animus confidenti

“Ive! You came to save me.”

and i know that sounds weird because he is legit a hitman and that at least should put him more in bronte gothic love interest territory

and yet i stand by my claim

javier is 2005 darcy striding across that frosty sunlit field and The Hand Flex and colonel brandon showing up to hand you a knife when you’re quietly cutting reeds or reading you sonnets on the lawn and mr. knightley being willing to be real with you when you’ve messed up in a “very badly done, emma!” fashion, but also all “if i loved you less i’d be able to talk about it more” and taking you to the seaside because you’ve never left the village you grew up in before but have always dreamt of seeing the ocean* 

it’s just facts

javier pereira: terrifyingly efficient killer, reverent devotee to his beloved lady, jane austen hero of today

I can now share my Harley Quinn piece for the zine I was invited to take part in @arkhamgalleryzine

I started cracking my knuckles in fifth grade. My parents asked me why, and I told them it made the pain go away. My parents told me that I was too young for my joints to hurt, and that I would ruin them if I kept cracking them.

By the time was fourteen or fifteen and entering high school, I hadn’t stopped cracking my knuckles. The hurt more, and the relief was more. I was convinced that I had arthritis.

My parents told me that I was too young to have arthritis.

Fast forward thirty seven years when my joints take a dive and I cannot even get out of bed on some days. I take chemo therapy pills twice a week, and I have two injections of chemotherapy ever four months. I have to take two medications every day just to manage the pain the chemotherapy doesn’t cover.

This at least allows me to get out of bed and on most days it allows me to go to school. It doesn’t make the pain go away, and on bad days I want to cry it gets so bad.

The diagnosis? Early Onset Rheumatoid Arthritis.

It went unchecked for twenty five years, my immune system eating away at my joints like a buffet even though I wanted to go to the doctor from day one.

If I had gone to the doctor and I had been wrong - they found nothing - well, we would have been out a few bucks for the doctor’s visit.If I was right - and I was right - I would have been treated for 20 years.

If I had gone to the doctor on my insistence that I had arthritis at fifteen, I would not be in pain today. This would have been treated twenty years go.

Do I support minor self diagnosis?

Yes. Absolutely.

I would rather a minor self diagnose and be wrong than a minor ignore their body and suffer for 20 years like me. No one is harmed by listening to a minor and taking their concerns seriously. But that minor might be harmed for the rest of their life you ignore them.

Self diagnosers don’t go to the doctor to check like you did.

Self Diagnosers assume they have it, assume everything they’ve done is because of it, and refuse to listen to any professionals who say they don’t have it, or say they have something else.

The only things you should be self-diagnosing yourselves with is a head cold or seasonal allergies.

Hi, I also self diagnosed my autism. I even started working educating doctors, nurses, and therapists, on the intersectional issues of autism and gender (something I still do to this day).

The ONLY reason I have a clinical autism diagnosis is because I wanted legal protection for accomodations at University.

My self diagnosis was years before my clinical diagnosis. I was active in the autistic community for years and yes, I used those precious resources meant for auristics, including seeing a clinical social worker that specialized in autistic adult therapy. I did this for over a year before my clinical diagnosis.

In other words, do your research, read the meta studies and studies, and if you are going to get into a conversation with some who deals with autism professionally, be prepared get homework.

You know what I haven’t seen a lot of in the posts supporting self-diagnosis yet? That supporting self-diagnosis can help those with a clinical diagnosis as well*.

I’m clinically diagnosed. Like CandidlyAutistic, I got a clinical diagnosis to unlock accommodations at university (and later on at work). I knew I was autistic a little under a year before I got my official™ diagnosis and until I had the paperwork in my hand I was constantly afraid that the answer had been seeking for well over 2 decades would be yanked out from under me. With that said. I’m the only officially diagnosed member of my family, but we’re sure I got it from my dad, and we’re pretty sure my youngest sibling (I’ll call them Meme here) is as well (and after being failed by our healthcare system, Meme has decided to stick with the self diagnosis for now).

You know what I learned from my self-diagnosed family and the larger self-diagnosed Autistic community after my clinical diagnosis?

- I always though my hearing was ‘better’ than my siblings. I could tolerate more and I wasn’t as sensitive to loud noises. Nope, just a mask and because we knew more about autism by the time Meme came around (they’re over a decade younger) and they didn’t grow up with a rowdy younger brother, they didn’t HAVE to mask as much.

- Oh, on the hearing thing? Fans. They’re terrible, they’re the worst, I don’t know why people consider them white noise because my blood pressure drops like 10 points when a fan gets turned off in a room. Thing is, growing up with a family that tried their best but didn’t really understand the subtlety of autism yet, I didn’t have the language to describe why I hated turning on a fan when I cooked or grabbed a shower. The autism community talking about auditory processing disorder added so much to my understanding of my hearing.

- Just… Auditory processing disorder. All of it. Never would have gotten anywhere close to where I am now understanding my APD. Got my Self diagnosed partner to thank for that.

- I thought I didn’t have any texture/clothing sensitivities. Sure there was some styles I couldn’t’ handle (turtlenecks…. Whyyyyy) but it’s not like my cousins who can’t wear clothing with tags! Oh wait… you mean MOST people don’t feel sticky and gross and damp after towel drying in a shower? Most people can’t tell the different between ‘still retaining the slightest hint of surface moisture’ and ‘bone dry’? WTF?

- Mind-body disconnection. This is one that really should have been a given but still astounds me to this day. I used to joke I didn’t understand what ‘bloated’ felt like in my body until my mid-20’s. Now I can say it took me until the ripe old age of 32 to understand what a ‘spasming’ pain feels like. It took a doctor telling me my back and shoulder were spasming to be able to articulate anything beyond ‘this hurts’. Critical medical information has been left uncommunicated for decades because of this mind-body disconnect. Having fellow autistics (self-diagnosed and clinically diagnosed alike) talk about having to figure out their own mismatched body signals was a missing piece of the puzzle that the medical community has no way of helping me with.

- Executive function. Just…. All of executive function. The ability to talk about spoons of energy came from the chronic illness community yes, but the idea of splines is so very closely linked but so very autism-centric that I don’t think there is any way to have been able to articulate executive function issues without it.

There’s more I’m sure, but the thought is fading a bit now, so I’ll let it be. But please let me be clear, my core point is:

Even if you think self-diagnosis takes resources away from clinically diagnosed Autistics** you cannot dismiss how much the self-diagnosed community has helped people with clinical diagnosis as well.

And really, they aren’t two distinct communities either… There are so many good reasons why someone chooses to stay with self-diagnosis or is forced to based on their circumstances. And I sure as hell am not going to stand by and disparage their experiences, whether they are minor or not.

* This is just on top of all the heaping good stuff that self-diagnosis does for those who can only self-diagnose. Or choose to stop at a self-diagnosis!!

im glad people are discussing fatphobia but please don’t throw disabled & chronically ill fat people under the bus while defending metabolically healthy fat people! health is not equivalent to morality or worth & unhealthy fat people’s bodies are no more the business of thin folks than the bodies of metabolically healthy ones.

Yes. We are. We are in fact defending the people who write wholly unrealistic smut that kinks on taboo subjects so people can work out their screwy urges in a controlled, risk-free way! We are in fact defending the people who write pure misery and know it, because they’re feeling god-awful and need OTT catharsis! Defense of screwed up fanfiction as morally neutral is not just about “oh, that good stuff that looks at issues as a Real Thing to bring attention to them”.

No, it’s also the (emotionally aware, tagged, warned for, niche, compartmentalized) fiction that lets everyone pour out the nastiness in their heads where the only people who are likely to see it know what they’re here for.

Inspiring by this X from cornflakepizza

I usually don’t do sad stuff, but this matched some of my thoughts about brujay.

Cassandra Cain | Legends of the Dark Knight #120

“Her father was one of the men who trained me.”

“Cain trained you?”

1. absolutely nothing in the entire game requires dexterity or quick reaction time. you can beat the game with no problems even if you have the reaction time of a shuckle

2. game mechanics based on categorization, things placed neatly into categories that are easy to memorize

3. there are multiplayer elements but the game itself? completely single player. no social interaction required to enjoy the hell out of this game

4. you are not only encouraged but expected to have empathy for and form an attachment to these virtual creatures that do not actually exist, which is very easy for an autistic person with hyperempathy to do