Snakedancing

She’s technically a monster too. She might not look it at first glance and seems mostly human, but it isn’t deniable even despite her looks compared to the other monsters. 

But she realizes that she is still not like the rest of the monsters either and may not have entirely the same experiences as them, which is why she feels that she might not belong to or deserve to go to the support group. By sometimes passing as human, she feels she isn’t worthy of the space. 

The sad reality though is even though she’s mostly human in appearance, that tail she has undeniably would still cause her some struggle. Humans are still gonna look at that tail and think she’s a freak. There are probably still accommodations she needs because of the tail that she may still struggle to have access to. Even if it is just the tail, that tail is still enough to other her from humans and cause her problems and discrimination. 

She should get to belong in that support group even if she gets told she’s not monster “enough”. She still shares some of the same struggles as them that are caused by being a monster, and needs support. 

Holidays are stressful enough but many of us on the #Autism spectrum have at least one family member who is bitterly disappointed with us. I have one. My best friend has one.  And they’re nearly impossible to please - nothing you do ever seems to be good enough.  If you have a job, it’s not a good enough job.  If you live in an apartment, it’s not a house.  (And heaven forbid if you don’t have a job or a house!)  There are times you suspect you could have a mansion and a BMW and they’d just complain that you don’t have a Porsche.

They always seem to pick on us during dinner, when we feel trapped and they have an audience.  What have you been doing lately?  It’s almost always a challenge, never a question delivered in genuine curiosity.

A lot of us prepare for this ahead of time by creating a list that I cheekily called the “Sod-Off” list.  This was a list of everything I’d accomplished in the past year.  It doesn’t have to be a big accomplishment, just something you’re proud of.  Did you finish a knitting project?  Finish a NaNoWriMo?  Start a NaNoWriMo?  Win a battle with a government agency?  Take a course?  Sure, there are “big” things like buying cars and earning degrees, but make no mistake, those “little” accomplishments count.

Here’s the thing:  The Sod-Off list is not for them - it’s for you.  If we try to list these accomplishments, they’ll just challenge their validity, tell us why they’re not satisfactory, and strip away everything that made us feel good.  No, this list is for you to keep in your mind, when you’re put under the spotlight.  It’s to remind you of when you felt proud of yourself, so that when that person asks you “What have you been doing lately,” you can shrug and say “A bunch of things here and there,” then turn to someone else and ask them, “What about you, what’ve you been up to?”  You might add “I’ve heard you’ve been doing X, what got you interested in that?”  This deflects attention away from you without sending the ball back to the challenging person.

The list is also for friends and family members who are genuinely curious about our activities and aren’t out to find reasons to be disappointed with us.  If possible, try to converse when the challenging relative isn’t around, so they aren’t tempted to interrupt with disparaging comments.

If possible, try to buddy up with a sympathetic relative or friend.  I have an aunt and a cousin whom I buddy up with.  My aunt is also trying to avoid our challenging relative, so whenever one of us sees that person trying to move in, we glide in and lead each other away with a “hey, come try some of this” or “hey come look at this game” or a “let’s go to the corner store, I’m craving buttertarts.”  We even have a text code for ‘challenging relative alert, come get me.’

Meanwhile, on the Tumblr autistic community:

Family life is not what I imagined it to be.

I guess we’re all guilty of imagining our future children as little carbon copies of ourselves or our spouses.

So when I imagined myself with my future children, I pictured them as quiet, well mannered little readers.

I never could have imagined the active, people-loving extrovert that somehow grew out of my womb.

My daughter is more like me, and while I sometimes see signs in her that make me worry that she also has allism, she isn’t formally diagnosed and I hope they are just behaviours she has picked up from her brother.

Her brother is very allistic. He is the life of the party, constantly talking to people in class, and more interested in the social activity around him than in his work.

In his weekly self report that he brought home from school on Friday, he rated a one at getting his work done.

ONE.

I try to remind myself that he got rated a 5/5 on kindness.

They say that allism comes with superpowers, like finely tuned social skills and an awareness of others that supersedes the average autistic.

And that’s great and all but… a ONE.

What does he go to school for? To learn. Not to SOCIALIZE. I wouldn’t mind if he was struggling to understand his work but the kid is BRIGHT. He just doesn’t apply himself at all. He doesn’t even seem to know he has a brain. Everything about him extends outwards.

His reading and writing skills are nowhere near what I was doing at his age. He has brilliant instincts for math but he is getting average math grades because he never stops talking long enough to actually focus for a moment.

At least focus on something that isn’t another human being’s FACE.

Sometimes I feel robbed. Sometimes I long for the family I imagined - sitting down and reading quietly in the evenings, or sharing some time together as we each spend time with our special interest or stim in each other’s company.

Instead it’s play dates and video games, demands for novelty and complaints about boredom if heaven forfend I leave him sit with his own thoughts for a few minutes.

It’s hard. Only another allism mom can really understand.

It’s easy to look at this kid who is so different from me and wonder if changelings are real.

But he is mine.

And he is a wonderful kid, really. He gets awards at school for his thoughtfulness and kindness, and maybe the world would be a better place if we had more allistics like him in the world.

So on good days I focus on that and try to forget that to him people will always come first, and reading and writing and math will always be a pale second best.

He is who he is. He was born this way. And loving him has made me stronger, more resilient.

I’m a survivor. And he and I, we’ll survive this allism together.

Maybe we’ll be able to change his behaviours with time to get him to spend more time independently working.

If someone tells you they are autistic, you are not, under any circumstances, to say “but you don’t LOOK autistic”. They told you they are autistic, that’s all the proof you need.

Meanwhile, it’s socially acceptable for abled men to expect women to be their servants, to the point that women who refuse to cook or clean for a man are told that they’ll die alone.

Autistic people are assumed to lack empathy as an excuse to see them as subhuman.

Hope you don’t mind, but I created a list with your commenter suggestions (so far) for the SAD lights. Thought it might be a bit easier for those of us currently searching for one.

Most of these are on Amazon.

Brightech Litespan LED - this version or this one

Not sure which one OP has! I guessed

Phillips Hue lightbulbs - here

Naturebright Sun Touch Plus - here

Circadian Optics Lumos - here

Verilux - here

Also be sure to check out the rest of their products, I went with this one because of the price

This one seems to be pretty popular!

Sky Bright by Carex - here

Charmex Touch - here

Boxelite Desk Lamp - here

Some autistics are 100% verbal.

Some autistics are 100% nonverbal.

But plenty of us are semiverbal. Plenty of us are varying degrees of verbal. Some of us are mostly verbal, with periods of being nonverbal, or specific circumstances that will cause us to become nonverbal for a while. Some of us are mostly nonverbal, but will be verbal from time to time.

If you want to be a good ally to autistic people, understand that verbal status is not set in stone, and is not merely a dichotomy of verbal autistics versus nonverbal autistics.

Understand that verbal status does not indicate intelligence or willingness to communicate. Understand that verbal status can be very fluid. Understand that verbal status has no bearing on hearing status.

Well people try and argue that saying “autistic” rather than “with autism” is “letting your autism define you”, which I think is highly hypocritical because nobody has a problem with saying if someone is “artistic” or “musical” or whatnot.And it leads me to wonder, do they not realise that autism literally affects everything we do? It’s not just one small part of us or a personality trait, it’s how we see the world, it’s how our brain works

buddy, reckon that’s because i’ve spent the entire 17 years of my undiagnosed life deliberately targeting and eliminating my “autistic” behaviors, because i learned time and time again that they are the reason things aren’t working out for me. Through the entirety of my elementary school years, my difficulties and complaints were swept aside with “you gotta try harder”, “just do your best”, “you gotta take initiative”, and never once did any adult consider that “oh, this kid is struggling a lot with x. what can we do to make this easier for them?”

it was all on me; at my earliest memory, a seven year old kid with undiagnosed autism, who’d come to spend ten fucking years singling out and annihilating every single “autistic” trait that they’d learned to associate with social and academic failure. that’s ten years of being a child thrown away to despair and self-loathing.

It’d take over six months of 2-3 sessions a week with a very adamant therapist to break up the dried-up husk of a personality i had by the age of sixteen. it wasn’t until a person assessing me for ADD suggested that i might have an autism spectrum condition that i even considered that the misery of those years weren’t the consequences of my failure. 

Today, my blood still boils at the suggestion that children’s inability to function well under the abhorrent conditioning of most schooling systems is in any way caused by the child’s shortcomings. Children have extremely malleable concepts of success and failure, and they’re so reliant on the status quo to guide the way. For me, the status quo said that people who struggled like i did had to find ways to become like the people who didn’t.

So that might be one reason I don’t “seem” autistic to you, even though the very idea that autistic people have to “seem” a certain way is abysmal, and paves the way for further dehumanization of autistic people. Ever since being told I could be autistic, I’ve been learning to respect my needs, and adjusting my surroundings to accommodate them. The reason you’re not seeing the “problem behaviors” that might alert you of my autism is the strategic and predominantly preventative measures I take to make sure I don’t push myself to the point of sensory overload in your presence. 

I learned to respect my boundaries instead of ramming right through them just to do what other people do. I sometimes get frustrated that I have them, and I still have a lot of internalized ableism to work through, but I no longer define myself by the goal of being like allistic people.