Lan Wangji might be an unstoppable force, but Xie Lian has 800+ years of practice of being an immovable object.

(poll results here for context)

I was talking to a client today about "how to identify masking" as part of the process of learning how to shift masking from a reflexive coping strategy to a voluntary and conscious one and I feel like it led to a really important shift in framework FOR ME about masking and social distress.

Paraphrasing, the ideas we came to are as follows:

One of the reasons masking can be so difficult to recognize is because, essentially, masking is the act of performing "yourself" as a mirror for the other person you are interacting with. It's this idea of "I will micro-manage my own mood, affect, behavior, mannerisms, and environment in order to reflect back to you whatever version of "self" you need from me because if I don't there will be consequences". So because masking is essentially performing "mirroring" as selfhood by amplifying or minimizing aspects of yourself based on what you think the other person wants to see in you, it varies significantly from one context to another. The major commonality is that it takes up an INCREDIBLE amount of energy, mental and emotional resources, cognitive processing power, etc. So you don't identify masking by specific behaviors so much as by the feeling of "having a significant amount of your mental/emotional resources be occupied by the act of social interaction" to the point that it doesn't leave enough left-over for other cognitive tasks, or leaves you feeling exhausted and worn out, or basically by the impact that masking has on you during and after.

In this framework, part of why we get so anxious about new or unfamiliar people or situations is because we don't know how to mask in that context yet, and so until we get there and figure it out, we're basically just terrified of what could go wrong since we don't know what we're walking into.*

*This is the underlying framework of anticipatory and obsessive anxiety as well. Anticipatory and obsessive anxiety functions as the mechanism by which we conduct both predictive reasoning-basd advance planning and review/self-correctionof our mental predictive model.

Autistic aversion to uncertainty has a lot to do with our need to be able to use predictive reasoning-based advance planning to cope with "social deficits" aka how much harder it is for us to interpret subtextual/nonverbal cues, learn/meet social expectations, and work through/around disordered sensory processing. That predictive reasoning requires us to be familiar, in advance, with the stable constant factors that influence decision making in social contexts. If we aren't familiar with the constant variables than we can't plan, if we can't plan than we are more likely to make noticeable social mis-steps, and if we take notable social mis-steps there are consequences. It becomes necessary for us to be hypervigilent to observable patterns in other people's behavior in order to try to reverse engineer the social interaction playbook on the fly. That ends up making us more likely to assume personal responsibility for predicting and managing the emotional regulatory needs of people around us at all costs, replicating the behavioral/cognitive impacts of chronic traumatic stress due to the activation of our sympathetic nervous system from chronic hypervigilence.

Essentially, masking is a cognitive defense mechanism to severe and/or persistant traumatic interpersonal stressors. As the neurological impacts of chronic traumatic stress heal, we mask less frequently. But in order to heal from chronic traumatic stress, the human brain requires a safe environment that does not trigger a retraumatization episode or replicate feelings of helplessness/fear for safety. In other words, reducing/terminating masking safely requires us as autistic people to have consistent access to social environments in which we are able to utilize autistic interpersonal boundaries without fear of consequence or chonically unmet need. This requires the people around us to be able to respect not only autistic interpersonal boundaries, but also autistic self-expression/advocacy modalities and mediums.

I feel like a lot of the pieces of this framework have been rattling around in my head for a while but the flavor of words hit just right today and all the connections snapped into place.

Anyway, I'm still sort of sorting through the clinical implications of this framework but I think it's a direction I want to keep exploring for sure.

Doodle page of the skelebros except they get individual doodles cause they barely talk to each other

Love that the team continued to uphold Lloyd being extremely mentally unwell at all times. Barely functioning but insisting its fine. Plagued by the visions™. Legitimately had a panic attack when everything started to go wrong. Completely willing to fuck over his entire physiology with weird dragon magic because "yeah that'll probably be helpful later". Waking up screaming and shrugging because its totally normal to have nightmares that horrifying on the regular. A+ on this assignment lads, you've broken Lloyd down to his bare essentials.

Bro I hate fundamentalists and culturally-fundie parents they'll say shit like "spare the rod spoil the child am I right haha yea my parents used to have to beat my ass with a switch almost everyday but I sure did learn my lesson" but like??? no you didn't??? you were hit multiple times for something you very obviously did not, in fact, learn

Like studies about how harmful even lightly spanking children is aside, you're literally contradicting yourself?? Some even admitted they got worse as they got older cause they wanted to see how far they could push their parents before they got punished

And studies not aside, you're gonna get child raising advice from the same book that tells you to stone your wife if her hymen doesn't break on your wedding night instead of the decades of research we have now?? Just say you're a bad parent and move on my guy. Skill issue

Cool As I Think I Am Reprise kills me for a lot of reasons, but something that has been especially heart breaking for me is Pete's line of "One of us is in love, it doesn't take a detective." One of us is in love. It wouldn't have taken much for the line to be "The two of us are in love, it doesn't take a detective." It doesn't disrupt the flow of the lyrics. Which means that this is how Pete feels. He thinks only one of them is in love here, and considering his whole thing in this song is convincing Steph to kill him so she (and the rest of the world) will live, and those are not the actions of someone who isn't in love, he's talking about himself. Which makes me think that he doesn't think she loves him back. He thinks he's the only one in love here. Sure, he's what she wants the most, but that doesn't mean she loves him. He just knows that he loves her, and he's willing to die to save her, even if she doesn't love him back (which she does).

Sylvie is loterally loki if he never met mobius.

LIKE HOLY FUCK?!?!??!!

That saying.....those 2 old guys should kiss 👍

I feel very bad and i don’t want to cry alone so here are some ttp crying Holly doodles

men aren’t allowed to complain actually about the safest strategies women have developed to say no or get away from an unwanted interaction with a man. it’s not on women that men historically most respect rejection when the implication is that another man has already claimed her. you’re infuriated? we’re trying not to get murdered

❝Aren't we a pair?❞

Luther: "So, Klaus is still Klaus, in case you were wondering."

Allison: "You know, after all these years, I find it strangely comforting."

clara for blorbo bingo

incredibly annoyed i didn't get bingo for the worst girl of all time

inspired by @shokuheshi's doodle of Ivy, I thought I would find my funniest screenshots and doodle them.

do you ever just. yeah.

jango fett really is the master of starting out a thought in wholesome territory and then just gradually letting it devolve into borderline fridge horror, huh.

HIIIII im back for my annual oc redesigns AND propaganda <3 this time featuring THE most brothers of ALL time bc my GODDDDDD. i open my notes on the Ryder family and they unravel and roll on for 382 miles like a cartoon scroll u feel me

LOKI SEASON 2 FINALE SPOILERS!!!!

I like how for the whole season, we have never seen mobius swear. When he hit brad? He called him a "silly little man". BUT when lokis acting different, when hes being weird, mobius swears.

Because hes genuinely worried about loki, because something seems off, because lokis never acted that way.

Whatever the reason mobius swore, and the look on his face showed real, hardcore worry.

It may not sound that deep, but if mobius is so worried about loki he swears, then i dont knkw guys.

ALSO MOBIUS WAS THE ONLY ONE TO ASK IF LOKI'S OK/WHAT HE'S DOING.

Call me crazy but that had a deeper meaning.