Latest Posts by digirat - Page 7
how am i supposed to ever get a job (that i actually like) when all my small brain lets me think about are these dumb animatronics??
this came to my attention because lately ive been taking more videos of myself and i realized in almost all (if not all) im making really weird noises or saying something from a song/show and i just find it really entertaining cause i don’t even realize its going on
people don’t talk about vocal stimming enough, in my opinion. haha like vocal stimming is the best. i always have to do it alone cause it usually annoys my family, but still i just love to just go and “aaaaaaaaAAAAaaAaAaaAaa” it’s somehow so refreshing
people don’t talk about vocal stimming enough, in my opinion. haha like vocal stimming is the best. i always have to do it alone cause it usually annoys my family, but still i just love to just go and “aaaaaaaaAAAAaaAaAaaAaa” it’s somehow so refreshing
me: i want like a mentally stable friend. a friend who i can just rant to, like tell them everything im feeling and it won’t trigger or even really upset them. they could just listen and make affirmative noises, and then id just leave and that would be our whole relationship. ugh, i wish that were actually a real thing.
me: ohhhhhhhh, therapy. therapist. i want a therapist.
i keep my personal life off of this blog for the most part, but right now my circumstances are really dire and i seriously need help. tw for violence/abuse:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Bl_JBOlQpif7C7AO9HpVTeK5xfvLsR8j6UwurYy5sG0/edit
i need commissions, for money and to help my parents believe that i have a chance as an adult. im nearly 18 and i want to get out as soon as possible because living here isnt good for my mental health with me repressing what happened
if you are interested in helping, please drop me a line and we can discuss commission prices, or reblog this to boost my signal. thank you so much for reading
you ever just *goes to make sandwhich* *gets distracted and writes a hyperfixation related essay for four hours* *goes to do a simple chore* *ends up painting a furby that’s been sitting in the closet for three months*
(does one thing) hm i think i deserve a little reward :) (walks around in circles listening to music for three hours)
you ever just get super thirsty, guzzle half a water bottle, and think “aa yes this will sustain me for the next month”
Ppl without ADHD be like “oh if I get rid of all possible distractions then you’ll be forced to focus on the boring task!” Fool… You underestimate my Power
if you’ve been trained to to dislike yourself for enjoying anything due to years of being told you’re annoying clap your hands 👏👏👏
if I listed out every particular instance that was met with negativity enough for me to stop feeling comfortable talking about it, this comic would be like 50 panels.
[ more comics | Patreon | Tapastic ]
oo guys, if any of you stim to music please send me your most stimmy (stimmiest?) songs, I wanna make a playlist
(my favorite is kara kara kara no kara by kikuo)
if any mutuals (or anyone really) ever wanna chat, I promise I’m real chill. anons are fine too!I’m kinda awkward, but I’m always up for random conversations.
(I don’t know if this is just me or if other neurodivergent people experience this but) growing up I was bullied/shamed for having any interests whatsoever so now I’ve just learned to internalize any impulses to infodump. like I really want to talk about all these really interesting things, but like even thinking about telling another person just feels so wrong? and dirty? I don’t really know if this makes sense, but it’s basically unstoppable force (the need to share my hyperfixations) vs immovable object (paralyzing anxiety)
hfjsgdjshkfks idk what worse-
having lots of hyperfixations at once or not having any hyperfixations
when i have lots of them i get rly overwhelmed cus i just,, wanna do all of them at once and its like a constant need to be doing something related to all of my hyperfixations but u just CANT watch five shows at once or listen to music, watch a video, research, and do crafts all at the same time i just physically cant do that
but when i dont have any hyperfixations i feel so empty. my thoughts get kinda mixed up cus i dont know what to think about or focus on and im just constantly understimulated because of boredom and thats just miserable
animatronics are one of my special interests and the other day I was at work, and I literally just thought about chuck e. cheese and i got so excited i screamed and flapped. i was so nervous someone saw me, but luckily no one noticed
just a reminder that your stims don’t have to be small, discreet, or “normal!” no matter how you stim, it’s perfectly alright. you don’t have to water them down for neurotypical approval.
being autistic as a kid without knowing it be like: *taps foot on the floor* *gets told to stop because the tapping is annoying* *stims in the school bathroom* *stims at home* *stims when reading whatever book you attached yourself to* *gets called a good reader* *attaches self to a group of people who don’t really wanna be your friends but they tolerate you* *gets placed with random people for group projects* *stims in the school bathroom* *gets called a picky eater at home* *gets put into the gifted program but is also really bad at some topics* *draws in class* *stims in class* *gets ignored* *stims in class* *stims in class* *stims in c
offering a hug to all the trans people with traumatic religious upbringings; we didn’t deserve what they did to us. we deserve love, community, and acceptance. i’m here for you
Anyone else grew up in an overly religious household that disallowed you from playing pretend in certain ways? For example, I was not allowed to pretend I have magical powers.
Also, being banned from saying normal words? I could not say I hated something. "Hate" was treated as a curse word and I still struggle to this day with saying stuff like "I hate scratchy socks" without feeling like a bad person somehow.
Another thing: thinking it's okay if you slack off in class because your parents say you're all going to heaven this year anyway (the rapture). It's crazy thinking about how fucking normal such a terrifying statement was to hear. "But will God let me bring my teddybear?" "You won't need him."
So many innocuous things were treated as satanic. Anything referencing magic was automatically evil (unless the creator was a 'professing christian' aka lotr, narnia) which meant everything from D&D to Lucky Charms were banned.
Such made me very afraid of things like demonic possession, not reaching adulthood before the rapture, getting in trouble for having friends who like Harry Potter, my brother going to Hell, some random new rule being pulled from the bible, etc etc.
the fact that a cat considers “sit in the same room ignoring each other” to be an acceptable social activity and not an insult is great for me because that’s how i like to socialise
Does anyone else really like to wear headphones / noise cancellers? I’ve found that I always wear my headphones, even if they’re not plugged into anything or there’s nothing playing.
me: so being autistic effects every part of me...
allistic: ok
me: it even changes my perception of gender...
allistic: that makes sense
me: i identify as autigender because my experience of gender is intertwined with my autistic experience
allistic: AuTisM IsN’T A GENDer?!!!!
———————————————————————
autigender doesn’t necessarily mean autism is a gender, it is simply a term autistics can use to describe the way their gender and autism interact (hope that helps explain it!)
relationships are so weird sometimes cause like, my friends were discussing how girls are hot and im just over here like “anyone wanna hear me recite stay calm from memory?”
Made a meme about my experience with autism, and it seemed to resonate with people on Reddit so... here ya go.
Psychosis is 3x more common in autistic people than in the general population. Why?
This is a question that scientists are trying to answer. There’s not enough research on the comorbidity of autism and psychosis to be sure exactly what all of the reasons are for this overlap, but there are some interesting facts about it that I’ll outline here.
Psychosis is a symptom, which is composed of a constellation of smaller symptoms. Psychosis can be caused by schizophrenia spectrum disorders, but it can also be caused by mood disorders, stress, illness, and substance abuse. And research seems to be showing that autism might be a factor in developing psychosis as well.
...
I have always been interested in the connection between psychosis and autism. One of my uncles has a schizophrenia spectrum disorder, which was diagnosed after he went to a psychiatrist to be evaluated for autism- the reason he went in being that he saw himself in me, and wondered if he might be autistic, too. Turns out, he has psychosis.
Within the past few years, I have also been experiencing symptoms associated with psychosis. It would be very difficult for me to accurately identify any “negative” symptoms of psychosis, given that I already experience executive dysfunction, fatigue, sleep & appetite changes, etc. due to my ADHD and physical health problems. However, what I have been noticing are “positive” symptoms of psychosis. Namely: hallucinations, delusions, and paranoia.
My most frequent auditory hallucinations are of my alarm clock, and the cricket alarm on my iPhone. I hear them clearly, as if they’re coming from outside my head, at random periods throughout the day and in different locations, when the actual alarms aren’t going off. Around two years ago, I hallucinated a stranger’s voice calling me into another room. I was extremely confused and disoriented by this, as I got up to look around but nobody was there. I haven’t heard any voices since then, which is good.
I often hallucinate scents associated with significant people, places, and memories, even when those people aren’t present and I’m not in a location where the smell would naturally occur. At first I thought this could be chalked up to migraine aura or something like that, but I don’t get migraines.
I’ve also had extreme “sensed presence” hallucinations where I feel like someone is watching me even though there’s nobody else in the room. At times, this hallucination has fed into paranoid thoughts that there are cameras in my shower drain, etc.
My main delusion in episodes I’ve had in the past has involved the extreme significance of certain numbers and symbols. At the time, I didn’t think anything was wrong. In fact, I was convinced that I was on track to uncover the pattern that organizes everything in the universe, and all of my interpersonal relationships. As part of this delusion I would vocally repeat certain numbers (as a strategy to figure out what they meant), and spend copious amounts of time writing down all of my “findings” in Google documents and notebooks. At one point, I ended up writing down a bunch of dates in a row and adding up all of the digits to discover how they were connected to the numbers 4, 5, and 7, which I had decided were the most important numbers in my life. Looking back on the Google document I stored the data in, I have absolutely no clue what my thought process was at the time.
...
So, I’ve been wondering what all of this means.
When I start putting the pieces together to examine my own life, things start to make some sense.
First, as I mentioned earlier, autistic people are 3x more likely to develop psychosis than the general population. Obviously, that statistic is relevant to my situation, since I’m autistic.
But I’m not just autistic. I also have a decent handful of mental illnesses, each of which overlap and carry their own risk factors for psychosis. The main ones I’ll be talking about here are severe generalized anxiety/panic disorder, OCD, and BPD (Borderline Personality Disorder). I consider my OCD and BPD to be ~spicy spinoffs~ of anxiety, because they have the same root cause: my anxious, socially traumatized brain. We’ll get to that in a bit.
For now, here are some statistics:
A study conducted in 2012 found that psychotic symptoms were present in 27% of people with anxiety and/or depression.
A study conducted in 2014 found that people with OCD are around 5x more likely to develop schizophrenia than the general population.
A study conducted in 2017 found that 43% of people with BPD experience hallucinations, and stated that other studies have found prevalence rates of hallucinations in BPD ranging from 26% to 54%.
...
So alright, great, I’ve got a lot of risk factors. But what caused me to have those risk factors/mental illnesses in the first place? Let’s look at this specifically from an autistic lens. I’ve already talked about a lot of this in my “Autism and Mental Health” post on our Instagram, but these statistics are worth repeating in this context:
Around 40% of autistic people meet criteria for one or more anxiety disorders at any given time, compared to only 15% of the general population.
Autistic people are 4x more likely than neurotypicals to be clinically depressed at some point in their lives.
Autistic people are 4x more likely than the general population to experience severe loneliness.
Autistic people are 3x more likely than the general population to experience maltreatment (a catch-all term for various forms of abuse).
A study conducted in 2012 found that 63% of autistic children had been bullied, and were 3x more likely to be bullied than their neurotypical siblings.
And what does the research say about the long-term effects of bullying and abuse?
According to a 2012 study, children who are bullied by their peers are at an increased risk of developing Borderline Personality Disorder. And BPD is, as previously established, a risk factor for developing psychosis.
According to a 2014 study, people who were bullied in childhood are 11x more likely to develop anxiety disorders in adulthood, but especially OCD. And, as previously mentioned, people with OCD are 5x more likely to develop schizophrenia.
But the link between bullying and psychosis gets even more explicit than that.
A 2013 study found that children who had been bullied were 2x more likely to experience psychosis symptoms than typical controls, and that children experiencing first-time psychotic episodes were 2x more likely than typical controls to report having been bullied in the past.
...
This is not to say that being bullied and abused is the only reason why autistic people sometimes develop psychosis. There are obviously a great deal of different factors, some genetic & biological, that lead to the development of mental illness. But the role of trauma and other social/environmental factors can’t be discounted.
If two people are exposed to the same negative experience, it’s possible that one will become traumatized and one won’t. That’s because one person may have been genetically/biologically predisposed to have heightened fear responses to environmental stimuli, while the other person didn’t have the same predisposition. Yet, the genetically predisposed person would not have been traumatized if they had not experienced the negative event.
I was bullied as a child. I was also abused. Both of those things deeply affected me, because I’m autistic and therefore hypersensitive. The trauma caused me to develop BPD and severe abandonment anxiety, which often feeds into paranoia. My generalized anxiety also morphed into OCD, which caused me to have disturbing intrusive thoughts, and compulsions. All of this predisposed me to develop psychosis. And in the past few years, *surprise*, I’ve started having psychotic symptoms.
When I look back on my life experiences and how they interacted with my autistic brain & positive family history of psychosis, none of this is surprising. It actually makes perfect sense. And because it makes perfect sense, in a way I’m reassured. My hallucinations and delusions fit the pattern, so there’s no need for me to be scared. I know why this is happening. The trajectory is predictable. And if I keep taking care of myself and monitoring symptoms, I know I’ll be alright.
~Eden🐢
Autism Type #1814
I want to wear this but it is sensory hell but I will wear it anyway because the way it looks makes me feel happy.