what remains is this

do not crash out

your feelings are NOT valid

do not send that text

don't kill yourself. lock in

just so we’re clear, because i think someone could get that impression from these tags, oxytocin is NOT a drug. oxyTOCIN (hormone, the subject of this post) and oxyCONTIN (opioid drug) look very similar and sound very similar but they are not even vaguely related despite nearly being anagrams

it is not an opioid or a painkiller. oxytocin is a hormone and neuropeptide that is involved in the way mammals form social bonds with each other. it cannot cross the blood-brain barrier, so when you take it orally, it ONLY affects your body, it does not affect your brain. thats why it’s in nasal spray form in these posts. in obstetric medicine, oral or IV oxytocin is used during labor to increase uterine contractions, because in the body it is also involved in childbirth (both the physical act of giving birth and in boding with your baby/tolerating the people around you while you are in labor)

researchers have noticed for a long time that oxytocin levels in autistic people are generally very low, which in my opinion is exactly what autism “feels like” in social situations: ie, you are ambiently aware that hugging, physical touch, conversation either intimate or smalltalk level, and just being in proximity to people you care about should feel nice, everyone else seems to be having a good time, and they cant all be faking it. so what’s my problem? why does it stress me out so badly to be around people i actually want to be around and whom i trust and love? what am i MISSING that other people have? well, it might be the oxytocin for a lot of us. again, the studies on autism are 99% on “curing autism in children” and no one is interested at all in running research on improving quality of life in autistic adults, so the research we have on this is really stupid. but it offers some insight. autistic children given oxytocin nasal spray seem to respond with what you would expect from increasing someone’s low oxytocin levels: less social stress, better verbal fluency around people, better mood around people, etc.

i universally could not find any details about the disability services that were written as though they were addressed to a disabled potential student. I reached out to one school via email, very politely, to ask if she could tell me some details about how the program worked. disability services can be structured a lot of different ways and in my experience it's important to know how it will be ahead of time, bc some ways of structuring disability services will not work for some people while others might. No way to know ahead of time until you encounter that specific system yourself

Anyway i got a very rude email back telling me there was information on the website and that they 'work with the student once they're accepted,' with the implication that if i wanted to know how they would accommodate a student like me, i would have to go through the process of applying (fee and all) and being accepted. possibly even of enrolling, it was unclear from her phrasing.

i have not applied to any schools since then. i realized that they're all like this on purpose*. they exist because the school does not want to get sued by the department of justice. they do not exist to help disabled students. they exist so the school has something to point to and loudly claim "NO WE TOTALLY ACCOMMODATE DISABLED STUDENTS"

this clarified a lot for me about the way a LOT of institutions work. and made me feel very naive for not having reaalized it before. it seems so obvious now. the reason my inquiries were always met with offended confusion is because their materials are not for me. their materials are for the purpose of looking convincingly as though they provide disability services. it's for the government. it's not for me.

You send the thing out and maybe someone reads it and something moves in them and they have no way to tell you exactly what moved or why and you have no way to know if it was the thing you meant or something else entirely.

You're working in permanent uncertainty about whether any of it lands. and you keep going anyway. you have to develop this strange faith in the act itself, in the value of the attempt separate from the outcome, because if you need confirmation every time you sit down you will never sit down.