#autism #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
#autism #Star Trek #DS9 #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #art #fanart #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what #ableism cw? #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
One absolutely hilarious part of human existence is the repeated incidents of spicy bananas. People who have lived their entire lives up to this point just assuming that a specific fruit or vegetable is supposed to taste bitter, tangy, or spicy, having no fucking idea that all this time, they’ve been allergic to this plant. Because how would they have known? You learn what things taste like by tasting them, nobody’s going to tell you that bananas are supposed to be one of the mildest flavours out there. And people already eat so many things that taste hot, bitter, tangy and tart! Because they like how that kind of thing tastes like!
You can just happily much on a plant, thinking “ah, this angry plant tastes sharp because it hates me. Much like all the other sharp angry plants that people eat because they like the sharp”, and it wouldn’t cross their mind to think that the plant just hates you, specifically.
My best friend’s husband didn’t realize he was colorblind until after they were married in their mid-twenties and she watched him run a stop sign that was in front of a big bush. He’d lived his entire life not knowing. So when they did some tests and realized “hey, you’re super colorblind,” he got to thinking, it’s X-linked, right? Which means it had to have come from Mom’s side of the family, so he started digging and asked his mom’s dad, and Grampa was like “Well that would explain a lot, I suppose. I kind of thought your grandma was just pulling my leg about the tomatoes.”
Because Grandma had apparently banned him early on from picking the tomatoes in the garden because he was constantly coming in with unripe ones, and he thought she was just being super nitpicky about it. This was a lifelong family joke, that Grandpa couldn’t tell a ripe tomato to save his life, and nobody ever stopped to wonder if maybe he and the grandson who routinely colored the grass red on his drawings might have something going on with their ability to see red and green as distinct colors.
i thought aloe vera gel was SUPPOSED TO burn your skin. like how rubbing alcohol burns when applied to a cut. figured that everyone else was just better at gritting their teeth and bearing the full body aloe sting than i was. i just didn’t feel like the stinging was worth the mild healing properties aloe had.
yeah… turns out it’s NOT supposed to burn and i was just allergic to aloe
My husband comes from a “weird” family. Like, the whole county knows. “He’s a total weirdo. AAAH THAT’S HIS LAST NAME THAT EXPLAINS IT OKAY NO PROBLEM GO FLY FREE DUDE WE LOVE YOU!!” The family’s just a bunch of freaks, like the Addams Family meets the Beverly Hillbillies. I ADORE them.
It was celebrated because they’re so valuable to the local community. This one sells meticulously grown veggies at the farmer’s market, then hisses at you for suggesting they wear soemthing that isn’t tie-dyed. That kid was in kindergarten before she said her first word, and that’s cool because her older sister translated for her NO THANK YOU TEACHER WE DO NOT NEED A DOCTOR THAT IS NORMAL FOR THIS FAMILY GO AWAY. She’s got two quiet kids of her own now and WE STILL DO NOT NEED A DOCTOR GO AWAY. That uncle knows everything there is to know about every car engine ever, and he never wears shoes with laces because he literally never worked out how to tie them (He’s 60). He’s also the top mechanic in his town and makes serious dough that put his super-smart daughter through college, and now she’s an ace veterinarian who pterodactyl screams at acrylic sweaters and keeps everyone’s pets alive. I shit you not, the family matriarch gets excited for tax season every year and begs everyone to bring her their taxes so she can MATH at them. It’s her freaking hobby.
Whatever. They’re in OUR family. It’s totally normal for us. The family’s just full of freaks, that’s all. We encourage our people to go with their strengths and use their skills to make our little corner of the world a nicer place to live in, then teach them how to manage the difficult parts of the world because we all had to learn to do it ourselves. “Because this family’s full of people just as freaky as you. You’re one of us.”
No, most of them don’t go to college. It’s rural Illinois, of course they don’t. Lots of them end up in specialized trades, like electricians or farmers, and they always kick ass at it. They tend towards jobs that require a lot of focus, and attention to detal, and very specific, in-depth knowledge that is almost useless outside of whatever field they’re in. We’re mostly spread between two or three small towns in Illinois, and I do not think these three towns would function without my husband’s family fixing and growing everything they do.
One of our cousins’ kids got diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder a few years ago. His now-ex-wife insisted that something was wrong and that our cousin was a jerk for not caring enough to notice. The family reacted with “He’s fine, it’s normal, we all did that when we were his age… wait… shit… what do you mean it’s genetic?”
It turns out that like 70% of my husband’s side of the family is autistic as fuck. We’re talking about grandmothers. Uncles. Cousins. People are in their 70s just now figuring out why they are how they are.
They’re just so famously weird in our community that they attract the other weird people as partners, and then they have weird little kids, and no one really looks twice. A bunch of the people (including me) who married in were informally adopted first. “Oh, your parents punished you for this behavior? We all do that here. Come to the barbecue!” Two years later, I had their last name and was helping watch their adorable little handflappy babies.
We’ve got an entire gene pool over here of autistic people thriving so well that no one noticed we were all autistic.
Also, that cousin got RID of his wife when she started talking about how “tragic” their son’s autism is. Their son is a perfectly normal child in our family and will be raised as such. We joke now that when something needs fixed, “Oh, just call Uncle So-and-So, he’ll autism at it.”’
Beautiful, wonderful story, no notes (except maybe asking if there’s room for one more at the dinner table).
Anyway, back to the original post, I am in deep gratitude for it, because it’s the only reason I thought to wonder if chickpeas are supposed to be spicy.
(Hint: Apparently they’re not. The genetic lottery locked the good tasting falafel and hummas behind an allergy wall.)
#that one post with the thing #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #food #allergies #autism #PSA #embarrassment squick #poison cw? #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
the autism mood of never knowing when its “your turn” in a convo so you say the first word of your sentence about 5 times before you actually get to speak
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#one of the most relatable posts to ever be written #autism #that excuse for communication called speech #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
person announcing the show: “now i don’t want to see any heckling tonight, no racism, no sexism… none of the isms”
person in crowd: “what about autism?”
announcer: “yeah autism is fine”
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#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #the humour of my people #autism #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
i might just be autistic but data entry fucking rules dudes you just. enter the data. you take the data and you plug it in. then what? who knows! who cares. the data. has been entered. what next? buddy you’re not gonna believe this it’s more fucking data. excel used to be my enemy but now she is my best friend
I think a lot of people spent their childhoods being very deliberately forced out of their comfort zones by parents / teachers / whomever in a way that was just deeply unpleasant and degrading and so, when they reach young adulthood and are finally allowed real control over their lives, become set on only doing things they know they’re comfortable with forever. that’s a really important thing to be able to do, especially if you’re so used to having your boundaries routinely ignored that you aren’t even certain what you like vs what you can bear, so I absolutely see why a person would have a negative reaction to being told that discomfort is good: it can very easily sound like being told that all that work they’ve been doing to prioritze their needs for the first time ever is Bad and Selfish, actually. and to that I will say two things:
one: as long as you aren’t hurting or, like, being a dick to anyone, just staying in your comfort zone isn’t an immoral action. if you just want to read one type of book (or just fanfiction), or just eat one type of food, or just watch one type of movie, or not go to new types of social events, you aren’t being a bad person for that, and if people say that, they are soundly wrong and just trying to get a self-righteousness kick.
two: trying new things because you want to expand yourself feels a hell of a lot different than trying new things because you’re being forced to. you’ll feel better about trying new foods if you know you have a back up familiar one in case you can’t stomach the new one, it’s easier to read new books if you can experiment with audio versions or reading it in little five-page chunks by yourself, you can breathe a lot easier going somewhere new if you aren’t chained there for three hours because your parent is your ride home, etc.
tl;dr: new things are good. I get why you might not want to try new things, and that’s fine, but it’s also more comfortable to try new things as an adult with your own agency so, yeah, what have you got to lose by trying a weird old art film?
It’s really important to recognize that the negative reaction you might have to being forced into something new might make your reaction much worse than if you had the no-pressure option to explore it on your own. I always try new foods when no one is around, or only some few close friends I trust on that level, because I feel judged for being a picky eater – even if people aren’t *actually* judging me, I feel judged anyways and the pressure makes the whole experience unpleasant and I’m less likely to enjoy the food
It’s also important to recognize that sometimes, newness, in and of itself, can trigger a disgust reaction. For this reason, when i’m genuinely trying some new food/drink, I take a small bite/sip or two to get over the initial “this is new and new is bad ew ew ew” reaction, and then take the next bite/sip to actually evaluate how I feel about the flavor/texture/etc. Even when i don’t end up liking the food, this often takes a food I’d be super grossed out by and moves it closer to the “eh i simply don’t like it” category.
huge part of being autistic (and why that is Literally Traumatizing) is that your comfort levels and sensory experiences are so out of touch with everyone else’s that you’re just routinely subjected to awful, terrifying, torturous stuff as a kid and you are told “no one likes this, everyone is scared sometimes, but you just have to do it”
because the adults in your life think you’re experiencing a normal, bearable level of discomfort? because that’s what they themselves would experience, in your situation?
And you have never experienced being another person, so you think you are experiencing a normal, bearable level of discomfort, and just over-reacting to it.
The part that really digs itself into your psyche is the certainty that you can’t expect the world to be kind to you. That suffering so much is just and even necessary. The feeling that the whole world will see you in excruciating distress and think it’s unnecessary to help you, just, scars some deep primal part of your brain
it me
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#as does this‚ in a way #and yeah‚ consent matters #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #interesting #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what #autism #(…I don’t have a dedicated tag for immune bullshit as such‚ but that bit in the comments about) #(”the adults in your life think you’re experiencing a normal‚ bearable level of discomfort because that’s what they themselves would”) #(sure is a thing)
one thing you need to know about me is that i am constantly having insane galaxy genius ancient greek philosopher level thoughts about everything ever all the time but before leaving my mouth they get filtered through seven layers of autism and come out sounding like a youtube comment made by a nine year old
Is that what that is?!? Is that why i cant vocalize the hot thoughts?
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#god I fucking know right #fucking hate the autism filter #(the layer of having to verbalise your thoughts in the first place is one thing) #(but the layer where *even when you know exactly what words you intend to say‚ your mouth won’t repeat them verbatim*? uggghhhh) #that excuse for communication called speech #autism #relatable
#1 – 2. I don’t know‚ why can’t you #3 – 5. fast-food restaurants (and also grocery stores) #no you don’t have to pay‚ and it weirds us out when you ask our permission to use the restroom #you *do* have to ask for water because we’re supposed to check that you’re filling your cup with water and not soda #although the probability of getting an employee who doesn’t give a shit about that is fairly high #(many people buy bottled water from us and I look down on them) #(there is a water fountain (with cups!) Right There) #really almost any non-tiny store and some of the tiny ones will have public bathrooms #6. masks are a solution to many of life’s problems #(let’s face it‚ it’s ragweed season‚ the air wasn’t going to be breathable anyway) #(also I do hear vehicle electrification is gaining a good foothold) #(including the buses) #7. I don’t live in cities because they exist in a state of constant sensory overload #good luck re-designing that #no‚ really‚ I wish you luck #(in the cities I’ve visited‚ though‚ the things I listed above were still true) #(is this‚ like‚ an America thing?) #(no that can’t be right‚ the American cities I’ve visited weren’t like this and also this guy’s username is albertvancouver) #(what the hell is going on out in Vancouver) #(maybe move to Kitchener‚ you poor thing) #(you already have right-of-abode there) #(life doesn’t have to be like this) #tag rambles #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #our home and cherished land #autism #venting cw #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what #scrupulosity cw? #illness tw?
ramming into the back of the minivan with the autism awareness sticker like are you aware of me now sandra
WITNESS ME [totals my shitty honda]
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#I didn’t actually laugh aloud but it still amused me enough to reblog #((this amusement not to be taken as expressing an opinion regarding the statement itself)) #autism