or days to articulate. Sometimes I'm just trying to think of some phrasing other than "shut the fuck up, you don't know what you're talking about." I never say that directly to any individual. But there is so much utterly unearned and misplaced overconfidence in so many of these posts that it's difficult not to feel it.

I reblogged a meme-ish post about different users' possible causes of death if not for modern medicine and added:

The doctor had to break my collarbones to get me out in time to save me (I was basically considered dead at birth because I had a tumor in my throat that kept me from breathing). Also, asthma nearly killed me multiple times until my mid-20s! Fun times.

Tagged: #it's like... okay #i was born a) not breathing b) because of a tumor c) with severe asthma and d) also with autism #let's say that nature did not mean me to thrive #tbh it's why i'm '......' at 'we need to go back to nature!!!!' people

I reblogged a post about sensory overload, and tagged it:

#this is the number one thing i struggle with wrt autism #like #by a mile

There are some valid issues with Neurotypicality Discourse, but ngl, about 80% of the gripes just seem like

A post just crossed my dash about how only the privileged can afford to stay calm. I see these posts … pretty much all the time. And it’s true to an extent.

But that extent is “in some alternate universe where everyone is neurotypical.”

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