Contains Multitudes

If my caretaker had not been accepting of me being trans and invested hundreds of hours into psych appointments and taking me to my endocrinologist and doing all the paperwork involved with my name change and literally taking a week off work to stay with me in the hospital for surgery etc i would have just like. Never transitioned. My ability to transition was entirely dependent on a singular person and that's what a lot of other parts of my life are like as well. and that's fucking terrifying and a great way to be neglected and abused in ways that are horribly hard to get away from.

I dont drive, I dont work, I struggle to leave the house at all, I dont fucking communicate with people majority of the time. The things that are hard for you? I probably can not do them to begin with. No one in my family lives even close to a comparable life to me. None of my irl friends do. I'm incredibly isolated.

And then I go online and see people rant about how easy MSN and HSN people have it because we just get everything we need and how because people can tell we are disabled everything is so easy because none of you even manage to listen to us talk about the neglect and abuse and trauma we face/d. I see people angry at their (more) disabled siblings for getting care they need to survive instead of mad at society for creating a system where its incredibly hard for families to take care of both a higher support needs child and another child.

And I see people who live completely independent lives who work and drive and make their own doctors appointments and grocery shop and travel by themselves call themselves MSN (I could go on a rant about how that's also often the fault of LSN influencers for not leaving a lot of room in their own community for legitimate struggle but that's for another day).

I'm gonna try to do this as respectfully as possible but I feel like you do not understand how disheartening it is for a lot of my posts on this and similar issues to be turned into "but dont forget LSN people!". Believe me, they are not being forgotten just because a singular post doesnt center them.

99% of the self advocacy movement of the last decades is done by them and for themselves. Large parts of self advocacy movements are based on distancing themselves from me and my higher support needs friends and siblings. They call us harmful stereotypes: "autistic people dont actually do x or need y" even though MSN & HSN often do... They get upset if they are assumed to be like us because being like us is bad to them even if they might not say that out loud. Its still obvious.

When I got diagnosed my mother bought many books, many by autistic adults. What she read in there did not actually help her a lot in knowing what to expect from me as I grew up, how to understand me, or how to help me. Because they were written by LSN people for that same audience. No one in there told her about prompting to help me with communication or ADLs, or AAC, or head protection for my self injury behavior. They did however tell her I can move out and live by myself and go to university and then get a job because I'm smart and smart autistics are just a bit socially awkward and struggle with sensory input sometimes and if it's really extreme we might forget to shower for a couple days, but all we really need is some leeway when we dont understand your sarcasm and some noise cancelling headphones to focus at work and a weighted blanket at home.

I struggled for years until I found out you can be somebody that did not fit this profile while also not being HSN. It was a long time until I realized That even with the support I was getting, which was far more substantial than any of these other adults in the books or the general autism tags, it still wasnt enough. It took me another two years to be able to say online that I was MSN and start sharing what my life was like, after slowly finding others like me who I could finally understand and relate to. There arent that many of us on tumblr. I probably recognize every URL of people who have posted in the MSN tag more than twice. We try hard to advocate for ourselves.

But like every time I talk about my life in some detail someone shows up goes "what about LSN people experiences". That's not what I want to discuss. It's what everyone is already talking about. If those spaces dont discuss struggle openly or whatever that is something they can change from within.

I can not live a fairly normal life with the help of planners and phone alarms and a friend or relative who drops by once a week for an hour or two. Sure a LSN persons dishes might pile up sometimes and doing laundry is exhausting and maybe they dont brush their teeth twice a day. But that in itself is an unattainable fantasy for me. My caregiver is currently helping me apply for assisted living so I can move out into assisted living. That's what i need for like all iADLs. My therapist and me is looking into care agencies to cover the care of some bADLs, funded by my care level granted by the government. My mother is legally my caregiver. The government has assessed that I'm disabled to the level of needing daily care and she is being paid for this. I will most likely need financial assistance from the government for the rest of my life to even be able to afford just rent and food. I will most likely forever need this level of care.

i love you autistics with caretakers

i love you autistics who need caretakers but don’t have them

i love you autistics whose motor control is too poor to feed yourself without assistance

i love you autistics with poor facial control and poor volume regulation and poor tone management

i love you autistics with terrible interoception

i love you autistics who stim in “gross”/“weird” ways

i love you autistics with loud and disruptive stims

i love you nonverbal/nonspeaking autistics

i love you unreliably speaking autistics

i love you autistics who have verbal shutdowns

i love you unpredictable autistics

i love you autistics who society pities and infantilizes

Start putting the people who struggle more in the spotlight. Those with intellectual disabilities, those with learning disabilities, those with cognitive disabilities, those who are just generally stereotypically “dumb” and embrace it!

People automatically assume that higher support needs people, especially those who are nonverbal/nonspeaking are hiding this special talent that will wow the world.

Brain: Hey remember that internet argument you got into like ten years ago with someone you can’t even remember

Me: Please I’m so tired

Brain: I’ve written a 400,000 word rebuttal which I am going to narrate to you now

Me: please