AMOTM

if you want butterflies, you need to live with caterpillars.

ilya

TIL The Double Empathy Problem theory suggests social difficulties experienced by autistic people when interacting with non-autistic people are due to reciprocal differences, not an inherent deficiency, most autistic people are able to display good social reciprocity with most other autistic people

okay but the BEST part of the first study discussed (conducted by an autistic person!) Is that it shows that while easy, calm, mutual communication and social interaction is often more natural between two autistic people than it is between an autistic person and a non-autistic person, it is ALSO like this when an autistic person encounters a non-autistic person who imitates the autistic individual’s behaviours- neurotypical parents copying autistic children’s play, for example, apparently receive more positive engagement from their child- which is SERIOUSLY FUCKING IMPORTANT and VERY VERY GOOD because it is, once again, scientific evidence that bullshit like aversion therapy and enforced conformance and FUCKING “quiet hands” aren’t “”“”“solutions to the autism problem”“”“” and that “”“”“problems”“”“ with autism don’t stem from BEING autistic, but rather, from how NON AUSTISTIC PEOPLE TREAT AUTISTIC PEOPLE.

I cant go to my local libary anymore because last year when I stopped by a librarian was reading a book I wrote under a pen name years ago. This book sold under 10k copies and I've literally only heard people talk about this book online *if* I went looking for it so I went up to them and tried to start a conversation like "oh hey I've heard of that book is it good?" Like hoping for some real feedback and she goes "yeah I love reading things by queer writers" and in a moment of terror I was like "oh but- hold on, I thought the author was some old hetero white guy?!" A thing I thought because I used my own dead grandpa's picture for the author pic because grandpa never had internet. I fake looked it up and was like "yeah if he was queer its not public?" And without looking up this absolute unit goes "oh the author bio is obviously fake. I'd bet my left leg the author is a west coast millennial non-binary queer who has never lived on the east coast." And then proceeded to rattle off a dozen linguistic flourishes that are specfic to the pacific northwest that are in the book and several that are nearly ubiquitous in the state where I said my pen name lives that are somehow completely absent from the book.