Adeline Area

To recover, you literally need to manually learn skills that most people learn as a toddler

You need to learn what makes your body uncomfortable, and what to do to fix it

If you are high-masking, that usually means that you have learned to ignore every distress signal your body sends unless it is a distress signal that a neurotypical person would recognize. People have likely been unintentionally gaslighting you about your lived experience your entire life

If you feel bad or panicked for no reason, stop and try to pay attention to your body. Are you tense? You are likely feeling physical pain somewhere. If you've been gaslit about your pain your entire life, you might not be able to identify it.

Go through a sensory checklist.

SIGHT: Try closing and covering your eyes. If this gives you relief, the lights are probably too bright. You may also need differently-colored lights

SOUND: Cover your ears. Does this give you relief? If so, you may need earplugs or noise canceling headphones. You may also benefit from a neutral or pleasant background noise, like soft music or brown noise.

TOUCH: Are your clothes uncomfortable? Your chair? Your body? Do you feel greasy, like you need a shower? Do you need softer, sensory-friendly clothing?

TASTE: Do you need to brush your teeth or tongue? Would chewing on something help?

SMELL: Is there a strong or unpleasant smell in the room? Do you need to clean or empty a trash can? Would an air purifier help? Would a pleasant smell like a candle help?

INTEROCEPTION: Are you hungry? Thirsty? Tired? How is your posture? Are any of your muscles tight or sore? Scan your body slowly from head to feet, tensing and loosening each group of muscles. Going for a walk or doing a series of quick stretches may help a lot.

Learning how to do this stuff is not intuitive, if you've had an entire lifetime of gaslighting telling you that everything hurting you isn't a big deal and you're being dramatic over nothing.

This takes time, it takes work, it's not intuitive, and it's hard. Most people forget how hard it is, because they learned this as toddlers.

If you can correctly identify what type of dog Zorro is, you get a prize*

Disability isn't actually explained well by playing "body vs brain". So many different types of disability and so many types of impacts, the binary doesn't really make sense.

instead of saying "body vs brain", try:

♥️ Physical/mobility - disabilities that impact function of limb, body, organs or mobility.

Examples being SCI, cerebral palsy, limb difference, arthritis

💚 Sensory - disabilities that impact the senses.

Examples being d/Deafness, being Hard of Hearing, being blind, having low vision, auditory processing disorder

💛 Intellectual & Developmental - disabilities that impact cognitive ability, development, learning, etc.

Examples being intellectual disability, specific learning and language disorders, developmental delay, autism spectrum disorder

💜 Neurological - disabilities that impact the nervous system or brain.

Examples being epilepsy, motor neurone disease, migraine, fibromyalgia

💙 Psychosocial - disability due to mental health conditions.

Examples being OCD, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, personality disorders, etc - any mental health condition may potentially be disabling

🤍 Other - no classing system is ever infallible and some disabilities and chronic illnesses may not necessarily slot into one of the above categories.

Many disabilities may fall into multiple categories - like cerebral palsy being a neurological and physical disability, or auditory processing disorder impairing hearing but having a neurological root cause.

All categories have both visible and invisible disabilities in them. All categories have different levels of functional impact. Both of these are often even true across many people with one diagnosis.

But more than anything: this isn't about "physical vs mental". It's not a binary. It's many ways people experience life under one umbrella term, and it's important to be considerate and learn from each other.

I was being facetious with the trick part lol but you know the joke "I might be racist, but you're mean and that's worse?" It's the root of that. We discussed it back when we read White Fragility. You can see it in Trump, Elon Musk, and your average Tumblr racist:

They really, REALLY want to be liked. Not just liked, no that's not the right word, but validated.

Think about it this way. Racism is the status quo; the default, right? Part of maintaining that default is through normalization, and that includes the solidarity necessary to reinforce that (DiAngelo called it white solidarity).

So, if being covertly racist is the status quo, then that means you will be socially rewarded for being so. When you get rewarded, people are nice, friendly, relatable, they keke and haha right alongside you. But when you confront someone's racism, you're not socially rewarding them anymore- the spigot of validation has been paused! Instead of taking it as a valid critique, you are seen as socially punishing a person. You're being MEAN, because the validation I got from everyone else's also-racism was NICE!

That's why when you confront racism, you HAVE to stand firm on it. You cannot feed into the desire for the validation of their behavior. That's what makes a lot of people snap. The blowup is meant to stop you, to force you back into compliance! The only one being punished really is you for bringing it up.

And hell, if not socially validating a bigot is punishment... 😐 Why would that be... A bad thing? We're not hitting you with rocks, we're just saying we don't fuck with you and your behavior. (But that's also a part of really all of the books we've read in #cbc book club so far; that antiracism is seen as violence.)

Over 500 years spent trying to cut down a whole trunk of human culture.

Well maybe I don’t WANT to work double as hard as abled people!! Maybe I deserve a BREAK!! Maybe I’ve been working MORE THAN double as hard for MY WHOLE LIFE and it’s led me to immense burnout & caused me to develop several MORE disabilities!! Maybe I should be ACCOMMODATED so I don’t have to KILL MY BODY AND BRAIN over trying to do what abled people can do!! Maybe I DON’T have to work double as hard!! Maybe if there’s the option to let me NOT work double as hard, I should have it, because I’m already working double as hard JUST TO SURVIVE!!

Her name is Nastya (Anastasia Koné), her father was a diplomat so her family moved to the USSR in the late 50s, before she was born.

this is her in the present day in the story (early 200s) She's a butch/stud lesbian and runs a bakery with her wife and child

Well if you mean just Russia, I typed in "being Black in Russia" and this is the first video that popped up! I also remember this question from some time ago and there's also AfroRussiaTV!

Enjoying bad art is neither virtuous nor unvirtuous because enjoyment is passive. It is barely a choice. I do, however, think that incuriosity is shameful. Taste, as in the ability to understand, diagnose, and articulate, the artistic choices that make up a work, is the vehicle for understanding and producing art. Taste can only be cultivated by reflecting upon a broad field of art, peak to dogshit. Because of this, the cultivation of Taste is one of my favorite parts of being alive.

If you've only ever watched marvel movies, of course they are your favorite movies. Your love of marvel movies means little. However, if you have sampled everything the world of cinema has to offer, have watched every single movie dogshit to peak, and marvel movies are still your favorite, that is meaningful. You probably have some very interesting things to say about movies. Even though I will probably disagree with them.