I have been browsing your autism tag and thinking about the differences between being an HSP vs being autistic. I found some definitions online that presented being an HSP as an increased awareness of certain stimuli while in the same blog post autism was defined via behaviour. I think this is very obviously flawed. My own tendency towards anti-psychiatry makes me really question all this. Your posts about the interiority of suffering are fascinating and made me realize how little discernment exists in neurotypical culture...
Anyway, if you have any thoughts on autism vs high sensitivity, I would love to hear them! Also caught up to chapter 30 in your buckyfic... poor Steve! Hope you're having a good day :)
I have an impulse to say that a lot of people that consider themselves "highly sensitive person" are probably neurodivergent in some way, but it's not like "official" medical labels are necessarily more correct in this case.
I think that culture is really negative about sensitivity (definitely felt this growing up, I had a lot of self hatred about it)
i have an autism diagnosis (since I was 14) but my experience of autism is that I experience everything with extreme intensity.
I've had really intense, basically trauma responses (???) to experiences that a lot of people seem to survive unaffected. when i was 10 years old I got some kind of stomach flu/norovirus while staying overnight at my Mamaw's house and subsequently started having extreme panic attacks and terror towards the notion of getting sick ever again, which were so consuming for the next 2 years of my life that I felt like I had been changed into a fundamentally different person.
similar thing with my early childhood medical experiences, which, the ones my mom recalls as the most negative I can't even remember. But they were not very far outside of average experiences, and yet, I've had a level of absolute terror of medical procedures throughout my entire life that defies description. I invested a lot of energy in my teenage years on Not Thinking About It and then covid happened and I couldn't avoid my triggers anymore and for about 2 years there it felt like I was going completely insane because my body and mind were doing things I had never heard of happening to anyone.
I couldn't think of a way to justify it being Trauma and yet it was completely different than a "phobia" (for one thing, it felt completely rational and having it labeled irrational made me feel violent) so I was just like yeah i'm fucked up and filled with terror and rage and nightmares and intrusive sensations and thoughts for no reason because there is something wrong with me that has never been wrong with anyone in the history of the world and I should probably be burned alive for being weak
I'm very chill now, but I have circumnavigated the globe a thousand times in terms of the distance I have traveled in personal self-understanding.
Anyways there are a lot of ways to have a body and experience having a body and experience existence, and this world is cruel about them for no reason, and if you are Affected by something other than the clearly labeled Bad Things That Are Not Normal, you might as well be some kind of species of wild animal that has never been discovered and never will be.
I think "highly sensitive person" exists as a label because it legitimately is traumatizing and life-limiting and EXTREMELY stigmatized to be "sensitive:" to be affected emotionally or psychologically or spiritually by things to a greater degree than others, even a little bit.
like everyone in this world is on a race to the bottom in terms of who can be the most callous and unaffected by everything that happens. if you are hurt or upset by something more than average, there is A Something in culture/society that thinks you should be punished violently and painfully. And I know this because I thought I should be punished violently and painfully.
Like, the most vicious and hateful part of me is that part that has been directed at my own "sensitivity," and I've had that part since I was a young child and it is so fucking violent and cruel, and I think sometimes people don't understand fascists and their need to punish and make other people suffer and their visceral gratification at the Rightness of this suffering, but like. that part of fascism is something I viscerally empathize with because I've felt it. Towards myself. And I can imagine how it must feel to direct that towards other people. And I wonder if fascists start out by directing it towards themselves.
sorry this went really off topic but it's all connected ya know
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