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Erika Heidewald, Proud Autistic Bitch

@erikaheidewald

4 Apr

i started contemplating something & i have no idea if it’s right or wrong so i’d love to hear people’s personal thoughts. basically - are we sure autistic people don’t pick up on social cues? or do we just not know the unspoken social rules behind them that dictate their meaning?

i was thinking in particular about facial expression and tone. those are things you can learn from pattern recognition, and a lot of people who have spent a lot of time socializing learn so many patterns so well that they struggle to figure out if it was instinctual or learned

i was thinking in my own personal life - who have i seen not pick up on social cues? obviously there’s always the chance i’m not the ideal observer, but the examples i can think of are neurotypical men ignoring women’s cues of discomfort. they pick up on it, but they don’t care

Read 15 tweets

Erika Heidewald, Proud Autistic Bitch

@erikaheidewald

3 Apr

the topic of ADHD meds and addiction was making me think about how we discuss addiction as if it is a monolithic experience and this has always been confusing for me because i don’t get physically addicted to things. i just don’t. i don’t know what that feels like, at all

nobody ever acknowledged this as a possible reality so i’ve tested it over and over again. anything i like and do consistently, i’ll quit for a while just to see what happens. i’d hear people talk about what it was like to quit coffee or soda or sugar so i’d try it and.. nothing

i started vaping because i enjoy it and also because i don’t have great impulse control and i despise cigarettes but i would smoke them if people offered them to me so i decided i’d get a juul and never accept a cigarette again. that worked. i decided to quit vaping a year ago

Read 18 tweets

Erika Heidewald, Proud Autistic Bitch

@erikaheidewald

3 Apr

sometimes people assume i’m generalizing my experience of being autistic but honestly i don’t find my experience very representative - where i’ve learned the most is from the experiences other autistic people have that i don’t connect to, and delving deeper to find out why

the diagnostic criteria are biased & largely unhelpful & it bugs me how arbitrary they are - NT “experts” don’t bother wondering *why* some autistic people would demonstrate those traits. what do they mean? where are they coming from? what is a good reason for a brain to do that?

when i hear a lot of autistic people talk about an experience/trait i don’t have, i want to know more about it. how it feels, where it comes from. almost every time i have eventually seen how it relates to something within myself that seems different externally, but really isn’t

Read 13 tweets

Erika Heidewald, Proud Autistic Bitch

@erikaheidewald

3 Apr

i mentally feel totally fine but my body has major anxiety - can’t eat, tons of muscle knots, everything hurts - and by now i know that means it is clearly feeling some type of way about something and i’m more than ready for it to just hurry up and tell me what it is

a lot of people identified with having anxiety pain so fyi if you live in a place where this is available, i ate one square of this 5 to 1 CBD to THC chocolate before bed and it made me really relaxed and my body feels so much better today. lightyears better. i recommend it!

weed is really complicated and individual for people with anxiety and i wish people had been more truthful with me about that early on so FYI from what i’ve learned for myself - weed without a higher CBD content gives me panic attacks but high CBD makes it *completely* different

Read 5 tweets

Erika Heidewald, Proud Autistic Bitch

@erikaheidewald

3 Apr

autistic kids are described in terms of “delay” - reaching developmental milestones later than NT kids. i think we should cut that the fuck out. autistic kids aren’t neurotypical so we aren’t going to be on the same developmental schedule. what if we’re right on time for ours?

many autistic kids start speaking later but when they do, speak in full sentences. a family friend didn’t speak until he was 4 and his mom was encouraged to send him to an institution. he can remember before he spoke and he knew people wanted him to, but he didn’t know why

we learn differently & think with a different process which means we will learn some things earlier and some things later than NT kids - and a lot of it depends on if we have access to the information and tools we need. there are logical reasons behind our developmental schedule

Read 6 tweets

Erika Heidewald, Proud Autistic Bitch

@erikaheidewald

2 Apr

omg i just found out about the phonics vs whole language debate and for decades people have been fighting over which is the best way to teach kids to read and apparently did not realize that phonics works for NDs and whole language works for NTs?? it’s... really fucking obvious

this is the problem with the assumption of neurotypical as default. neurotypical is not default. it’s not an overwhelming majority by any means, might not even BE a majority. there is no one best way to teach anything. there are always going to be at least two.

neurotypical people are holistic processors - they process things in chunks that do not need to be broken down into discrete parts. autistic people are data processors - we process all the discrete parts. this affects how we learn, think, process stimuli - everything.

Read 13 tweets

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More from @erikaheidewald

Erika Heidewald, Proud Autistic Bitch

Erika Heidewald, Proud Autistic Bitch

Erika Heidewald, Proud Autistic Bitch

Erika Heidewald, Proud Autistic Bitch

Erika Heidewald, Proud Autistic Bitch

Erika Heidewald, Proud Autistic Bitch

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