#nightramblestm

Thinking about how, when I told my mother this, she asked me “So what’s hurt?” Which is very different than “what hurts?”

I looked at her, confused. “Nothing is hurt. I just hurt.”

And she says “But where do you hurt?”

“Well, right now it’s my stomach and my ankles-“

She cuts me off. “So you twisted your ankle?”

“No,” I say. “My ankles just hurt. I’ve been walking today.”

Now it’s her turn to look confused. “Just walking doesn’t make your ankles hurt. You must have sprained them or something.”

But I shake my head. “Nope. This just happens on days when I walk more than a little bit. My ankles hurt first, then my knees by lunch time. And if I don’t take a nap and stay on my feet all day, my hips will be hurting too.”

“Oh.”

Joint pain is my normal. Sometimes, if I barely walk all day, the ache in my ankles is barely noticeable and doesn’t affect my functioning because I’m used to it. If I do what most able-bodied people would consider to be a “normal” amount of walking, almost all of my joints will hurt by supper. If I have to wash dishes or run any errands, I’ll hurt so bad I can’t walk for the rest of the day.

Then there’s the chronic migraine attacks. I used to have them multiple times a week as a child, and no matter how I explained myself, nobody ever understood that they weren’t just headaches. I experienced those too, and frequently, but they were not the same. Thankfully, at the age of eleven, I found an article explaining migraine triggers. I was able to identify a few of my own triggers, and the frequency of my migraine attacks reduced to maybe a couple a month. For a few years I was basically on cloud nine, I’d never experienced such a lack of pain before and it was so freeing. Unfortunately, migraine is a progressive condition, so the attacks have gotten more frequent over the years.

And then there’s the “random” pains. Some mornings I wake up and my stomach hurts. Or my chest. Or my back. These are just things I have to live with, because my body’s connective tissue is… well, for lack of a better word, faulty. And I never knew that other people didn’t experience this, because how could I? We never talked about it. Sometimes I’d hear people complain about back aches and just assume they were like mine. Of course, I knew that injuring yourself could cause muscle aches, obviously. But I just assumed that *most* of the time, other peoples bodies hurt like mine did. I didn’t realize that humans aren’t supposed to “just hurt” without a connected incident.

Notice how the missing word is “people”. When you take off that word and change the term from a noun to an adjective, you strip the humanity from the term.

“Female” isn’t a noun, just like “black” and “transgender” aren’t nouns. Female what? Female human? Female frog? It could be anything.

You aren’t calling women “females” because it’s sCiEnTiFiCaLLy aCuRaTe. You just don’t see them as people whose humanity is worth acknowledging.

Annabeth and Hazel doing each other’s hair, and both of them helping teach Piper new braids. All three of them practicing on Leo, who pretends it’s against his will but is actually really glad for the company and for the platonic physical contact. Percy walking into the room to see what everyone is up to and immediately getting pushed into a chair next to Leo and becoming another mannequin.

Jason and Annabeth and Frank plotting battle strategies together, swapping stories of their adventures and the antics of their friends, starting a “who’s best friend did the dumber thing” battle. Jason and Annabeth studying together because Jason promised to build those shrines and Annabeth knows so much about architecture.

Piper and Percy teasing each other relentlessly, playing pranks (Piper always pretends she’s not involved, because she’s obviously above that). Percy and Piper vying for Annabeth’s attention, even though they both know it’s only a joke and her heart belongs to Percy.

“Allistic” simply means “NOT autistic”.

It DOES NOT mean you are neurotypical. It is not a bad thing. It’s not some kind of accusation that you need to be defensive about (literally saw someone throw a huge hissy fit about being “lumped in” with neurotypicals by an autistic creator).

You can be neurodivergent AND allistic, if your neurodivergence is ANYTHING OTHER than autism. You can have OCD, schizophrenia, adhd, anxiety, DID, or literally anything else. As long as you are not autistic, you are still allistic.

Please stop using allistic as a synonym for neurotypical. Please stop acting like it is an attack if someone refers to you as allistic if you know you do not have autism.

Yes, I know that using paper towels and Clorox wipes is not as sustainable or healthy for the ecosystem as just using regular towels and rags. However, I am fucking exhausted all the time, and if I use regular rags, I will not have the energy to clean them. They will sit in my kitchen and get moldy and have to be thrown away anyway. And then my family is living in unsafe conditions because we’re breathing mold spores.

Additionally, we are fucking poor. We don’t have a washer and dryer. If I want to do laundry I have to load it all up in my car, drive across town to the only laundromat, spend most of my day switching things over and waiting for machines to open up, spend about thirty bucks (probably more, because the dryers are shit and never actually dry things on the first cycle), load everything back into the car, drive back home, and then sort and fold and put away everything I just washed.

That is not feasible most of the time, because I am disabled, I don’t have that money to spend, and I am the primary caregiver for our baby who has extreme sensitivities to changes in our routine. I can’t just take him to the laundromat with me, and I don’t have anyone to watch him while I go. Most days I’m not physically capable of carrying baskets of laundry to and from my vehicle. And again, we can not afford the laundromat. Anything that I can do to reduce the amount of laundry we need to wash in a month, I’m going to do.

All of this to say, please for the love of god consider that there are literally thousands of reasons someone might not be doing “clean living” or choosing the most eco-friendly option all the time. We can’t all cut out disposables. I already feel guilty enough that I can’t just function like a normal person, you do not need to butt in and make it worse.

If your activism for the environment and the earth goes so far as to make you apathetic to the struggles and needs of the real actual people around you, you need to reconsider where your morals lie.

I 100% think that we need to hold people like Doja Cat and Taylor Swift and Lizzo and Ariana Grande accountable for their actions, but I am so fucking sick of seeing all the brainrot incels come out of the woodwork thinking it’s their time to shine, and just shitting all over these women for being women, for being fat, and/or for being black.

Just because I don’t like or support someone doesn’t mean I want to sit and listen to you spout vile hateful bigoted shit about them. Because guess what, all that stuff you’re saying applies to billions of good people. And if you think it’s okay to be racist and misogynistic and fatphobic to bad people, it is ONLY EVER because you are a racist, a misogynist, and a fatphobe.

It’s like when people think it’s okay to misgender or deadname a trans person just because said trans person turned out to be an asshole. That is not okay. And it’s not about “respect” for the person, it’s not about consideration. It’s because misgendering someone (intentionally) is wrong.

Also me for the last 20 years:

Walks on toes when thinking hard or feeling jittery

Taps out repeating patterns with fingers and toes when feeling social anxiety

Repeats big words over and over in my head when unable to clear intrusive thoughts

Wiggles isolated leg muscles when overwhelmed by loud noise

Rubs hands in circles on carpet when trying to speak clearly with friends

Chews lips and fingernails constantly

Listens to the same song for hours on end when tired or upset

Repeatedly puts hair up and takes it down again when trying to focus

Intentionally makes limbs/hands fall asleep when bored so the tingly feeling acts as a distraction

Paces constantly

Always has to have a show to watch when trying to do anything productive (almost always Criminal Minds)

Can’t fall asleep without rubbing feet together or wiggling toes for several minutes

Stays on the merri-go-round until physically sick

Does consecutive summersaults on the trampoline until dizzy

Wiggles fingers when excited

Conductor hands to music

Bounces excessively when enjoying music

Compulsively reorganizes bookshelves and desk and art supplies and collectibles when bored/understimulated

Like yeah, I remember highschool. It sucked, but not because of what I was learning. It sucked because teachers are overworked and underpaid/under supported, and the school system doesn’t give half a shit about disabled kids or kids with different neurological conditions or really any of the kids.

We do need schools. Whatever issues the system as a whole has, it needs to be reformed, not done away with. You cannot sit and gripe about how we don’t need any of these history classes because it’s all stuff you don’t want to know anyway, and then go absolutely batshit insane when someone doesn’t know about Pearl Harbor.

Because those people aren’t stupid. They are being intentionally misled, neglected, misinformed, or all three. They are ignorant, not because they chose it but because someone else chose it to further their own desires.

Ignorance leads to harm. Ignorance leads to manipulation. Ignorance is why we have slews of people in the US who are so scared of autism (which IS NOT SOMETHING TO BE SCARED OF) that they refuse to vaccinate their children, which is a form of medical neglect. They are actively endangering people they care about because they have been lied to by political parties and religious leaders who benefit from uneducated mobs.

Ignorance is how you get cults. Ignorance is how people get taken advantage of. Ignorance is how you get genocide. ONE person decides they want power and they use the lack of education to amass followers who will support them blindly because they don’t know any better.

Everyone is appalled when ex-Mormons get on the internet and talk about all the things they had to learn as adults, who by all accounts should have known those things by the time they were fifteen. People lose their fucking minds when ex-Mormons mention they didn’t know how babies were made until after they got married at like thirty. I saw someone make an entire six minute video about how he’s pretty sure all these deconstructers are lying for clout online, because how could they possibly not know?

They don’t know because they were intentionally kept in the dark. That is how high-control religions and cults operate. That is how you keep people under your thumb.

You ask how Christians could possibly think that evolution isn’t real? As someone who was raised that way, I’ll tell you.

From the moment my education started, I was fed misinformation. In kindergarten I learned about how God made dinosaurs, but they all died in the flood and the earth was too damaged afterward to support such big species even after they came off the ark. In middle school I watched Ken Ham and Kent Hovind videos about how carbon-dating is all bogus and if any scientist tries to use it to debate you, you can say “Aha! I knew you were wrong!” and end the discussion there. In highschool I took apologetics, where we learned how to “defend our faith” by constantly moving the goalposts when we spoke to atheists. We were taught that “What happened to the Missing Link?” is a gotcha that no scientist would ever be able to dispute, and so obviously we were the ones in the right. I was told at every possible opportunity that Bill Nye is literally the antichrist, that he doesn’t have a clue what he’s talking about, and that any Creationist (Christian “scientists”) could debate him into the ground because he’s so stupid.

I didn’t question any of it because that wasn’t an option. It was *literally* all I knew. I had such a fundamental misunderstanding of science as a whole that when I was exposed to true scientific facts and processes and studies for the first time, I could scoff and say “Don’t they know that’s not even a real thing? How ridiculous that they’d think I would believe it!”

I’m doing the work now to re-educate myself. I have learned so much in just two years that I genuinely can’t speak to half of my family because it makes them so angry. And when I hear people talk about anything happening or existing “billions of years ago”, my knee-jerk reaction is still “The earth is nowhere near that old! That’s how I know they’re lying!” I have to intentionally reprogram my thinking every. single. time. that I engage with scientific literature or media.

It’s hard. It’s frustrating. And it all could’ve been avoided if my own parents hadn’t also been misled their whole lives. I’m not going to make excuses for them as adults, because learning and doing better is your own responsibility once you’re not a kid. But I will say that if their parents hadn’t also been misinformed, they wouldn’t have learned the same lies that they later went on to teach me and my siblings. It’s a vicious cycle, one that is designed to keep people ignorant. It is purposely designed not to have an out.