I’m currently reading ‘Unmasking Autism’ by @drdemonprince. My favourite quote from it so far is

“When you’re trapped under the mask, all love feels conditional.” 

This one hit deeeep for me.

Even since primary school I was praised and even awarded for how ‘kind’ I was. However, I never felt as though I deserved the praise I got. It felt like my kindness didn’t come from a kind heart. Or a good nature. It came from a battle for survival. A desperate need for attention and acceptance.

In primary school I tried to make friends with my classmates but they all fizzled out over time. To make up for my difficulties connecting with others I started masking and people pleasing. I did have one friend all throughout my schooling, but they turned out to be neurodivergent too. I thought I was normal and people just didn’t like me, but looking back the other kids must’ve sensed I was ‘different’ somehow.

To try and connect I would change my personality to suit whoever I wanted to try and get along with.

In high school it got to the point where I was TERRIFIED of different friend groups in my life meeting each other. I masked really differently for different people and if they met I was so scared that I would be called out for ‘pretending’ or ‘lying’.

Masking inadvertently landed me in the ‘therapist’ role and into being the ‘leader’ of my main friendship group in high school. I was the one who organised events, who initiated hang outs and meet ups. No one ever invited me to anything.

I felt like I was being used. But the reality is, is that my mask was making me seem eager to be used. All my friends had social anxiety and so they were happy for me to take control, and I seemed eager to. I always had a mask of either joy or indifference. Nothing ever seemed to bother me. So why would anyone check in? But I felt like my friends didn’t care. I didn’t know that I had to express my needs for people to fulfill them.

I felt like if I did express my needs or ask for help, I wouldn’t be loved anymore. This made me really depressed obviously.

But then there are a couple of phrases I heard that helped me to break free from my mask.

“If you never express your needs, you never give others the chance to fulfill them.”

This quote made me realise that it wasn’t that my friends didn’t want to help me, it was that I never gave them the chance. If one of my friends had asked me for help, I would happily oblige. Helping those close to me is important to me, it’s important to me that they feel okay. I realised I never gave my friends or partners the chance to try and help me. I realised how damaging that was for me.

The second phrase was “Stop asking why people love you. They just do.”

Part of the reasoning for my masking was to try and give reasons for people to love me. Part of maintaining that mask was to try and focus on the parts that people did love. But this quote made me realise that I don’t love people for specific reasons. Maybe I became friends with them because we are similar, but as time passes I begin to appreciate them for who they are, even if they change. It made me realise how pointless masking was. Those who truly love me would (and did) continue to love me without the mask.

Disclaimer: Not all masking is bad. It can be a helpful tool, but for me I was masking to even my long term partner and my life-long best friend. But yeah, basically thank you Dr Price for summarising this experience for me so eloquently.

Aliens being used as an allegory gor autism in writing: 🥱 boring, overdone, kinda cringe, mega L

Werewolves being used as an allegory for autism: 😈 new, exciting, realistic, based, W

While I continue to procrastinate on SMS I think y’all need to see the copy of Frankenstein I just bought because I’m OBSESSED with it

First of all, gorgeous cover art.

Then you get to the actual PAGES, and

LOOK AT THAT

IT’S SO GORGEOUS

THIS LOOKS LIKE IT COULD BE FROM PHANTOM OF THE OPERA

THE CREATURE LOOKS SO FUCKING COOL RAAAAHHHH

Please answer this is for science :)

Autistic Book Recommendations

Littlepuddins.ie

- j (x)

i ❤ u

why on earth does she look so autism creature in this sprite

a little illustration for the «Captain Walton listens Frankenstein's story» scene

I was looking at a few posts about autism (as one does) and it just suddenly clicked into place a fundamental thing about Yuri's character that I'd been grasping at, but hadn't really been able to adequately identify. I still have a much longer and more thorough analysis going through a whole lot of my thoughts on Yuri's character and her experience of autism that i'm working on (of which this will likely be a component), but I thought I'd share this separately just to emphasize.

Post I saw which made this click for me was making fun of the fact that most media depicting impaired empathy in autistic characters explicitly depicts them with this unflappable confidence of never having been rejected by people they love. The crux of this is that in actual reality, autistic people almost always have that experience at some point, for some behavior, for reasons they don't really understand. "There is an invisible line where people will get sick of you, and you have no warning of when you're about to cross it." So frequently, autistic people attempt to ride a razor thin edge, walking on constant eggshells to desperately attempt to avoid crossing that line.

Very often autistic people will attempt to avoid doing anything at all which could be considered weird, or off-putting, and will try their absolute hardest to do things in a way that is acceptable to other people, sometimes to the point of outright suppressing their emotions, because they are afraid that they'll say something just wrong enough that the people they care about will push them away, and they don't understand WHY it happened, but they know it's THEIR fault. Sometimes masking is fighting to appear aloof all the time because you can't regulate your emotions in a way that is acceptable to other people.

And holy fucking Jesus, that fits the exact mold of what I've been trying to talk about with the particular way Yuri's anxieties manifest.

It really feels to me like Yuri has this constant fear of breaking the "rules" of socializing, despite not really understanding what those rules even are. She's constantly afraid of saying something wrong, when she doesn't even know what wrong would be, she's just sure everyone ELSE will know it when they hear it. I think a huge part of her social anxiety comes from her own understanding of herself as a very weird person who doesn't really get a lot of how to socialize, and it seems to me like she's probably dealt with her fair share of social rejection and isolation based on those traits. She then felt she had to take responsibility for those traits, probably because it's the one thing she can change, and she is the one common denominator in all of these bad situations (This is something which is pretty common, actually! "Everyone else can socialize just fine, and I have so much difficulty with it! I must just be broken in some way. I have to try super hard to be normal to make friends!")

I think a big part of why it's so apparent in the Literature Club is because she really thinks she's found a place where she can make friends in spite of all of her issues, so when she starts...being herself, and receives even the smallest HINT of pushback, she overcorrects and tries to rein all of herself in to fix her "mistake", because she really wants to make friends here, and doesn't want them to reject her as well.

She's had this experience of others pushing her away for being weird so often that, coupled with her acknowledged trouble for reading situations, when anybody responds poorly to something and she recognizes it, she immediately overcorrects out of fear of being an annoying burden to everyone around her, and that "correction" consists of suppressing herself into being "normal" (or at least "less weird"), because she believes nobody could actually like her just for being who she is. There's something wrong with her fundamentally, and to make friends, for people to like her and want to be around her, she has to "fix" herself.

it's just, like...

it's really hard for me to interpret Yuri's character that doesn't involve her being somewhere on the spectrum, bros. she's written with such delicately constructed autistic coding, despite the appearance of just being a hackneyed weird girl visual novel trope. she deserves the world.......

english teacher Mike Wheeler who comes across as this Serious Intimidating and pretentious jerk until you discover he's just a nerd who all the Troubled and 'Difficult' kids surprisingly love and look up to. No one knows how he does it. (he was, once, that angry troubled teen).

art teacher Will Byers who absolutely every student loves. You cannot hate him. Queer kids are especially drawn to him and he's the best at reassuring them and helping them feel comfortable and safe. He's always followed by at least two or three students and he gets the most notes, gifts and hand-made crafts during holidays.

and yes they're married

At least a face like this will make people think twice before making snap judgments about what I am. It’s harder for someone to pin you down as a girl when they need a moment to pin you down as human.

I want to peel off all my skin, if only so I could be anything other than a naked body, something horrifying instead of vulnerable. Nobody looks at a pig corpse and thinks it could be made beautiful.

If you liked Hell Followed with Us (that's where the first quote is from!), then go read The Spirit Bares its Teeth

Victorian thriller, ghosts and gore, basically Poe-vibes

Absolutely fantastic trans & autistic MC

Lotsa disturbing imagery and surgical metaphors

T4T!

Anti-establisment themes aka fuck the system

Can I? Can I love you forever? Can I be next to you even on those days when it seems like you don’t want anyone around you? Can I wake you up in the middle of the night because I’m afraid some ghost is haunting me? Can I tell you how much I’m in fear because it feels like I’m gonna die at any minute for no reason at all? Can I ask you to hold my hand in the middle of the street before I’m about to fall to the ground in a panic attack? Can I just pull my hair and scream at your chest while I’m having a meltdown?

I find it very funny when people think that dystopian fiction is a warning for imaginary future issues that could arise and not a commentary on the very real very current failings of governments and society as a whole. And obviously it’s exaggerated because it’s fiction but the point is to sensationalize the absolutely insane things that are actually happening and typically get dismissed because of privilege or a desire to ignore/an inability to comprehend the true state of the world. This is particularly true for those of us that are disadvantaged in some way.

Recently I have been reading into Biopower and Biopolitics which finds its origins in Foucault. Agamben's "Homo Sacer" has been extremely interesting, especially because I wish to do some more research in Disability Studies. I am looking forward to reading Lennard J Davis.

Pete Wharmby has written a book about autism. According to his page:

If you're interested in autistic special interests and hyperfocus then you might enjoy my first book which is about how my interests have shaped my life.

Pete Wharmby, Autistic Author