For my followers: how interested would you be in a:
YA modern/urban paranormal/faerie fantasy novel set in Vancouver Canada,
featuring a native, asexual, autistic, female protagonist,
and her ragtag band of misfit friends that become family,
and that focuses on themes of friendship, family, justice, rebellion, loyalty, morality, culture, belonging, discrimination, oppression and self-identification rather than on romance?
‘Cause I’m writing the thing. I’m calling it TMC for a working title and will use #TMCbook as a tag. If anyone is interested on here, I’ll post updates about it every now and then!
why? why does tumblr keep unfollowing me from blogs that I want to be following?? ??? doesn’t it want me to… do the tumblring?
I eat existentialist dread for breakfast (try it with jelly on top)
Oh my gosh I love this photo of you! It’s amazing!
You srsly look like you belong in LOTR as an elf.
@candidlyautistic Aw, thank you! It’s just a no-makeup phone selfie- I didn’t realize it was a good photo of me. I’m feeling it a lot more now :)
@butterflyinthewell omg. At any given moment I am hoping to be mistaken for an elven LOTR extra. Goal achieved!!
I eat existentialist dread for breakfast (try it with jelly on top)
Anonymous asked: I saw the other ask about fake laughing, and it got me thinking about something from my childhood. When I cried when I was a kid, my mom used to constantly tell me to stop, saying she could tell it was fake when I was completely legitimately crying and upset. Did my real crying seem fake because I'm autistic, or was my mom just kind of an asshole?
Definitely the second one, possibly also the first one. Either way, whether a child’s tears are “sincere” or not, that’s an emotionally immature and damaging way to react to a child seeking emotional validation.
Your mom should have believed you and validated your emotions. She was wrong to deny what you were feeling and accuse you of faking. I’m sorry.
I want you to know that this happened to me, too. Personally, it gave me issues re: crying or showing emotion in front of other people. It sucks. I hope you’re doing okay.
Anonymous asked: Hello, Thank you so much for your videos, they have been very helpful. Our son has recently been diagnosed ASD, ADD. He is four, he does a-lot of scripting. My question is, can he be scripting laughter? You can tell it is a forced/fake laugh he does at times when he thinks others are laughing or something is supposed to be funny. I'm curious if that's the case. p.s. Thank you for your video on vocal stimming, he vocal stims alot, now I understand why and that it is a positive thing for him.
Hi anon. Thanks for the message, this is something I’ve been thinking about lately.
Everyone scripts laughter. Everyone, regardless of neurotype, has laughed at someone’s unfunny joke out of politeness or because it’s just what’s expected. ‘Cause frankly, allistic standards of interaction are really weird.
Sometimes I really do find something amusing but don’t have the “laugh urge”, so I just fake it to convey my amusement for the benefit of people around me.
Autistic people are simply at a disadvantage because we may have a harder time/take longer/be unable to perfect the real-sounding-but-unspontaneous-laugh that non-autistic people tend to master earlier.
Keeping in mind that some autistic people (like myself) have charming, warm, 100% fake laughter/smiles that people totally believe. There are some allistics who can’t act to save their life and whose fake laughs are not convincing at all. People, in general, vary this way.
Like, some people’s laughs simply sound forced or awkward. It doesn’t mean they are laughing wrong.
There have been situations in which I can’t call on my acting skills, so I need to decide between laughing and sounding totally forced/fake or sitting there, smiling, hoping my silence isn’t misinterpreted or considered rude.
Also, social pressure is powerful. Humans want to belong, and most of us desire to be accepted socially and included in stuff. I mean, a pretty common nightmare (even for allistic adults) is being with a group of people who are all laughing at something, only you aren’t laughing, because you don’t understand, and there is anxiety about this being discovered.
It’s good and very human to want to be doing what everyone else is doing. For autistic kids, who from our earliest years sense that we are different and that things are harder for us, fitting in and faking laughter is survival.
But it should also be taken into consideration that four-year-old across the board are funny, weird, charming, awkward little people who are all similar and yet very different from each other. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a four-year-old fake-laugh convincingly.
Some parents- not saying this is you, but it could be- learn that their child is autistic and lose their frame of reference, or take on a really distorted one. Parents can start examining every little behaviour or habit, holding it up against the autism diagnosis, squinting, moving it around, trying to see what it “means”.
Parents can start attributing meaning or significance to what are simply the quirks and traits that come with being a tiny person. It’s good to keep an eye out for that kind of thinking in yourself.
But really, the gist is that people are weird and kids are weird. And your son is only four-years-old. That is very young. Much too young to be worried about the frequency/sincerity of his laughter. All toddlers force/act/try on/fake emotion. It’s how they learn.
So your son may be truly amused and laughing for the benefit of the people around him, in which case, that’s nice of him. He may be scripting laughter for purely social reasons or mimicking people around him. This is good. This is how kids learn.
Give him lots of opportunities to try laughing to convey his genuine amusement, and he will probably pick up on how to sound more “natural” (aka how non-autistic people sound) as he gets older.
[gif description: A young kitten is sitting up in a hallway with its eyes closed and falls asleep. It flops over onto the floor, where it wakes up long enough to recover and get into a tiny loaf position. It then blinks at the human recording the video and resumes sleeping. End gif description.]
[Image: A series of colourful badges with white sans-serif text against a solid or patterned background. Each badge has the hashtags “[hashtag] end the stigma” and “[hashtag] you are not alone” underneath the main text. Some badges have “[hashtag] 1 in 5″ as well. The main text for the badges read:
[Image: A series of colourful badges with white sans-serif text against a solid, gradient, or patterned background. Each badge has the hashtags [hashtag] end the stigma and [hashtag] you are not alone underneath the main text. The main text for the badges read:
Anonymous asked:
I saw the other ask about fake laughing, and it got me thinking about something from my childhood. When I cried when I was a kid, my mom used to constantly tell me to stop, saying she could tell it was fake when I was completely legitimately crying and upset. Did my real crying seem fake because I'm autistic, or was my mom just kind of an asshole?
