Squawking - Blog Posts
"Follow your natural circadian rhythm" my natural circadian rhythm thinks I should sleep 24/7 so I think its judgment is flawed
Can we please stop calling Republicans compulsive/pathological liars, psychopaths, sociopaths, narcicists, delusional, etc? And can we please stop calling Democrats the r slur? I don't care what they've done, cut it out
Yes, even when it's Trump.
Why do doctors seem to think you only have 1 problem per appointment? I've stacked up, like, twenty problems over the years that I still need to talk to my doctor about because she only gives me time to bring up one per session
Guess who finally got diagnosed with long COVID? After having long COVID for over two years?
Anyway, wear a mask.
Psoriasis on my forehead got really bad (mom says it looks like I have a chemical burn) so now I have to be emo and do the swoop fringe until it goes away. Ugh.
I just had a migraine visual aura stop as a tiny little speck and in literally a few seconds I would not properly see out of either eyes because the aura filled my vision that fast. I am not exaggerating, I noticed the tiny speck of aura and in the few seconds it took for me to grab my meds from my bag the aura spread to the point that I could not read. I think that's a world record and in related news, I am visiting urgent care as so as I am able to because what the fuck. That should not happen. I think is has something to do with my eye photophobia suddenly getting so much worse so quickly over the last few months. There might be something wrong with my eyes and I'm very worried
Two new LEGO friends characters, Petch and Ida, are disabled. Petch has a prosthetic leg (purple and it's an above-knee prosthetic) and Ida is, based on appearance, a, person with albinism. I am so excited to see more of these two in the future!
Good video about the problematic history of freak shows and PT Barnum. It's around thirty minutes so fairly short, but he put a lot of effort and research into the history here
I wish there was a way to ask for money without doxxing myself. I have seven dollars to last me until the 28th and I need forty bucks for transport to my job.
Salt pills are a miracle. I had low salt levels earlier, took one, and it took my levels up so fast it was wild. I went from feeling like I needed a hospital to feeling fine in what seemed like minutes without needing to dump table salt into my mouth. Beautiful. 100% recommend
My cousin is noncompliant diabetic (type one,) but not by choice.
So, she's six. Her parents do not listen to her doctors and will not follow her diet plan. She stays part-time with another one of my cousins and he does his best to follow her diet and make sure her needs are met, but he doesn't have her at all times. There have been a lot of times where she gets dropped off at his house only for him to pretty much immediately need to take her to the ER because she's in ketoacidosis or her blood sugar is extremely off. There was one time where things got so bad she was in the PICU on a ventilator because her lungs stopped working, it was a miracle she survived and he's worried that it will be too late if nothing changes.
I don't know. I'm just worried about her and I'm venting about it. There's no way to help her without trying to go to CPS, but there's no family in the immediate area if she gets removed from the house who can take her and if they don't take her, her parents might retaliate and move somewhere else or stop letting her stay at my cousin's and then she's in even more danger. I wish I knew what to do. She deserves better than this
Introducing two new tags
op says endos dni- means that the person I'm reblogging from does not want endogenic systems or their supporters to interact with the post
op says anti-endos dni- means the person I'm reblogging from does not want those who are anti endogenic systems to interact with the post
And if I ever accidentally reblog from someone who doesn't want someone who's neutral on syscourse to reblog from them, feel free to tell me and I'll delete the post. Please try to be respectful of OP's wishes when I use these tags.
I will never forget the time I was on the bus and I heard some middle school-sounding kid say to his friend "Stop being so autistic, Sam," using autism as an insult.
And another kid, presumably Sam, said "But I am autistic."
That one... that really stuck out to me. An autistic kid having his own disability thrown at him as an insult. Every time I see someone use autistic as an insult, or "acoustic" and "artistic," I think of Sam.
I'm about to blow a lot of minds right now
Have you ever seen a person with a visible disability and wondered how they got it? Did you see someone with a burn or other scar and wonder what happened? Does what happened to that person who doesn't have part of their leg fill you with burning questions? Well, guess what, you don't even need to ask. You already know.
Does someone have a burn scar? You already know what happened, they got burned. A cut scar? They got cut by something. Missing part of a limb? Clearly they were either born without it or something happened that made the removal necessary. Are they in a wheelchair? Clearly something happened that made them using a wheelchair necessary, whether that something was a condition they were born with or if it's a condition they acquired later in life. You already know what happened. Don't ask.
The who, when, where, and why of that person's disability does not matter, it is not your business. That is their personal medical history and they should not be asked to disclose it to a random stranger who's staring at them like they're a unicorn or something. You know what happened. You do not need the specifics. So don't ask for them.
Communicating about problems is hard for me.
I don't know why. If I'm having a problem like I'm sick or I'm having a migraine or I can't do something, I can't just tell people that verbally. It gets harder to make my thoughts come out of my mouth. I stutter and I pause and I use a lot of filler words and even then, usually I can't actually say what's wrong. If I can manage to say it, I can't... like, if I tell my manager that I can't do a specific task right now and she pushes back and says there's no one else to do it or that if I can't do it she'll send me home, I can't stick up for myself. The second I meet a tiny bit of resistance, I always fold. I always try and force myself to stick it through. Even if it's an issue where I really, really need to go home, I can't communicate that with my words.
Writing out what I need to say is better. I can write out my thoughts and feelings way easier and better than I can speak them. So I write down what I want to say. I explain the issue, and I explain why said issue is causing a problem and why I need some intervention here. But even then, actually communicating with that is hard. Because it's hard to just hand my manager a note. It feels weird. Like, socially, it feels like I thing I absolutely should not be doing. But say I manage to give her the note. Now I need to explain why I am handing her this note and we're back to the first problem. And if she chooses to push back, I still can't help but fold.
I don't know what it is. But it's hard to deal with
I am visibly autistic but wouldn't want a cure because I don't know how it would change me as a person and that's scary. I'm not diagnosed but that's complicated (I had signs and my parents saw a doctor about it several times but he firmly believed I did not have autism because I was verbal early, and now I've had several professionals tell me some variation of "I'm almost certain you're autistic" but haven't been actually diagnosed because I hear it's a hassle.) I was not in ABA therapy but I did have a friend who lost his life to it. And then I'm MSN
*a world where this would not be used for eugenicist purposes, would only be done with informed consent, etc. whatever your criteria for an ideal world is.
no nuance button, just pick one. everyone would pick nuance because this is a nuanced question so I'm not adding the option. feel free to share your nuance in the replies/tags
⬇️ follow up polls in the reblogs ⬇️
Wait a second are you pro endo?
I'm not a system, I have absolutely zero authority to speak on the issue and I don't have skin in the game so even if I did know enough about the discourse to have an opinion on it, my opinion would mean nothing. I am not educated enough to have an opinion and every time I try to do research it just winds up confusing me even more and again, I have no right to have an opinion here anyways as a singlet.
I'm neither pro-endo nor anti-endo, neither pro-sysmed nor anti-sysmed. It's not my place to have an opinion here even if I knew enough to have one. I'm sorry if this answer isn't satisfactory, but it's the only answer I feel I can give. My opinion doesn't matter here and I think the best thing I can do is acknowledge that and not try to insert my unimportant and likely ill-informed opinion where it is not needed.
I can't for the life of me understand the issue and so much of the information is contradictory and complicated. So I think it's best I simply not have an opinion at all.
Is there anyone else who doesn't remember the "before my TBI" time? Like, you were super young (I was eighteen months) when the TBI happened, and there was never really a "before" for you, this has just always been your reality?
AuDHD means that someone has both ADHD and autism
pixie have question, for whoever know this word .. what is "audhd " ?
I was thinking maybe I'd do a couple audio clips of me talking to kind of demonstrate what some speech disabilities can sound like, one of me just talking and one reciting a few scripted lines from work.
My take on people reclaiming the r slur, as someone with cognitive and developmental disabilities. Warning, I will be referring to a racial slur in this post. It will be censored.
The r slur means slow. It is made specifically to mock "slow" people like me, people with a specific group of disabilities that impair us in a very specific way. Unless you are someone who is slow, that word does not apply to you and your cannot reclaim it. Honestly, even I hesitate to say it because while I have one of those specific disabilities, I am not intellectually disabled and so my ability to use that slur, to me, is not promised and I do not want to offend.
"Who are you to tell me I can't reclaim a slur used on me?"
Okay, so here's the thing. I'm Irish. Back in the day, racists used to call the Irish white n-words. That slur has been used against the Irish just as the r slur has been used against you. For the Irish, people hurled the meanest thing they could think of at us, and to them, comparing us to Black people was the worst thing they could possibly do. Similarly, ableists have referred to you as the r slur because they think that comparing you to people with intellectual disability is the worst possible insult they can hurl in your direction. Are you following?
Do the Irish have the right to reclaim the n-word just because it was used against us to "insult" us by comparing us to Black people? No, of course not. Because even though that word was used against us, it's a slur against Black people. Irish people who aren't Black don't get to reclaim that slur. Only Black people can reclaim it.
Similarly, if a straight man who was just a bit too queer-looking is bullied and called the f slur, because comparing him to gay people is the worst insult his bullies can think of, does he have the right to reclaim the f slur? No. The slur doesn't apply to him. It's been hurled in his direction but at the end of the day, he isn't gay. Just like the Irish aren't Black, and you are not intellectually disabled.
The r slur was made specifically to target people with intellectual disability. Outside of people with intellectual disability, there are very few groups to whom that word applies.
You can't reclaim a slur that doesn't apply to you. Even if it was used against you, there's a difference between being insulted by being compared to someone like me and actually having that word hurled at you because you are like me. I'm sorry people were ableist to you, but that's not your slur to reclaim. There are ones that apply to you. Ableists were very thorough. Please reclaim one that applies to you.
I think I might be relapsing.
I don't even want to really say it because I'm afraid the second I say "I think I'm relapsing into compulsive lying," everyone is going to think everything I've ever posted is a lie and nothing I'll say will ever convince them otherwise. But I am. I am relapsing because of the situation at work and because I'm scared to go into work every single day and that's just making my mental state so much worse and now I'm compulsive lying again.
At least this time, unlike when I was younger, my lies are believable so I'm not getting caught when it happens. It might landslide back in that direction, it might not. I hope it won't. I'll try and talk to my therapist about it and see if we can figure out how to fix this.
This sucks. It could be worse, but still, it sucks.
(And no, before you ask, I'm not lying about the stuff I post online. Because online, I type out the lie but realize it before clicking post and I can just delete it. For me, compulsive lying is only really an issue in my real life. I can stop myself from lying online. And if I do lie, I can always delete the post fast. I'm not lying.)
To my knowledge, my hair started turning grey when I was ten. But, from what I remember, I was super surprised to find a grey strand so it might have started sooner than that. My hair has also steadily been getting greyer since then.
So, I have a morbid curiosity issue but also OCD and anxiety, so sometimes, when I fall down a rabbit hole of something just a bit too creepy (especially when it comes with creepy pictures, like this schoolboy9 thing,) I find myself irrationally afraid of stupid things. Like twenty-ish minutes ago, I was afraid of seeing that schoolboy9 guy in my closet if I got up to go to the bathroom. I knew it was irrational, but I was too scared of that to get up. So here's a solution that worked for me;
Reaction content for kids under twelve.
Seriously. Azzyland, Kyutie, and Reaction Time, Azzyland and Reaction time slightly more but Kyutie does have some more adult-geared content if you'd prefer that. I just watch a couple videos and boom, I'm feeling better and I can get up and do what I need to do. I recommend it.
(Also, those merging games! I know there's a trick with Tetris, where if you see something scary you can play Tetris for a while and it helps you forget whatever than thing was, but I've never been good at Tetris. But merge gemstones games, like Candy Crush or, my favourite, Enchanted Kingdom; Eliza's Adventure, those help me take my mind off of whatever I saw. Plus they're easier.)
Gods, the Storm post makes me so unbelievably angry. I think it says something about the community that we're erasing one character's extremely dangerous powers to act like she's being a dick to someone with powers that aren't anywhere near as dangerous just because people don't want her to be right.
Like, this is a crystal-clear example of y'all refusing to listen to people with higher support needs. I'm just saying. The parallels are crystal clear.
There is an entire blog, @cripplecharacters, you can start with. Please, this is what we're here for. To make sure people don't write stuff like this.
We shouldn't be your only stop and as OP said, sensitivity readers are worth the investment, but we can help, too. Please utilize disabled sensitivity services. We're here because we want to help you represent your characters right.
ive been thinking a lot about the whole sia music think lately and ive said this before on my other blog but if youre allistic and working on a story involving autism/an autistic character please please get an autistic sensitivity reader (ideally more than one tbhhh) and, in addition, if you can please compensate them.
if you cant afford to compensate a sensitivity reader because the story youre working on isnt something you expect to be able to monetize like thats understandable especially right now. you should still seek people out. odds are you will find someone willing to give your work a once over and provide some thoughts, but like, if thats the case expect the kind of work you would naturally expect from a freeby. reading and giving feedback on another persons writing IS work and it honestly can be very draining work especially when it involves essentially asking a marginalized person to encounter and correct microaggressions they already are forced to deal with in life. that deserves the proper appreciation.
like if youre writing something about an autistic character and reach out to me ill definitely give it a look because this is something i care about a lot and i really want to see better depictions of neurodivergence in media, but if im doing this for freesies im going to be a lot less willing to get into circular arguments about what gets a pass and what doesnt or give you super detailed advice on how to fix a particular problem.
if im taking the time to review your potentially insensitive writing for nothing but my hope that itll do some good for the community, dont expect me to hold your hand. seek out sensitivity readers. pay your sensitivity readers.
Okay, as a mod of cripplecharacters, I'm about to go off from several different angles. And these aren't even all of my thoughts. I have more. (TW for ableism, mention of prone restraints, caricature characters, and really, really poor writing of disabled characters.)
If she didn't get her information through a collaboration with Autism Speaks then where'd she get it? She claims she did three years of research. Did none of that research include basic stuff about writing disabled characters in general? Also, it takes five seconds to find out that there's an issue with Autism Speaks. It's in the little Wikipedia blurb. She didn't even skim Wikipedia in three years?
Not even come slightly close to the topic of prone restraints (which have a death count,) and definitely not portray is as a good thing twice
Gotten rid of that detail of Music having an accident during Kazoo's relapse. Yeah, that can happen sometimes with some autistics in real life, but the fact that it was portrayed the way it was and by an actress who wasn't autistic-
Similarly, the angry "Brush you hair" scene was... where to even start? No, not by an actress who isn't, at the very least, MSN or semispeaking (or even nonspeaking)
Gotten rid of that inspiration porn Music singing scene at the end.
Significantly rewritten the guy who is... I think he's Zu's love interest?
Actually done something with the kid who seemed to care so deeply for Music.
Explained how said kid managed to acquire twenty thousand dollars to buy Music a service dog over the internet just like that???
Remove Music not doing anything about finding her grandmother dead on the floor??? Or at least acknowledge that the poor girl was probably traumatized from the experience and had no idea what to do or how to help? It's shot almost like she's being selfish and choosing not to help rather than being disabled, terrified, and unable to help.
Not forced Maddie into this movie using their massive power imbalance. Definitely should never have forced a young teenaged girl into a position so bad that she literally broke down sobbing because she didn't want to come across as a caricature, at which point Sia lied to her. Look, Maddie was what, fourteen? And Sia was basically a mother figure and the one responsible for Maddie's success.
Not called stimming tics. Tics come from a very different group of disorders, involuntary stimming behaviours are a completely different thing with different reasons and mechanisms. If she wanted to write Music having tics, she should have given her a tic disorder. Actually, wait, scratch that. She screwed up badly enough with a singularly-disabled character. I don't want to know how much lower she could go by trying to portray a multiple-disabled character.
Not lied about trying to get a nonspeaking actress (because she was quoted long before that as saying she would only make the movie if Maddie was the main role. She wasn't going to try with an autistic actress.) Not acted like firing the fictional autistic actress was a mercy rather than putting some work in and making the set accessible for her.
Like, sure, maybe a hypothetical nonspeaking actress couldn't have been able to handle the dancing. You know what the solution to that is? Either adapt the dancing or get her an autistic stunt double who can do the dancing
Not have Music be significantly less autistic in her head? The stimming and movement abnormalities fade, if not vanish entirely, during the dream sequences. As though the version of Music in her head is less autistic than Music in her body, maybe even not autistic at all. Which is an idea that has blood on its hands
Not tried to portray all of autism rather than just Music, a character who happens to be autistic. What Sia was doing was trying to portray autism as a whole, or maybe even turn the entire idea of autism into a character rather than create a person with autism. Compare this to a (slightly) better example, Wendy from Please Stand By. Dakota Fanning wasn't trying to portray all of autism and her character wasn't written to portray autism as a whole, she was playing Wendy, one particular autistic woman, rather than a caricature.
Given Music literally anything. Why doesn't she have hobbies? Where's her personality? I know nothing about Music as a person and that's because she wasn't written to be a person.
The dead disabled brother plot was unnecessary. As was the HIV plot.
"She can hear two rooms away" she's autistic, not Superman.
The grandmother left absolutely no plan to help Zu care for her H-MSN sister, not even a note in her will like "The neighbour is close with her, he can help." I know she died suddenly but c'mon, she has a grandchild who will need care for the rest of her life, she should have been more cautious as an elderly woman. Her carelessness was setting Zu up for failure and Music up for an even worse time of this massive change in her life.
So yeah, it would make sense that there's some growing pains, Zu has no idea how to interact with her sister and her sister is probably distressed, confused, grieving, and frustrated because her entire world is changing. But rather than treating this as a "Yeah, this would have gone better with a bit of planning and we're both struggling because we're going into this blind," it's portrayed as "Music is the source of all of my problems, she's the worst, she's unreasonable, she's the worst thing that's ever happened to me and I hate her." Why is Music being portrayed as a burden rather than the burden being how ill-prepared the grandmother left all involved parties for this eventuality.
Wasn't Music meant to be HSN? Like, level three autism? Spoken like someone who's never interacted with someone who's HSN before.
Zu is high-key resentful towards Music as though any of this is her fault and she seems so desperately dedicated to either ignoring or despising her sister and the way it's portrayed makes it feel like the audience is supposed to agree with Zu?
Wow, I went off. To keep this from being nine hundred miles longer, she should have just not done that. If she had submitted this plot to cripplecharacters, literally any of us, autistic or not, could have told her not to do this. Did she even talk to someone from the disabled community? You don't even need to be autistic, just disabled, to know that pretty much all of this was a horrific idea.
What SIA Should’ve Done Making Her Movie ‘Music’
Cast an autistic actor for the main character
Consulted with actual autistic people instead of f$&@ing Auti$m $peaks
Did PROPER research
Made the movie accessible to watch - got rid of the whole flashing light thing that could trigger seizures
Used an actual mixed actor instead of doing literal blackface
Started being open to criticism instead of having a flip out at people for calling her out
Not agreed with an interviewer comparing non-verbal people to an actual inanimate object wtf
Feel free to add to this
Hi, guys. So, just to warn you, I encountered an ABA "therapist" (child abuser) in the wild today so I'm saving a lot of posts that are very anti ABA and Autism Speaks. Don't know when I'll reblog them but all will be tagged as ableism, plus specific tags like "aba therapy" and "autism speaks"
I would probably have way less diagnoses if the doctors had explained to my parents and properly documented things when I was a baby.
Like, I have some unspecified hip condition, I was born with it. That's all my mom knows. I figure it's bilateral, and that might be why my gait is weird and gods know how many of the other problems I have with my legs, like how one's longer than the other. The TBI I got as a baby was, according to my mom, complicated. All the doctor really bothered with was saying I'd be fine, he didn't tell her a lot of details. Again, gods know how many of my things that could have caused. There was whatever happened when I was five, when a severe allergic reaction (to something I had only been slightly allergic to before and have only been slightly allergic to after) and asthma we hadn't known I had put me in the PICU for days and the hospital for two weeks, then a nebulizer for months and an inhaler for year but never an Epi Pen, which I have questions about now. Apparently I also have something up with my heart.
And we don't have any of this information because the doctors weren't explaining it.