One of the hardest things about growing up as an autistic kid for me was that I couldn't read faces and tones well and constantly thought people were angry at me when they weren't. It made me grow up terrified constantly of doing anything wrong.
Also, adults telling a kid "don't do that" without any explanation or context as to why gives me a lot of anxiety. Growing up my brain filled in that doing so would make me bad. It was just a social rule I had to follow.

Problem is, just about anyone can make up these rules
I would get very scared about getting any kind of reaction at all because it was usually very overwhelming. If it seemed negative, my brain read it as me being in huge trouble and a bad person. If it seemed positive, it was overwhelming. Slightly raised voices sound like yelling
Anyway, somewhere along the way I took some instructions too literally and misread peoples emotional responses to me and learned that if I'm not happy all the time & always nice to everyone, I'm a bad person.
I tried to mask very hard for a very long time starting at about age 3. I'm tired. 😅

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More from @A_Silent_Child

17 Dec 20
Heard back from the surgeon who canceled my surgery. I don't get even a penny of my money back.
I wasn't expecting they would b/c basically they're blaming me for it being canceled because they wrote down that I wanted it totally flat even though I corrected them on that more than once during my consultation

Basically they're saying it's my fault for not being clear enough
But I saw they wrote down flat so I corrected it more than once to more than one person & the woman I saw after the surgeon SAID she'd tell the surgeon and get that fixed on the notes.

So it's my fault because I trusted them to get that fixed before my surgery.
Read 17 tweets
17 Dec 20
Yale released a study ~in 2020~ where they repeatedly intentionally frightened toddlers over and over with short breaks in between each frightening stimuli in order to see how autistic toddlers response to fear differs from non-autistic toddlers.
They claim they stopped if a child was too frightened, but y'all are here admitting you're doing this study in the first place because autistic fear responses can look different from non autistic responses.
We often have delayed emotional responses. 30-75 seconds is not enough time in between stimuli to be sure that an autistic child has processed it & is not too frightened or overwhelmed to move on to the next stimuli

Also really want to know how they determined what was too much
Read 13 tweets
17 Dec 20
Does the Grinch have a sensory processing disability?
Image of the grinch with the caption "If there's one th
I know the 2000 and 2018 movies give him traumatic backstories explaining why he hates Christmas.

But the original Grinch the only reasoning he gave was that he hated the noise.
Read 5 tweets

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