I Say This With The Utmost Sincerity, But I Hope You Have The Courage And Space And Freedom In The Upcoming

when the autism is being an actual mental health problem instead of making me obsess over fictional characters again:

By terrifoss

As a kid, I wasn't taught any concept that there's a difference between wanting to do something, and enjoying it. I was a largely unsupervised kid with undiagnosed ADHD and parents who expected their kids to just raise themselves on their own. So when I was capable of spending hours drawing or reading a fun book, but couldn't even remember that I had homework, ever, I was told that I simply didn't want to do well in school. And who was I to question that, I'm eight years old.

Enjoyment and passion were the only forms of motivation I knew, and if I couldn't make myself either love doing boring math homework as much as I loved my hobbies, or force myself to push through things I hated with sheer willpower alone because I want to succeed so bad, then clearly I was simply not as good as all the other kids, who could do that. And that attitude carried onto adulthood. Every time I struggled to muster genuine love and passion into something, I thought that I just don't want it badly enough. Not to enough to love it, or to suffer through it.

Being medicated for the first time was a game changer. Like holy shit, so this is your brain on dopamine. And suddenly I wanted to do things, turned my life around, took up the passion career I had never dared to try. And when the first "honeymoon phase" of the meds wore down, the same fear came back - I don't like this anymore, do I not want it bad enough? What else could I possibly want?

And I shit you not I was literally 30 years old when I understood that life isn't just either loving every minute of pursuing a passion that you love, or joylessly dragging yourself through things that you don't even want to do. I can just tell myself "just because I don't like doing this doesn't mean I don't want to be doing it." It's not a mark of failure, weakness or lack of motivation, if sometimes the career you want to be doing just feels like having a job.

*day after october, the weary pumpkin gives a great sigh before collapsing physcially and emotionally from the sheer psychological strain*

Like. Autism doesn't come with an automatic love of hearing anyone infodump about anything they love. In fact sometimes it comes with the opposite. Sometimes restricted interests are in fact restrictive enough to make anything else boring. Sometimes it's just hard to process that much speech. Doesn't mean we get to be unkind about it either but yeah. This fantasy people push of autistics having endless energy and appreciation for each other's special interests is just not realistic.

an indecision, but a large one

beetlejuice (1988) dir. tim burton