The best realisation I’ve had this week. Don’t tell Starscream.

i think about this one so fucking often i had to clip it

2023 -> 2024

Anyway here’s a poem I wrote about my cat

After “Do not stand at my grave and weep”, author disputed:

Do not stand at your bowl and meow. I gave you food. It’s in there now. I feed you at the dawning light, I feed you at the fall of night. I feed you kibbles mixed with meat And wet food for a special treat. I feed you even though you scoff At all the food within your trough. I feed you and still yet you yell Like as a beast from deepest hell. Do not stand at your bowl and cry. I gave you food. You will not die.

I love u angry female characters. I love u deeply misunderstood and problematic female characters. I love u cold hearted and sharp female characters. I love you prideful and reckless female characters. I love u unbeautifly destructive female characters. I love u prickly and snarky female characters. not everyone understands u but I do and I'm listening

favourite afk journey heroes: vala

If any of y’all didn’t know, there’s a free online library, aka

https://openlibrary.org/

and I found like, twelve ebooks I’ve been wanting to read on there, and blasted through like three of them during the course of a boring-ass shift.

interesting how transmascs & transfems alike think losing weight is the answer to pass as our chosen gender.... almost as if fat people are never Truly afforded a passing gender regardless of trans status. as fat people we are never Truly seen as Men or Women. anyway fuck that notion & if u think u need to lose weight to pass that's the devil talking

I really don't know how to explain to people that supporting gender liberation (liberation for trans people, liberation for gnc people, liberation from all oppressive gender roles) means you have to be able to see someone you think is cis "crossdressing" and be cool about it. You have to be able to see someone presenting in a way that doesn't make sense to you and not interrogate them about their identity. You have to be able to hear someone express a gender identity you don't understand and go "Huh! Neat," and go about your business. If you truly want gender liberation for all then you have to stop trying to exert control over other people's genders, period.

Bro is GORGEOUS 👹

gnawing on the bars of my enclosure

I saw a post a few days ago which of course I’ll never find again.  It was a politics-related tweet that was basically saying that as more women under 40 go into politics, it is inevitable that people will weaponize nude photos/sexts/things they did online when they were 20 against them (not to say this hasn’t already happened, just that it will happen more and more).  And we collectively need to get a lot firmer and better at saying “This is irrelevant, a huge number of women have done this, and it shouldn’t matter to her reputation or career” or else the general effect will be to deter women who have ever done anything sexual on the internet (sending a racy photo to a partner, or writing spicy fanfic) from entering politics at all.  

And it’s not just about politics.  More and more published authors, for instance, have also written fanfic, but a combination of factors (including AO3’s existence) means it’s easier to track those things down now and weaponize them.  If we want to have aspiring politicians and authors not just say “ugh well I guess I’ll never publish anything/never hold public office because I don’t want to deal with the harassment”, we need to get louder and clearer about saying that having done or written about sexual things is normal and common and doesn’t impact a person’s worth or reputation or skill in a totally different field.    

Think really hard about the general climate that’s being created when women, LGBT+ people, and POC, are made to feel ashamed and afraid if they decide to speak up that someone is going to dredge up something they said online, or a photo they took, and use it to try and discredit them.  Who exactly benefits from that?  Does the world feel safer if a person who wrote a darkfic a decade or two ago doesn’t get their next novel published? Or if a woman who sent nude pics to her boyfriend is forced to resign from office because he leaked them to the public? Do you think that this type of extremely broad net is only going to catch the “bad” people and leave the “good” ones unscathed? Are publishers going to start saying “hm the last time we published a book by someone who was a fanfic author, it turned into a giant publicity disaster, but we’ll definitely take a chance on the next one who comes along!” Which voices are at risk of being drowned out by this environment of fear?

Because if the only answer that comes out of this is “women, LGBT+ people, and POC will inevitably get trashed for anything even remotely sexual they do in public (and some things they did in private),” the world is a poorer place for it.  

This guy in my town owns a rug store, and he’s always changing his sign out front but he’s also the biggest Dad in the world so his jokes are awful but brilliant

The weirdest guy I ever met in a church was this boy who referred to “Buzz Aldrin and his husband” going to the moon. I was completely baffled, and when I asked if he’d misspoken, he got really angry and accused me of being deliberately ignorant of the facts. It turned out that he was somehow comvinced that Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong were married. It took five Wikipedia articles to convince him otherwise.

Speaking of therapy, I say, as though we're old friends, and you're not a stranger trapped in this metaphorical elevator with me and you can hear the suspension wires starting to fray.

I've been doing a lot of work recently that's focused on imposter syndrome and the feeling that no matter how well or how much I do, I'm not good enough. That I'm somehow tricking everyone into thinking my work is actually good.

Some days it's a minor niggle in my head that I can gentle and soothe with logic and affirmations. Or smother, depending on the mood. Other times it's loud and all-consuming and the mental anguish it causes me is so real I can feel it twitching in my muscles. This desperate fight-or-flight instinct with nowhere to go and nothing to fight but myself.

Anyway, because I'm several types of Mentally Unwell™, I was switching between workshop sheets ahead of next week. Filling in different forms. (Trying to get a good grade in therapy) And I got my "recognize your harmful ADHD coping mechanisms" worksheet mixed in with the "you're not actually lying to people, you just feel like you are because your brain is full of weasels" worksheet, and seeing them side by side made something go topsy turvy in my head, and I just had to sit and breathe for a couple of minutes until the urge to scream passed. Because it clicked, it all suddenly clicked.

The reason the imposter syndrome workshops and therapy sessions aren't sticking was because I do routinely trick people into thinking I'm someone I'm not.

Because I'm masking my ADHD for their convenience.

I've always known there was something wrong with me. My neurotypical peers made it abundantly clear I didn't fit in or was failing in some way I couldn't see nor remedy, no matter how hard I tried.

So I compressed myself into a workaholic box of hyper-competence in the hopes they'd stop noticing the flaws and exploit like me instead. And then subsequently lived with the daily fear that if they looked too close, they'd realize I'm a monumental fuck up with enough personal baggage to block the Suez Canal.

If you ever need someone to burn themselves to ashes for your comfort and convenience, I'm your gal.

Or I used to. Until I had a bit of a breakdown, and the rubber band holding my brain together snapped and pinged off into the stratosphere, never to be seen again.

Unfortunately, the trauma of living like that didn't also fuck off and instead left a gaping maw where my personality ought to be, so now I get to deal with that aftermath.

And it's that aftermath that's affecting the imposter syndrome shit. Because yes, I am hyper-competent and good at what I do-- but it doesn't feel real because that is how I mask.

And the truly frustrating thing is I am good at what I do. I am not pretending. I worked hard to be good at this. It just feels like I'm dicking around because 90% of my personality turns out to be trauma masquerading as humor in a trenchcoat, and having people genuinely like something weird I'm doing is so foreign my brain has decided it's just another form of masking.

I'm pretending to be a good author so people will think I'm a good author, and my brain thinks we are in Danger of being found out. We are in Danger, and writing is Dangerous because then people will know I'm Weird and not whatever palatable version I've presented myself as for their NT sensibilities.

Like the neurotic vampire with a raging praise kink wasn't an obvious giveaway.

Anyway. I got nothing else. Thanks for listening.

I'm going to go be very normal in another room and not stare into the abyss of my own soul for a bit.

We are a small Canadian stim toy business run by two autistic women.

Many places that sell stim toys are focused on the needs and experiences of parents of young autistic children.  Here at FlappyHappy, autistic needs and voices are centred over caregivers.  Our goal is to focus on autistic adults since so many shops market towards children and it can feel infantalizing. Our stim toys are also great for people living with trauma, ADHD, chronic pain, anxiety, or other needs! We want you to know that it’s okay to stim. It’s more than okay actually! If you benefit from stim toys, then they are for you!

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