Mental Health Post - Tumblr Posts
going thru phone pics and found this thing that was tacked up next to the toaster at my old job, if anyone needs some light toast eating reading material
“If autism isn’t caused by environmental factors and is natural why didn’t we ever see it in the past?”
We did, except it wasn’t called autism it was called “Little Jonathan is a r*tarded halfwit who bangs his head on things and can’t speak so we’re taking him into the middle of the cold dark forest and leaving him there to die.”
also people really seem to think that specifically children with adhd will suddenly become not distractable if you remove distractors like phones which is very much not the case lol they just zone out you idiots.
I wish every autistic person good luck during the holiday season. You don’t owe a hug to anyone. You don’t need to talk to everyone. It’s alright to find quieter and darker spaces if needed and if anybody gives you a hard time for showing your traits, it’s their problem and they need to be responsible.
tbh the worst thing about being a self aware mentally ill person is that people assume that because you understand your illness you’re automatically able to actually apply your knowledge to your life and cure yourself
@paperandpencilsandskips eye contact is not a naturally friendly gesture! it’s well-documented that eye contact is actually a threat in primate behavior, so you’re actually in the right if you hate eye contact. humans, especially “western” civilization, have warped this part of facial language (as well as smiling, also ancestrally hostile) for some reason into expectations of respect and attentiveness.
Pros of having ADHD:
Can track prey for hours without losing focus
Special interest: basket weaving
Always fidgeting - banging rocks together and discovers flint-knabbing
Distracted by berries
Stimming by making noises, discovers the sksksk that lures out squirrels
Can't sleep at night, great at guarding the cave while family sleeps
Sensitive senses means discovering and refusing to eat rotten/poisonous food
Sees bird eat nut - impulsively tries it too and discovers that nuts taste good
Cons of having ADHD:
Can't do homework
Impulse buys
Can't use a calendar
Can't sit still in classroom
i cannot stress the importance of letting yourself be autistic
not just the good parts, not the parts that are met with an “aw, that’s a good autistic trait, so it’s ok!”
no. fuck that. you’re autistic, and as long as you’re not hurting anyone (including yourself), do whatever the fuck you need to in order to have your needs met and feel comfortable.
it sounds harsh, but sometimes it needs to be: fuck other peoples’ feelings. they are not the top priority in your life, you are.
Am I Worth It?
I know some of you worry that your life is not a net gain for our world. You worry if your existence is worthwhile in terms of bringing forth goodness and balance. If just being a living human in our modern context is immoral. If the Earth will gain a return on its investment for the air you breathe and the food you eat.
But existence just doesn't work that way.
Life doesn't work that way.
You aren't an investment and can’t be evaluated as such.
You weren't a calculated risk aimed at some form of profit.
You didn’t invent the processes of life that brought you here nor can you edit them.
You certainly didn’t choose what sort of lifeform to be.
Unless you photosynthesize, you're living off of other organisms. You didn't create this system. No one asked you to sign on to this fact. Life exists in myriad forms and its existence is its own justification. There is no "best" way to do it or "ideal model" for the planet. We are temporary. The planet is temporary. What is ideal for one species is less than ideal for another.
This isn't me suggesting we all take our hands off the controls of our lives and shrug. Our choices absolutely have weight. There is balance to be achieved and I think it should be our task to seek it.
I imagine these issues all feel different for humans because of our executive function/agency. We think about patterns and the big picture. We create systems. We impose order. We fall into the trap of thinking of reality as a machine. But weighing the value of our fundamental existence and our life-minutes isn't like finding the most efficient way to load the dishwasher.
There is no perfect version of ourselves or our world to achieve.
I think we should lay our hands lightly on the things we can influence and press gently toward our values. We should do this within the vital constraints of honoring our own limitations, happiness, and mental/physical wellbeing. We shouldn't dash ourselves against our hopes for a better world.
In the scales of my judgement, the quiet, gentle, tender moments deserve as much (or more) attention as our dramatic, strenuous, industrious moments.
Lives are mostly quiet, small, fleeting things and it feels like a mistake to spend them wishing instead that we were huge, enduring, planet-shaping things.
Context.
Acceptance.
Cultivate love for what is and hope for what could be, all while sparing a bit of awe and gratitude for the massive, unknowable, unlikely forces that culminated with your own odd, unique, singular presence on this planet.
Yes, own the small concrete good you can do, but reject the idea that the fate of the world is in your hands. Reject the idea that you need to justify the breaths you inherited from natural systems older than we can imagine.
Understand that not even the fate of this fleeting moment is in your hands. Yet, you should endeavor to love this moment and, by doing so, learn to love yourself.
Challenge your own guilt about things you do not control.
Tell it to hush.
No one chooses exhaustion or despair.
No one chooses pain or abuse.
No one chooses anxiety or illness.
You didn't invite these things and they don't define you, but I am so proud of you for enduring them.
one of my beloved friends (very autism) was in.. not denial but ignorance sounds mean. but that abt themself last time you brought up the raads r test so i sent it to the gc (full of autism) and they were like psh. fake test no one could get below 100. they know now but i think about it so much
The thing is. When you take the autism test. And you see your score is in the 100 to 160 range. You think. Oh this is probably the middle? Middle autism. Tinge of autism. Your relatives calling you bright but shy autism. Just a whiff of autism. And then you see the score ranges. And you go. This test is lying to me there is absolutely no way the majority of people score under 65. The 65 number is such a low cutoff and so many of these experiences are clearly universal a score under 65 is something they made up in a lab. People who score under 65 are obviously scoring just under that mark from 59 to 64 and they’re also obviously lying or purposely misrepresenting their experiences as less severe than they are. And then you find out there are real people who get a 20 or 30 or 7 on it. And you go. Ah
The “Social Grease” cheats for the socially anxious, Autistic people, and anyone else who needs it.
I had a medium length conversation with a Discord friend today, and my other friends all said it was good advice so here goes.
Friend L, who started the conversation, is nervous about going to a knitting group for the first time. He was nervous about fitting in socially with the group, which is a really VALID concern for literally anyone trying a group for the first time.
It’s especially a concern for us Socially Anxious and Neurodivergant folks, especially with ‘openly queer and disabled’ layers on top, so I really grok where he’s coming from. As I fall into most of those categories myself (it’s harder to peg me as queer right away but all the others are a big huge checkmark) it turned out I had some advice to give.
Tips:
The ULTIMATE THING that these tips revolve around: Remember you can leave, remember you can leave, remember you can leave at any. time. at. all.
Let me reiterate: This is not school. This is not work. This is not a grocery store run where you have to get food for the week before you can go home. You can leave at any time with any excuse.
That being said, having the excuses on hand is VERY useful and helps. Tips below the cut!
Keep reading
I'm at the autism. I'm at the adhd. I'm at the combination autism and adhd.
Whenever I start to fall down the doubt spiral of ADHD doom (“but what if I don’t have ADHD, what if I’m actually just a terrible person who doesn’t try hard enough and who somehow accidentally managed to manipulate a specialist into thinking I have ADHD?”) I like to take ADHD “tests” to remind myself that yeah, actually, my brain is 13 trash fires masquerading as 12 feral cats in a trench coat and that actually, my ADHD is both
a) pretty severe and
b) entirely unmedicated due to my physical health being the equivalent of a meteor strike masquerading as 13 trash fires.
Anyway, this one has a cool pie chart with colors which I found quite helpful compared to the usual number scales. But also, lmao, help…
Edit: link for anyone that wants it. (This is obviously not a complete or comprehensive diagnostic tool. I just thought the way it was laid out was cool and way more accessible compared to others I’ve seen in the past.)
brb gonna go on a spiral thinking abt this all weekend (bc i think its insanely true)
adhd is so embarrassing ur basically like “I have to have fun right the fuck now or I’m throwing myself off the roof” 90% of the time and you also have very little control over this
about adhd
it concerns me that people really don’t know that adhd isn’t a personality type or behavioral problem.
adhd isn’t someone who’s personality is driven by fun and disorder.
adhd is someone who’s brain goes all over the place looking for dopamine, because it doesn’t make or register enough of it, and when it finds a source of dopamine, it hyperfixates on it. it’s about deregulation of attention as well as emotions.
it’s not a person who can’t behave. a person with adhd can look like a lot of things. misconceptions about what adhd looks like kept me from even looking for a diagnosis, and it also kept myself and others (professionals, even) from taking my suspicions seriously.
everyone’s encouraged to reblog, but if you don’t have adhd, keep your additions to the tags.
grabbing myself by the scruff of the neck and forcing myself to at least skim read a longform post or piece of text that i just scrolled past despite thinking it sounded interesting because it's "too long" i will NOT contribute to my own attention deficiency and limit my general knowledge and critical thinking skills by needing information spoonfed to me in bitesize pieces to be able to digest it i will NOT
Thinking about the dichotomy of "I feel uncomfortable/triggered in the presence of x/y/z environments I would like to be someplace without that" that I constantly see online and when I tell my therapist I really get uncomfortable when people raise their voices around me even if they aren't actually mad and her response of "you can only control your own reactions and emotions, it's not really fair to police others on how they should exist in your presence" and honestly it sucks to hear but she's right.. it's good to have people be conscientious of what triggers you but really it's up to us to do the hard work of building that emotional resilience. The idea of people around me having to be hypervigilant of what they say and do lest I start getting dysregulated does not sound fun at all, I want people to feel comfortable being themselves around me and that means training my dumb lizard brain to chill tf out. Living in a constant state of avoidance sucks ass for everyone involved.
If you don’t know your score, take the test here
