2:06pm August 4, 2015

deucebasket:

I saw a bunch of ants carrying around a potato chip this morning and it made me wish I had a bunch of friends and a really huge potato chip

362,966 notes

12:48pm August 4, 2015

Circles

autisticpoetry:

When I’m writing a poem it’s 60% pacing.

My method also includes 20% squeezing hand sanitizer

into the crevices between my fingers and keyboard keys,

10% tugging at my clothes and 10% worrying

that everything I write is going to be taken at face value.

These words are not my face.

I read somewhere that poetry has body and soul,

That poetry conveys life and death like

a memory, or a photograph, or the laughter of a

loved one- but my poetry doesn’t smile.

You cannot take a picture like the ones in my head.

I tread steady circles around coffee tables and

stairwells and the downstairs of my parent’s house

and I would circle the world if I wasn’t afraid that

opening the front door might wake somebody up.

This poem isn’t meant to wake anybody up.

This poem is room temperature water with a

peanut butter sandwich.

This poem is checking the windows with each

circle around the main floor.

This poem is setting off firecrackers,

in the wake of a fireworks show.

This poem is another circle because I’m always collecting more.

If I walk enough circles I’ll catch up to this house

and eventually out-pace all the secrets that got swept beneath the oven. 

46 notes

12:17pm August 4, 2015

“

Animal Crossing, The Sims, and Minecraft are all worldwide sensations made by what one would now consider to be AAA companies, and yet, since not one of these games has violence as a core mechanic, each and every one of them has been criticized as not being ‘game-y’ enough.

The fact that the same criticism is levied at so-called ‘casual games’ and ‘casual gamers’ reveals a link between the two: games that don’t include violence as a core mechanic are perceived by the community as being fundamentally more feminine than games that do. Games with women-majority audiences, women-majority casts, and women-majority dev teams are frequently lumped in with this kind of critique. Violence, goes the logic, is what makes a game masculine—and, by extension, being masculine is what makes a video game a video game.

”

35,833 notes

7:29am August 4, 2015

My brain refuses to see delirium as 100% meaningless.

One of the things that sucks about being delirious is how little meaning things seem to have some of the time – most of the time, even.  When I’m delirious, it feels like I’m in a world of edges, never reaching any depths, just surfaces, and seeing all kinds of dizzying reflections in the surfaces, with my mind chasing them around in circles, unable to keep up or comprehend anything other than fragments of reality.  It’s a terrible, empty feeling.  And it’s weird because my head is outright cluttered, generally (unless it’s the kind of delirium where everything just fades away, instead of becoming cluttery and hallucinatory) and yet there’s nothing there.  There’s just nothing to anything.  

And after awhile that gets to me.  After awhile I start wondering, is every time that I’m delirious, time wasted, time I’ll never get back, time that’s utterly meaningless in the worst possible way?  Especially when it’s filled with hallucinations and delusions that have nothing to do with reality at all.

And yet every single time I’ve been delirious, I’ve also had moments where instead of too little meaning, suddenly everything drops out from under me, and… well in the comic I made, I represented it with a lioness, but that was a symbolic way of getting at something deeper.  So even though delirium mostly takes me as far away from reality as you can get, there’s also these weird moments where it suddenly takes me towards reality in a huge way that I can’t ignore.

But all of these things, whether they’re about taking my mind towards reality or away from it – they’re about what my mind experiences.  And reality isn’t dependent on whether I notice it at the time or not.  And I continue to exist just as much when I’m totally confused, as I do when I’m not confused at all.  That includes during times that my brain doesn’t even encode memories from.  It doesn’t mean I’m not there, or that what’s happening to me at the time doesn’t matter.

But even with all that – I just get this intense desire to make sure that these parts of my life have some kind of meaning to them, even though everything seems so meaningless so much of the time while they’re going on.  Maybe it’s because of that horrible empty meaningless feeling, that I insist on there being some kind of meaning in sight even then.  I don’t know.  I don’t even know how to say what I’m trying to say.

8 notes

7:20am August 4, 2015

Fey on the backpack.

13 notes

2:21am August 4, 2015

echolalia is weird

madeofpatterns:

I am getting a weird urge to combine yo mama jokes and social role valorization phrases.

HEEEEEEEE!

13 notes

2:18am August 4, 2015

madeofpatterns:

it is hard to express…

just how much you can break someone…

…if what you think you’re doing..

..is making them into someone who might someday become a real person worthy of respect…

I had a psychologist once who openly told me that his goal was to kill the person I was, and replace that person, inside me, with a person who was more functional and better adapted to living in the world and less psychotic.

Note that ‘psychotic’, for him, encompassed ‘autistic’.  (He was part of a team who had diagnosed me, among other things, as having been ‘psychotic since infancy’.  Which can only ever mean autism, because there’s no way to diagnose actual psychosis in an infant.  They were taking their ideas straight out of Frances Tustin’s books from the seventies, that differentiated some forms of autism from others, and called some of it autism and some of it childhood schizophrenia or childhood psychosis.  I was supposedly psychotic since infancy and schizophrenic since adolescence, although what the difference was, I was never exactly told.)

He did not succeed.

But he did succeed in doing some incredibly scary stuff to the inside of my head.  I was unable to defend myself against the things he did, because I was heavily drugged and he was an accomplished manipulator.

I have been told since – by strangers online who know nothing about my life, mind you –  that I should’ve known it was impossible for someone to kill who you are and make you into someone else.  That if I actually believed him that it was possible, then there was something clearly wrong with me that needed to be fixed, possibly by the very guy who was abusing me in this fashion.

Of all of the abuse I encountered in the psychiatric system, this man’s abuse was the longest-lasting and most damaging in terms of consequences for my mind.  I remember going into appointments with him and feeling like I was an entirely different person.  Like I’d walk in the door myself, immediately turn into someone else the moment I saw him, and leave the door someone else again.  Often I wouldn’t be able to remember our sessions later.

He once let it slip that he’d been trained by a certain school of hypnotherapy.  Then he refused to name it again when I and my family asked about it, and got evasive whenever we brought up the subject.  I eventually found some stuff by the person, and it was someone who was considered highly unethical by a lot of hypnotherapists, because he believed in lying to patients if he thought lying would bring them around to healing in some manner, and he also believed in involuntary trance induction.  When I read about the ‘confusion induction’, it was exactly what this therapist did sometimes. 

And being on a very high dose of antipsychotics made it impossible for me to psychologically defend myself.  Antipsychotics can have an effect where they basically shatter your cognitive abilities, including your defenses against having your mind invaded.  By which I don’t mean like sci-fi telepathy sort of mind invasion, but more like extremely skilled manipulation.  If you can’t think straight, you can’t defend yourself well against people who are hell-bent on manipulating you.

But he was incredibly up front about the idea that he was going to kill the person I was inside, and replace that person.  He said also that he was going to get inside my mind and never leave.  And that if I ever had an original thought, I should bring it to him, because I would probably die if I ever thought for myself for very long.

I remember when a friend first taught me to repeat “I am allowed to think for myself.”  She said I needed to repeat it to myself over and over until I really believed it, and that it was very important that I do so.  I thought she was trying to kill me.  And at first, even beginning to try to repeat it to myself, resulted in this torrent of confusing brain noise that felt like I was drowning.  It was like he’d set booby traps all over my mind.

People don’t think this kind of thing is possible.

People are wrong.

I was first able to begin resisting this stuff when I found a book about cults, by a person who had been a cult member and had indoctrinated other people, and he talked in depth about how indoctrination works and how to resist it and remove it from yourself.  I had never been in a religious cult, or even in any of the other types of cults in the book, but the residential facility I lived at when all this went down, had a power structure that resembled a cult enough that the book was very useful for me.

I actually confronted him about it once, after I started reading about cults.  He told me that anything he did was warranted because if it wasn’t for him I’d have been in a state institution for at minimum the rest of my childhood.  Mind you, when given a choice between the residential facility and the state institution, I chose the state institution.  I was overruled both because people didn’t believe anyone in their right mind could ever make the choice I made, and because there were no beds open in the state institution. 

But having now talked to people who’ve been in similar residential facilities and in the exact state institution I almost ended up in, I have been told that the state institution was definitely better.  Not good, not good by a long shot.  In fact, terrible.  But better.  State institutions don’t usually have the money to throw around for intensive one-on-one 24/7 brainwashing.  Which is why many actual patients prefer them to private institutions.  Not all patients, and not all institutions, but it’s a preference that occurs often enough, and goes against what most people consider common sense, that it’s been explicitly noted a lot in the psychiatric ex-patient movement.  Unfortunately, that preference (and, in general, preferences for places seen as “worse” from the outside for reasons that are largely aesthetic) is often seen as evidence that we lack sanity and should not have control over our lives. 

Of course, most of us would prefer no institutions, but when given a choice between different types of institutions, we’ll often choose ones considered “more restrictive” or “worse”.  Because our definition of what makes a place worse – as patients, who understand certain things instinctively that other people don’t understand – is often very different from what staff or family members consider worse.

So this idea that he was keeping me out of a state institution doesn’t hold water to me at all.

The idea that he did this for any reason other than his own amusement and power tripping, doesn’t hold water to me at all.  He was someone who got off on power and control.  Not someone who inadvertently misused power, but someone who craved power and misused it to do harm to people, and often enjoyed doing so.

He also told me that he really enjoyed being able to treat me, because normally people like me were stuck in state institutions and out of his reach, so he didn’t normally get to “work on” anyone like me.

Which was a creepy-ass thing to say.

I learned later that even in psychotherapy that is not deliberately sadistic, there’s a frequent idea that you have to destroy who someone is and replace them with someone more functional. 

So I was not imagining that he said this, and the fact that I believed him capable of doing something he kept threatening to do (when he controlled every aspect of my life, too, which can undermine anyone’s sense of reality), does not mean that I “had to have been crazy” and therefore that what he did was somehow okay.  (Why is it okay to do that to crazy people but not to sane people, anyway?  It shouldn’t be.  And why is it okay to imply that I’m crazy – and therefore apparently not worth listening to – because I was horribly abused by a psychologist on a power trip?)

TL;DR:  I had a psychologist once who told me that he wanted to kill the person I was and replace me with someone who could function better in the world and generally be a happier and better person or something along those lines.  He told me this, explicitly, many times.  His abuse did more damage to my mind than the rest of the psychiatric system combined.  And the one time I confronted him about the matter, he told me that it was all okay because he was doing it to keep me out of a state institution.  Except he was actually doing it because he got off on power and control.  Everything else was just an excuse.  It was horrible in ways I can’t even describe. 

136 notes

1:50am August 4, 2015

madeofpatterns:

My friends are FRIENDS. Not people I’m in a socially valued role with so that I can gain access to the good things in life.

There’s a disturbing idea embedded in all of this, that is very similar to an idea embedded in a particular school of pop psychology.

I’ve run into some autistic people who decided to learn social skills by learning that particular school of pop psychology.  It invariably turns their view of socialization into something that seriously disturbs me.  (I’m sure the same is true of nonautistic people who buy into it, but I think autistic people may be more vulnerable to using such things as a way to learn social stuff explicitly.)

I’m talking about, specifically, transactional analysis.  It’s one of the most horribly cynical views of human interaction I have ever encountered.  And it has something deeply in common with the Social Role Valorization stuff you’re reacting to, although I can’t articulate what.

19 notes

1:44am August 4, 2015

madeofpatterns:

A lot of the worst things that have happened to me were at the hands of people who thought that they were teaching me to occupy a socially valued role.

Me too.

23 notes

1:36am August 4, 2015

fullyarticulatedgoldskeleton:

withasmoothroundstone:

fullyarticulatedgoldskeleton:

If I had a solid piece of advice to give anyone it would be just “calm down”

And I don’t mean that in a dismissive sense but like

One of the things being involved in SJ did was give me an immediate panic response every time I saw someone talk about something Forbidden

And slowly learning that talking to people about things is not actually on par with trying to put a fire out before it kills someone has been extremely helpful for me

It’s incredibly important to be able to gain a little perspective. No, someone on the internet being wrong is not the literal equivalent of a bullet on its way to murder someone. Working out right from wrong requires time and patience. It can’t be done with panicked urgency or rage.

I think what’s especially saddening is that you get so many splinter groups within social justice itself because people don’t know how to deal with different perspectives without making it into “you’re wrong, and that’s dangerous, so now we’re enemies.” When some in-group thing becomes controversial, like, “Disabled people all think (thing),” and some disabled people go, “No, we don’t,” I never see that reconciled as a valid difference of perspective. I always just see it turn into enemy factions. It sucks.

I like the tags used by someone before me on this:

#I don’t think stupid is an ableist slur #that doesn’t mean I care less about people with ID than people who think it is

That’s a really good example of something that’s split people into warring factions, when it should just be left as a valid difference of opinion among disabled people.

There’s a website I’ve been reading as I watch Star Trek.  The guy has reviewed every episode and it’s fun to go there and read what everyone has to say in response, and then sometimes even add comments of my own, even though they’re so long after the fact that I doubt anyone actually reads them at this point, or that I’ll ever get replied to.  (If I do, it’ll probably be a year from now or something.)

But.

The author there… he has really good intentions.  And I respect anyone’s right to run their website however they want to, and moderate or ban people on whatever criteria they choose.  But I still wish he had somewhat different criteria.

He’s not, to my knowledge, disabled.  I could be wrong about that, but the way he talks about disability is very different than the way he talks about marginalization that I know he experiences as a gay man of color.

But he’s heard, somewhere, about The Unwritten List Of Ableist Words Never To Say.  And he enforces that.  He warns people if words like ‘mad’ or ‘stupid’ or ‘dumb’ or ‘crazy’ are in the books he’s reading or shows he’s watching.  And he does not allow people to use those words on his site, saying they are ableist slurs.

And I know that he probably thinks he’s doing right by disabled people, but as a disabled person whose disability makes it hard for me to do a search-and-replace function on individual words I use, I really don’t like being asked not to say words unless the words are so heinous that there’s really no excuse.  Like, I would not say the n-word.  And the only reason I say retard (as in REE-tard, not as in re-TARD, which is a completely different word) ever at all, is because it’s a word that’s used against me frequently so I feel I have the right to use it as long as I don’t use it for real.  Like, I can say the word, such as for discussions like this one, I just can’t say it as an insult or a way of actually describing real human beings or something.  But those are two words that I would have no problem with someone banning from their website, at least as used by white people and people without cognitive or developmental disabilities. 

On the other hand, banning stupid and dumb just makes it hard for me to write, because although I don’t throw those words around all the time, they’re still words for actual concepts that have nothing to do with disability.  And it makes me unsettled that people have become so factionalized over this issue, that even my talking about this has led to people telling me I just don’t give a crap about [insert groups of people that I either belong to or am routinely thought to belong to], or that I’ve never been hurt sufficiently by being called stupid or dumb, because if I had, I’d agree with them.

And the guy who runs that website?  He probably believes what he’s been told, which is that disabled people all agree about these words, or at least the disabled people who count when it comes to discussions like this.  I’ve seen so many disabled people state outright that all disabled people, or all autistic people, or all people with intellectual disabilities, believe one particular thing.  And it’s never true.  Ever.  But people say it anyway. 

And people like me either don’t exist or are uncaring monsters who don’t get how much words can hurt people, because if we did we’d agree.

And there’s that… thing people can do.  And people become very adept at it.  Where they can link anything at all back to a heinous crime against some marginalized group of people.  And then they can say that anyone who disagrees with them is doing the equivalent of allowing that heinous crime to happen. 

What do I mean?  Well… I forget exactly what was being argued about, because this was back when I was first on tumblr, and people were first forming the #actuallyautistic tag, to give some background on how long ago this was. 

But there was an argument between an autistic adult and a nonautistic parent of an autistic child.  This is not surprising, these arguments happen all the time online.  It was over something about… how parents should behave towards adult autistic self-advocates, or something like that.  Whatever the parent had done, it was a social gaffe at best and disrespecting autistic people at worst.

But then.

The autistic person somehow tied – and it took a lot of twisting to do this – the parent’s behavior, back to the murder of autistic people.

So now, the argument took on new urgency.  The people on the autistic person’s side were suddenly not just correcting a parent’s behavior towards online autistic adults.  They were, in their eyes, preventing murder.  And the parent was, in their eyes, contributing to murder in some manner. 

It took a large stretch to get there, and it took a lot of links in a long chain that would not hold up to close scrutiny without falling into pieces.  But that didn’t matter.  What mattered was that now a difference of opinion was elevated in importance, to the level of murder prevention.  And this meant that the autistic people in the conversation now viewed what was happening with an intense urgency that had not been there before.

And that disturbed me greatly.

Because the ability to tie relatively minor disagreements to things like murder, genocide, sterilization, torture and other crimes against humanity, is a skill.  And some people on here have honed that skill, turned it into a high art form in fact.  And that skill is so very destructive to anyone who is trying to communicate, to cooperate, to learn from each other.  But it’s pulled out and used like a weapon.  And it’s not right, and it’s not fair, to anyone involved.

And it’s late, so even if I had a direction I was going beyond this, I don’t remember it.  I think I’ve said enough for now.

Yeah, when people can’t outright mentally strip you of your minority status, they like to impose a hierarchy of “who’s affected the most by oppression” instead, so they can still dismiss your perspective. And they have this thinking where the person who is most upset is the one who’s most “right” about something. 

And yes, that- making every discussion about murder, and making it seem like people disagreeing is tantamount to murder. Why did this become a thing, and how does it make sense to anyone? It makes it so difficult to have honest conversations about things. I am really tired of seeing thoughtful objections to trending social justice ideas being shut down by people who are terrified of the “harm” simply talking about these things will cause to “oppressed people who are being murdered every day!” Just talking about things on your blog is not killing people. And the fact that most of us who are objecting are also oppressed, it’s like… you’re trying to stifle the growth of your own community. People could be sharing valuable insights and perspectives, and you’re going to stomp all over that, because you’ve convinced yourself that words are bullets.

Also the panic when you see someone talk about something Forbidden, or when you want to talk about something Forbidden yourself… that’s very familiar to me.  When I first came onto tumblr, I got blindsided by that element of things, and a friend had to tell me “you don’t seem like yourself at all, you seem like you’re dodging and weaving to try to avoid doing and saying the wrong things, while trying to always do and say the right things”.  Which was true.  And also, I was already bad at doing that, and only got worse over time.  So, yeah.  :-/

139 notes

1:21am August 4, 2015

madeofpatterns:

I believe in my religion. I’m not just doing it for instrumental reasons.

12 notes

1:17am August 4, 2015

seeklight:

This is my favorite cat of Instagram

41,364 notes

1:14am August 4, 2015

madeofpatterns:

Social role valorization really creeps me out.

OMG you’ve discovered that stuff?  It’s horribly, terribly creepy stuff.  I still remember when I first started reading Wolf Wolfensberger.  Wow.  Horrible.

9 notes