when we say we’re tired of politics we mean that we’re tired if being scared, tired of being worn out, tired of anticipating the next hate crime, tired of seeing what shitty piece of legislation “conservatives” and even liberal people come up with next, tired of not being taken seriously, tired of our lives apparently not mattering to people, tired of so so so much.
if you’re white. being,,,not straight ,,does not give you a “poc card”. i think a lot of you think it does. like being ,,not straight,,does not mean you can seperate yourself from other white people.
white people. you can reblog this. especially if you’re not straight.
I am both surprised that this is a thing, and, totally not surprised *facepalm*
I am queer, autistic and female and I TOTALLY benefit from white privilege. What I can do about it is USE this privilege to make noise and make room for people who are NOT white in any way I can. To listen to voices different to mine about what is needed, rather than thinking I know. To admit when I fuck up, because I have fucked up, and I KNOW I will again, not because I don’t care, but because my whiteness permeates every aspect of my experience. Being white doesn’t mean I’m not discriminated against for other reasons, but NONE of those reasons mean I know what it’s like to be anything other than white. I can listen, I can educate myself, I can try to empathise and open my narrow world view to try and imagine what it would be like for someone who is not white, but none of this means I KNOW. That only comes with living in a white supremacist society as a person of colour, and I can never be or experience that.
If you’re trying to figure out whether
someone has a fake smile, look at their
eyes. When you have a genuine smile,
the corners of your mouth upturn, your
cheeks raise, and the skin around your
eyes crinkles. Known as the ‘Duchenne
smile’, it happens involuntarily when
you’re truly happy about something- so
a smile without eye crinkles is a good
indicator that someone was forcing it. SourceSource 2Source 3
ahahah oh boy science no.
i learned to fake that part of the smile when i was fuckin 14 and miserable, if i smile you ain’t knowin it’s fake unless i want you to.
Also, the info in the original post is super fucking ableist against people who have different expressions for whatever reasons. Autistic people, blind people, people with muscle or movement disorders or paralysis that affects the muscles of the face, etc., often have different patterns of expression. For example, autistic people often have smiles that look ‘fake’ to neurotypical people. It’s not that we’re not happy or genuine. Right now, my five year old nephew (moderate to severely deaf, probably autistic too) smiles with only one half of his face. The other eye and half of his mouth he screws up tightly like he’s wincing. That’s just how he smiles. Sure, there are times he expresses with his whole face like a quote normal person unquote, but nine times out of ten, it’s his quirky, atypical smile/grimace. And that’s fine. He’s a happy neurodiverse kid.
Also, tangentially, fuck all that noise about ‘eye contact means you’re not lying’. No, eye contact means nothing. There are a hundred different neurobiological, social and cultural reasons why people don’t do it. Body language and facial expressions can only tell you a small part of the story when you don’t know the person and their background. Just stop judging based on science invented by sadists who liked torturing homeless people in the name of ‘research’. (Google Duchenne, I’m not exaggerating.)
This is a social story, what many autistics in the 80s were “trained” to think to appear neurotypical at all costs
Some background information you need to know:
Social stories are still used today but back in the 80s it was like social stories on steroids. They were drilled into our heads, act “normal” at all costs. I know my parents were particularly keen on this. I went from special Education classes where they knew I was autistic and visually impaired, when we moved my parents took advantage of that to mainstream me and not pass my health information along to the new school. Social stories became all that more important. Must. Act. Normal. At. All. Costs.
Being autistic was treated like it was something to be ashamed of and that is a thought pattern that is hard to break to this day.
Growing up in the 80s and 90s with autism was very much the “quiet hands movement”, (https://juststimming.wordpress.com/2011/10/05/quiet-hands/ good article!) which is to say we were silenced and punished if we stimmed. (For allistic people The term “stimming” is short for self-stimulatory behavior and is sometimes also called “stereotypic” behavior. In a person with autism, stimming usually refers to specific movements that include hand- flapping, rocking, spinning, pen clicking, desk tapping, beatboxing or repetition of words and phrases amongst others.“)
Stimming can mean we are happy or stressed or angry or any other array of emotions. Stimming is not a universal trait and no too autistic people stim the same.
It was also the land of Applied Behaviour Analysis (refered to as ABA for the duration of this post) where any stimming or “undesired behaviours” were squashed out of you as quickly as possible and replaced with “desired behaviours”.
Every night before bed, we would go through the story of how to behave like a neurotypical person. Social stories began before I could read, at first they were pictures. Pictures of faces and facial expressions I couldn’t see or understand.
Location: lunchroom table, 4 of your friends or at least people who are semi-nice to you and a new girl. You know you should follow the steps to make the new kid not think you’re “weird”.
Get your lunch, resist slapping your hands down the rows of cubbies.
Sit down
Don’t rock
Don’t hum or tap your fingers
Get out your lunch
Don’t rock
Look at the new girl, in the eyes even though it feels bad
Smile
Don’t rock
Don’t pull your sandwich apart, normal people take bites
Don’t rock
Join in the conversation, even though they are all talking at once and bouncing between different subjects and when you finally think of something to say, it was 3 subjects ago and you feel dumb
Don’t squint because the overhead lights feel like you are standing too close to the sun.
Don’t rock
Also, don’t cover your ears because the lights buzz and the clock is loud (normal people don’t hear it) and everyone is talking at once and it’s loud and people’s lunch wrappers are crinkling.
Don’t wrinkle your nose at all the smells of everyone’s lunches mixed together with the smell of pinesol cleaner
Don’t rock
Don’t talk in big words you just learned, that isn’t normal, they don’t like that
Don’t touch your clothes, quiet hands, sit on them. Don’t touch the table or walls or other people.
Don’t look relieved that lunch is over.
Go to the library instead of outside. It’s safe there because there is no one but the librarian and she is nice and doesn’t talk or make me talk.
So that is a social story, that is what runs through my head at every interaction with another person. The situation changes but it runs through my head. Still.
It’s exhausting, continuous stream of orders. But I’ve been trained like a dog that was whacked with a newspaper when it did something bad that acting “normal” is paramount to anything else.
And it is virtually impossible to crack, let alone break.
#MonthofSpreads Day Ten: The Court Signifier
Signifier
IX – The Hermit
Solitude, meditation
1. What message and or energy does this card portray?
Eight of Swords
Obstacles, difficulties on all sides, flawed perception, inability to see the way out
2. Which part of my life does this card represent?
Five of Wands
Inner conflict, lack of direction, scattered focus
3. If this card could speak one piece of advice, what would it tell me?
Eight of Pentacles
Skill, craftsmanship, mastery, accomplishment against the odds
Thoughts
I struggle to find inner peace, to find focus and direction in my life where concerns my thoughts, my mental health, and the direction I take to manage and balance my mind. Like the Hermit, I’m naturally introverted and solitary, but balancing that with a world that demands everyone be an extrovert is hard. It puts a strain on things. For me, being the Hermit isn’t that hard part – it’s smoothly transitioning back and forth as needed. I also really struggle with transitioning in general, in switching without a slow adjustment phase. A sudden phone call can leave me reeling. A change in plans can throw me completely. It’s something I know is a part of life, but it’s never pleasant, especially on days when I just want to be left alone in my shell.
So, a few weeks ago, on a quest for something else, I tripped over the concept of the 78-card Tarot spread. For those who aren’t into Tarot, the standard deck has four suits of 14 cards each that comprise the Minor Arcana plus 22 extra “face” cards that comprise the Major Arcana, so a 78-card spread would use every card in the deck, which is a trifle unusual in my experience.
There are apparently a couple of full-deck spreads floating around out in the ether, but the ones I looked at weren’t satisfying to me for various reasons – perfectly decent on their own, but none of them quite what I was looking for. I had been startled by the very idea of a full-deck spread, but once I looked around I decided it would be interesting to try and make one of my own.
I sat down and drafted out a chart (the hand-drawing in this post is the final drafting of that) and built up a structure around it. For the past week or so I’ve been shuffling and writing and preparing to give the reading a test-run. Now that I have (and it was very interesting reading), I’m ready to unleash it on the world in time for Halloween – or Samhain, or All Saints, or All Souls, or Dia De Los Muertos, or whichever Veil Is Thinnest Oh Shit Light The Candles holiday you prefer.
You can read more about the spread, including an explication of how to read it and a few variances on the reading, at the link below. I hope you all enjoy it and have fun with it.
It’s that time of year again, so I figured I’d reblog, especially since quite a few people I know have taken up Tarot this year.
This is TERRIFYING.
I mean, cool, seriously cool, but so, so many cards. I have never felt more of a novice than I do looking at this elder god of a spread.
Honestly, it’s only as complicated as you want it to be – The reason each row or column has a general theme is that so you can look at it in very general terms, or you can get super up close with each card. One of the reasons I did my own is that I wanted it to be more accessible than the ones I was seeing – that’s why it has a narrative attached, to pull the whole thing together very simply.
Admittedly I have been reading Tarot (or some version of fortunetelling cards) for a really long time, more than 20 years now, but that’s been very off-and-on, and I think the most important thing I’ve learned is that there is no single specific right way, no step where if you do something wrong the whole thing won’t work. It’s an intuitive process, so I always think of it as a rather structured improv, like writing to a prompt. You might not be writing what the prompter expected, but you’re combining that input with your own voice to create something.
This is a guidebook, not a rulebook. 🙂
I’m just looking at it from an executive dysfunction perspective. I think doing that spread would be POSSIBLE for me, but I think it would literally take me weeks to analyse. Maybe when I have twenty years going for me it’d be easy, yeah, but not right now. 🙂 I’ll probably try it in the future, but it won’t be a Halloween thing due to the current complicating factors: Six cats (mostly mine) and three kids under eight (NOT MINE) in this house right now. Never mind tarot – all my jigsaw puzzles are screaming at my from the shelf to DO THEM and it is a complete impossibility. The seven year old klepto would steal them, the four year old would lose them, the eighteen month old would eat them, and the cats would play with them. I’m only able to do readings because I have a laptable I can lay out cards on when the seven year old is not around.
Oddly enough, I think I’ve owned tarot for twenty years, but my teenage deck got misplaced/destroyed and I didn’t replace it until this year. So I am certainly NOT a fluent reader. I’m a LWB-in-one-hand-while-I-stare-at-the-cards reader. 😀
I’m a chronic multiple tabber. And I’m not talking five or ten or twenty. This evening, I looked at my browser groaning under ninety odd tabs and decided EVERYTHING MUST GO. The tumblr posts I’ve been meaning to reblog, the fic I’ve had open for over a year…. all of it.
So for the last five hours, I sat and did that. All the tumblr links are in a txt file, I’ll get to them maybe. All the fic, I also saved the links of, but saved a download of each story, too, in case of author deletion. I didn’t count, but it’s in the hundreds.
Now, I just have social media, email, a short story, and four ravelry patterns I’m tossing up between for my holiday project.
I feel cleansed, but also like I’ve just run one of those army survival courses with obstacles and booby traps and also maybe occasional gunfire.
It probably doesn’t help that it’s 5am, but I couldn’t sleep and this was the only quiet time I’d had in weeks where I actually had the focus to do it, so.
Sometimes I just wanna go back 20 years in time and fucking punch all those adults who believed in Indigo Children.
Like, I don’t know if you guys know how they used to speak about Millennials? We were supposed to save the fucking Earth. Indigo Children were supposed to be a generation born with the dawning of the new millennium who were more creative, empathetic, sensitive, intelligent, and loving than ordinary children; Indigo Children were also supposed to be fucking psychic. We were literally theoretically fucking born for the express purpose of coming in and using our fucking magic powers to save the entire goddamn earth from all the problems previous generations had left us: War, famine, pollution, disease, you name it. Psychically.
I got invited to speak at Gifted conferences when I was a teenager in the early 2000s because I’d done some self-advocacy work in the area, so I got to see this in action a lot. Like, a lot of kids want to solve world peace, right? You’re thirteen, you do Model UN, you believe in the power of love, it all seems so possible.
And fucking Indigo Parents would be like, “Of course I believe you can do it! I can’t wait until you’re 25 and I can come visit you in Switzerland when you’re working on world peace summits! You can achieve what no other generation can!”
Then the kids would come over to me, as the only Gifted Child at the conference who got to speak for myself instead of a parent speaking for me (my mom was in a corner, looking dubious) and be like, “I think maybe I wanna be an animal trainer? Or a rock star? But I’m afraid that’s too selfish. I’d be wasting my gifts. I know I have to do something great with them.”
And like… these days, I know so many former Indigo Children who are, for example… living in attics in the outskirts of Washington DC, struggling to pay their student loans from the triple-major they graduated from an Ivy League college with at age 18, writing policy briefs for an NGO about the questionable nature of foreign aid and feeling like they’ve failed as people because this isn’t living up to their potential. They were supposed to have solved everything by now. The best parts of their weeks are Saturdays when they can dress up like an elf and hang out with their friends, though lately it’s been taken up more by going to protests. But there’s still this faint sense of having failed on some fundamental cosmic level.
I’m left being really angry at parents who wanted an easy way out of the pain and fear of sending their children out into the world.
Who didn’t want them to be “labelled” with “fake disorders”, so we’re now helping each other crowdfund our ridiculously expensive autism diagnoses so we can finally get disability benefits, or giving each other advice on ADHD meds so our lives stop looking like slow wrecks.
Who didn’t want their children to encounter difficulties, and therefore told them they’d never have any.
[Image description: Four photos arranged in a square grid to be read from right to left, in the How People Shower meme format. The subject of all four photos is Miles, a light skinned autistic person with short brown hair and no shirt on standing inside of a shower.
The first photo shows Miles looking at the camera with a mild smiling expression and his fingers touched to his chin thoughtfully. The text says, “How do autistic people shower?”
The next photo shows Miles with wet hair and shrugging while looking at the camera with raised eyebrows and a slight frown. The text says, “Same as you neurotypicals.”
The third photo shows Miles with his face under the shower spray. His eyes are shut tight against the water. The text says, “First we get nice and wet…”
The last photo shows Miles with his wet hair pushed back from his face, holding a hardcover book and looking at the camera with a mischievous expression. There is a piece of paper with the word TRAINS written on it taped onto the cover of the book, so that it appears to read “The Little Book of TRAINS” The punchline text says, “Then we stay there all day and don’t socialise.”]
knitting in the dark 