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I was pondering the other day the theme of #Neurotribes, that with Autistics, it can take a long time to find ourselves and do anything (even if we are unabused), and thinking in particular, how do we learn language from people who don't use it?
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I mean, you're supposed to learn what words mean when you're young and it's "spanking doesn't hurt," and "cats don't kill things," how the Hell do we EVER learn what words mean, and it occurs that it takes us extra time, but really, do they EVER learn it?
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. #ActuallyAutistc @actuallyautistic
So, it's midsummer. I was totally unprepared for it. How fast it came, and how hard it came at me. All of a sudden half of the summer is gone. The few people I'm somewhat close to have disappeared to their cabins and whatnot. I've disappeared into a deepening depression and shutdown.
It's these kinds of holidays that always hit me the hardest. They really drive home how alone I am in this world. How I don't connect.
Some years ago I started to organize Xmas eve hangouts at a cafe I volunteered at. I knew there were many of us there who didn't really celebrate the holidays or go back home or whatnot. And that many of us felt lonely during the holidays, for one reason or another. When I talked about it with people, everyone thought it was a great idea. So, I went at it.
The first year someone else was helping out with the evening and it was a resounding success. The cafe where we held it was packed with people. Someone had made little gifts for everyone. We sang, we had so much food we had a leftover dinner the next day. Good times were had. The next year I had to organize it alone. Only a handful of people came. The third year, there were four of us, and the three others uncomfortably excused themselves after half an hour to go to an actual Xmas party. I stopped organizing them. A bit later I stopped volunteering there.
Why bring this up at midsummers? Well... Let's just say history was not my strongest subject at school.
It probably sounds awful, but it's good, a change after ten years of the definition of insanity. I just resisted the Autistic naive temptation to answer my spokeskid's latest responses as though they really wanted to know anything. I had said we need to make a change and they said yes, but what about this and that, and I just said, no, this and that is not the change we need, I'm not answering.
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Any Autist from the Other Side got a high five for me.
. #ActuallyAutistc @actuallyautistic
Thereās a point Iāve been failing to make: in the punishment/deterrent mode, they can say that the criminal could have avoided entering the criminal justice environment - and if, or inasmuch as this is true, then the criminal is the only one in the criminal justice environment that could have.
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Everybody else in the Criminal Justice Environment, TM, works there, mostly full time, and fail to avoid the environment of this ādeterrent,ā most of their lives. So they adapt, of course they do and we all know there are police families and non-police families.
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I mean. all of us are involved, and mostly we are all adapting to this toxicity.
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Havenāt said this for a minute but I tag this stuff for Autists, not because itās ABOUT Autism, but because it is science and philosophy FROM Autism.
. #ActuallyAutistc @actuallyautistic
@actuallyautistic#actualyautistic How do yāall deal with people who say that autism doesnāt even exist, and that it āsuddenlyā cropped up over the past few generations because people have been āmentally coddledā? Somewhat in the same vein as āthere is a diagnosis epidemicā but much more extreme.
#EvolutionBaby #ActuallyAutistc @actuallyautistic
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Thinking out loud:
I think the forever human mind, the Autistic one, the pre-Allistic human mind has an evolved brain path for evolution, which really only means change.
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Many Indigenous cultures understand the interplay between creatures and environments still.
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Far more close to home, even the authors of Genesis didn't seem to have forgotten it completely yet, they had the forms of life appearing in the same order we give them today with our science.
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I don't think Wallace and Darwent (sorry, a joke, like "Grommet") "discovered it," as such - except that the Allistic mind will forever be "discovering it," I think they are Allistic because that evolved understanding was replaced with something else, represented by the "Human Nature," business.
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. . . sorry. Carry on with your knitting. ā¤ļø
trying to tell the world, it starts with a pat on the bum, but it is not a static world of Natures, it is evolution and when you protect a thing and grow it, a pat on a bum becomes the Holocaust.
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Time is almost irrelevant, you have principles, a function, and it WILL HAPPEN.
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If this seems soon, only ninety years since last time, or it seems long, twelve thousand years. doesnāt matter, you WILL GET THERE, and we pretty much have. This is evolution, youāre changing things with every thing you do, creating environments with everything you make.
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Evolution means stuff matters. There is no ācheating,ā it, you become what you do, for real.
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Itās like that one about āI donāt know how to tell you you should care about people,ā I donāt know how to tell you that everything is real and matters.
. #ActuallyAutistc @actuallyautistic #EvolutionBaby
how to tell my sisters that the Chalice and the Blade does not lay the fault of the world on men like me but on Neurotypicals like them?
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Iām trying to create a re-popularization of that book. Thereās almost no sense in writing my own about it, I can just write a new introduction and conclusion to that and weāre pretty much done. ā¤ļø
. #ActuallyAutistc @actuallyautistic
one thing about hatching, about the ātism, is that I no longer have any hope that anything I think about the world matters, that just because it makes sense to me doesnāt mean it does to anyone else, in fact itās the reverse, if I think it, I can be assured itās not going anywhere.
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Good luck with the multiple existential disasters, folks, let me know how it went. Itās clear nothing I say or do is going to matter.
. #ActuallyAutistc @actuallyautistic
That argument Iāve had three times now, the experience of that has convinced me. I mean itās a thing Iāve said many times, and I ābelieved,ā it, but having hit that brick wall three times so quickly and so similarly, I guess Iāve proven it, as close to beyond a doubt as I ever get about anything - and Iām as arrogant an aspie prick as youād care to meet, Iām pretty sure of myself in these matters generally, so that is saying something.
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I think Iām at Zero Doubt, like the guy said on the UFO pod this week.
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The majority mind really does have evolution in the myth section, as an origin story, something that happened in the Before Time.
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They really carry on as though basic causality doesnāt exist in the present, as though we are not changing today, indeed as though we cannot change anymore.
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So rather than stop grinding, they say, āDonāt let the (grinder) grind you down.ā
āFight the evolution,ā they say. āDonāt let the environment shape you.ā
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The world isnāt the boss of you, is it?
. #ActuallyAutistc @actuallyautistic
#ActuallyAutistc @actuallyautistic
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"Autism runs in families."
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It's true, it's not untrue. But what do you think Allism does? Direct hotline from God, or what?
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It's part of the pathologizing, part of speaking in the language of the oppressor that you see, "Autism runs in families," a hundred times more than that Allism does - or that in biology and life, EVERYTHING "runs in families."
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Out of all the things that do - everything does - how many times and to what end must we say "Autism runs in families?"
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Why does it matter that we problem children "run in families," but not that cops "run in families?"
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Or that soldiers "run in families?
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They are cherry-picking evolution and genetics to speak this way, as though evolution and genetics are not what makes everything and everyone, but just drops into life once in a while to cause trouble. Damned genetics!
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I mean, try this: my siblings and cousins tormented me terribly keeping me in meltdown for most of my childhood - what, because "I" "run in families?"
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Or because Mom's family was Allistic, clever and abusive and hyper?
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It's at least really both, right?
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But let's back out, way out, to the edge of the solar system, take a long view. Who is running increasingly in families, who is taking over families?
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Who perhaps was not in the majority before twelve to fifteen thousand years ago, but is now, and so must be taking over families? Modern Man, yes, with his aggressive nature and superpowers to dominate the world?
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In this sense it's not just the language of pathology, not just a bias but a reversal, one of those conservative accusations that is really a confession, projection, who, "runs in families."
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So I see a completely different scenario in my childhood and my siblings' stories - from years or decades of therapy - are crap, ignoring my trauma and what my trauma did to everyone, and so I have to say: years and/or decades of therapy are no guarantee that an Allistic person is telling the truth š
. #ActuallyAutistc @actuallyautistic
#ActuallyAutistc @actuallyautistic
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Neurotype parses Human Nature.
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You can't be divergent and talk about some universal Human Nature, "Nature," in these sentences means neurotype, it means what comes naturally and what doesn't - that's neurotype.
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If you call yourself divergent, you have to give it up, all the talk about Human Nature, or you don't exist.
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Sorry.
#ActuallyAutistc @actuallyautistic
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I donāt know about you, but my self diagnosis was anything but fast or easy. It was sixty year goddam treasure hunt where anyone who knew or could have known anything made a point of keeping it a secret.
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No matter the troubles I was having, the messaging from family (who absolutely all knew) and doctors and psychologists was all NT conformism:You are Normal. We are All the Same.
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Self diagnosis is about as easy as a salmon finding its breeding spot after a thousand miles of white water. Itās an against all odds kind of deal, at least for us olds.
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Neurotypes are the biggest secret in the world, because We are All the Same, they say. They donāt like self diagnosis because itās when we win the game of Hide and Seek, we are Kicking the Can when we self discover, winning the game.
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