one foot in the golden life, one foot in the gutter

This page has more information and recommendations for some basic exercises:

and Kuzu said also something really smart about how rejection can also be like... embracing as a positive something people ascribe to you as a negative, e.g. trans women who were bullied for being "too girly" etc. where society is like "these are traits and experiences and ways of moving through the world and identifying with people that you should be ashamed of" and the rejection is then, "no, I won't be ashamed of it, and actually I'm going to build a whole life around honoring and loving the person that I am, with other people who also honor and love this about me and themselves"

and then ALFIE said this other really smart thing where he was contrasting like, transness to his conversion to judaism and he said, "i really think the seeking out community is a huge part of this, and that's why i think especially trans communities that are not intergenerational in the same ways can be sort of crab buckets. like, the interruption of intergenerational queer community & the fact that queerness is randomly distributed across the population is i think very damaging and is part of why it can be very hard to manage all that. there are things that you can learn not just from institutional memory but like, how things like institutional memory works." my friends are so smart. I am often thinking this about forms of marginalization that map onto "ethnicity" type lines and those that do not. this is true also of many types of disability, I think, particularly neurodivergence communities online where people are (often understandably, considering neurotypes) looking for hard and fast Rules and Identities that isolate us generationally. i have a very hard time relating to many younger autists, for example, and I'm only 38. (edit oh my God I wrote 34? I'm not 34. i'm 38. today is a bad cognition day) but we allow our very different experiences of neurodivergence and disability to make us suspicious of others whose experiences of those things looks different or has resulted in different life outcomes. often I think this ties into class in a big way but that's another post entirely, probably. but I think that beyond being annoying or toxic or whatever, this is actually quite bad for people because it is bad for people to have to feel they are a Brand New Thing that No One Understands. it is socially beneficial to feel and believe and KNOW that you are part of a community through time, you're a type of person who has always been present in human societies, there have always been people like you, and how they live was and is usually entirely determined by the social attitudes around The Way They Were/Are. being in contact with people who provide cultural continuity between yourself and this history of People Like You is extraordinarily socially beneficial.

anyway. uh. autonomy. very important human need. one that some people suffer from lack of it more than others. I suffer from lack of it EXTREMELY in ways that produce a type of distress that is EXTREMELY punished societally. because autonomy is not considered to be an important need by the society I live in.

"That just means he likes you."

Teachers often say this when a boy makes a girl uncomfortable. This is especially true if the boy is neurodivergent.

This hurts both the girl and the boy.

It hurts the girl because it shows that no one will protect her boundaries and that anything he does to a girl is okay as long as it's motivated by liking her, which easily eventually normalizes rape.

It hurts the boy because he continues to make girls uncomfortable, continues to give girls reasons to not like him, but grows up thinking he's doing nothing wrong so he ends up disliked by girls and unaware of why.

imagine being on your lunch break, and your supervisor comes over to your table, tells you to stand up in front of everyone. they draw everyone's attention to your thighs. they tell you that you have broken the dress code because of the length of your shorts. they tell you to go change (so you do not get the rest of your lunch break). they do this every single day at lunch. every day. so you read the whole dress code front and back, and you choose your clothing carefully to not break it. you bring a cloth tape measure with you to work because they will not believe you. this time when your supervisor tells you that you're breaking dress code, you pull out your tape measure and show that you are within the limit. your supervisor says "I bet you wouldn't want me to bring you to the boss and let him measure it, would you?" it's clearly a threat: if you don't obey then you will be put alone in a room with your boss and he will touch your thighs. you don't know how to respond. you're taken out of lunch again.

and these can be like, occupational therapists, speech pathologists, whoever. Anyone who works in what might be called "special ed," who is neurodivergent.

Because they will be posting ALL of the things about what neurodivergent kids benefit from in an educational setting and what is harmful to them. That's their job, and they're uniquely good at spotting those patterns bc they share many experiences with the kids themselves, and once WERE THEMSELVES disabled kids in an educational setting. They Know what options/accommodations/interventions feel like and what they needed and did not get. AND, they used that experience as motivation to learn as much as possible about learning and child development and what kids actually need, from an expert standpoint.

They'll tell you exactly why what happened at school hurt you. Because they know. and they know what alternatives might have actually supported you instead of traumatizing you!

Reading about this is extraordinarily triggering for me, to be clear.

But I do it, because when I am reading about best practices, it immediately becomes clear the gap between that and what I received growing up. The advocates explain WHY kids benefit from one setup and are harmed by another. I can absolutely tell immediately what specific aspects of my childhood and upbringing were the most traumatic to me based on the extremity of my reaction to the content. I can gauge that by tracking my emotional reactions to reading about varying specific topics or situations, and the ways that adults might handle those situations. Because whenever I was made to feel like the way it happened was the only possible way it COULD happen, and told I was weak and broken and not trying hard enough for desperately needing something different? They were lying.

We now know that they were lying. There were other ways to do it that would have had my own experience and wellbeing in mind. Ways that would not have damaged me so profoundly during such a crucial developmental period in my life. Often the solutions posed by advocates are ways that I was advocating for AT THE TIME, AS A CHILD -- the number of "best practices" I read nowadays that are just LISTS OF THINGS I EXPLICITLY ASKED OR BEGGED FOR. I swear to fucking god.

um

Anyway. If you related to my last post about school trauma, here is some actionable advice. I like NeuroWild and Destiny Huff (on fb and insta) for starting out, and you can find and follow other people doing that work through them, hopefully.

I joke about it being humiliating to be traumatized because "my parents made me go to school" but I am extremely serious that school trauma can ABSOLUTELY be some of the most damaging childhood trauma. Schools are not built to serve children, and they're especially not built to serve any children who fall outside of certain very specific parameters, who happen not to thrive under the way the education system works.

This is the root of everything wrong with academia -- the way our entire society approaches both 1. child rearing and 2. education are, from a prosocial and literally human-centric perspective (I think of this as Social Ergonomics,) some of the least effective and most harmful ways of doing those things.

Many, many people are stuck in their lives because of what they do not realize is school trauma. It is very rare even in childhood trauma spaces to discuss school trauma, because it is a type of trauma which inherently requires people to question the entire foundation of some of our least questioned Systems. Institutional trauma is extremely hard to discuss, because it rests at the intersection of 'discussions of interpersonal abuse and trauma' and 'sociology-focused institutional justice frameworks' which are things that do not often overlap.