#albism

A large part of being nurodivergent is that you interact with the wold very differently from how society expects you to. So naturally you have to explain your experiences a lot so that people in your life can understand them. Sometimes you need to talk about your experiences because there’s nowhere else in society you can process what you’re going through (because representation doesn’t exist), but sometimes you need to explain your experiences to people so that the two of you can better navigate your relationship.  But the thing is, as a woman, people don’t like you talking about yourself. I get so many criticisms about being self-centred and egocentric and being selfish always talking about myself, and yet I don’t feel selfish when I’m trying to explain myself to my friends - it feels like fucking work! I fall under the bipolar umbrella and it feels like emotional labour that I’m putting into the friendship so that the two of us can navigate my shit better and I can be a better friend.  And it sucks that I can put all this work into a friendship with someone and have that person turn around and tell me that I’m being selfish. Gosh how ungrateful! Y’all think I enjoy constantly having to be open for examination and having to reevaluate myself over and over for other people’s benefit?  But here’s the thing, I’m trans, people didn’t use to think of me as a woman. I can promise you that before I transitioned this script was entirely flipped. People fucking praised me for how introspective I was. How open with my experiences and feelings I was. People don’t have as much patience for it now they see me as a woman.  I haven’t started talking about myself more now that I’ve transitioned. In fact I’m so much healthier now I have a whole lot less to talk about when it comes to my brain chemistry. It’s outrageous to me how much time people afforded to me gibbering on about my head when they thought I was that other gender. But no one ever praises a woman for being introspective. The words we use for women instead of introspective are “self absorbed” or “vain”.  And this is a really inter-sectional problem. I want people to know that finding a willing audience for your experiences, even if it’s a necessity for health reasons, is harder for women*. And I want people to know that people’s refusal to listen to women’s experiences is harder for woman who aren’t nurotypical.    * I am of course aware that a trade off of this is that women are encouraged more to find audiences for their experiences than men are. And while men are listened to more readily, they are discouraged from talking about the heavy stuff in the first place and that’s fucking rough on them, but a different problem.  

Thank you very much

The world: “WOW lol omfg the world isn’t going to change for you. Grow up and face the REAL world lmao”

like basically cancer is bad but saying stuff like that p. much give people a negative concept of how to respond about people with it and can hurt people with the idea that it's okay to make fun of cancer when it's not something really worth laughing at

but calling someone stupid just means they're being stupid