Being autistic is seeing the blue-and-black dress when literally everyone around you insists it’s gold and white.

You either lose yourself in the pressure to give up your own perspective or you lose the shared experience of connecting to others, who think you’re nuts.
Note in the PROFESSIONAL MEDICAL LITERATURE about autism that @AnnMemmott constantly reviews the doctors take “seeing the dress as black and blue” as pathological, paranoid, not rooted in reality.

These are the people who train the people we rely on for support.
In this metaphor, some autistic people are able to see the white and gold dress too, with effort.

Very few allistics anywhere ever put in the effort to see the black and blue dress.

“Masking” is when those of us who can see both pretend to agree its white and gold all the time.
(Note: this is “the dress” under discussion. Some people see it one way, others see it the other way.

This is a metaphor. I’m not saying autistic people literally see the dress one way or the other, by the way.)

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More from @mykola

8 Jul
I want to speak to this: my expertise is personal. I've been studying and working through and dealing with my own trauma for years, now, and I've learned a lot. I've improved my own life significantly, and I've heard from hundreds of folks that I've improved theirs.

But.
Mr. @chudsommeleir is correct that I'm just a software engineer. I'm not a medical professional.

My question to them is, so what? Medical professionals have mostly let most of us down when it comes to dealing with this stuff.
I've got a trauma therapist who specializes in IFS and EMDR and it took me a year of working with him to start to make inroads in my own trauma responses.

But I also have a psychiatrist who scoffs at me and says I don't have "real" trauma. It's invalidating and hurtful.
Read 8 tweets
8 Jul
If you CAN’T STOP being overly critical of yourself, if you have a voice in your head that tells you how worthless you are etc - THAT VOICE IS NOT TO BE TRUSTED!

It’s called the “inner critic” and it’s a component of CPTSD.
This voice may sound like a parent, teacher or bully. I had my dad’s voice in my head for years judging me. It wasn’t really him. My dad loves me, but had a hard time in some ways with parenting.

I resented my dad for years for this voice that WASN’T HIM.
That inner critic voice? It’s the form trauma takes to interact with you.

It’s literally your trauma talking to you.

Your trauma is not your friend. Your trauma wants to kill you. Would you take seriously any advice from someone who wants you dead?

Tell it to FUCK OFF.
Read 7 tweets
7 Jul
Also: no neurotypical person in history could have written Finnegans Wake, it's just not even conceivable.
Do you know about the Wake, as its known among its scholars?

The book begins in the middle of a sentence: "riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend
of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs."
The book ends in the middle of a sentence. Are they the same sentence? Yes and no. The book is about loops, iterations, archetypes, shapes. It's the story of a family, but they're not really explicitly described. They show up in dreams, as anagrams, as snatches of character.
Read 20 tweets
7 Jul
Suspicion: autistic people are particularly susceptible to religious trauma, because to us the hellfire and damnation is real af and we are USED to being rejected.

It leads to a weird, bleak nihilism to be told god loves you so much he’s going to torture for eternity.
(This is part of why I'm sure that James Joyce was ND, probably autistic. Large parts of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man are about living with a visceral fear of hell, and about how ultimately it's not sustainable for our kinds of brains.)
This ultimately leads to the sickest burn in modernist literature. Stephen Daedalus, at the end of the book, confesses to a friend that he's lost his faith.

"You mean you've become a Protestant?!"

"I said I've lost my faith, not my reason!" comes the retort, and I laughed hard.
Read 6 tweets
5 Jul
CPTSD happens when you feel _unsafe_ for a sustained period.

Your parents don't have to have been abusive monsters, you just needed something that scared you in your life and around which you felt the need to be careful.

Growing up like that can give you CPTSD, which is hell.
Were you bullied in school?

Were you not believed about something that scared or hurt you?

Did you feel the need to behave perfectly to earn your parents love?

Did you have a teacher that just insisted you were a bad kid when you weren't?

These can all lead to CPTSD, I think.
How do you know if you have CPTSD?

One easy way is that you're terrified of abandonment and rejection, because you learned that your entire value as a person was based on being accepted by someone who didn't accept you unconditionally.

Heal this by reparenting yourself.
Read 12 tweets
5 Jul
The “clinically depressed” to “undiagnosed autistic” pipeline.
The “uncomfortable at gendered assumptions” to “not cis” pipeline.
The “chronically late and unorganized” to “adhd activist” pipeline.
Read 8 tweets

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