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@autava
Hi I’m Ava
I’m 20 years old in the UK and I was diagnosed as Autistic earlier this year. I’ve started this blog from somethings my counsellor said about getting my feelings out and sharing them. I intend to post about being autistic and hopefully figuring myself out better in the process. Feel free to follow my blog and send me asks or any stuff like that. I’m happy to talk to people, especially other neurodivergent people.
Just in case any of my plushies loving neurodivergent followers needed to hear this today:
Sleeping with plushies is good.
Talking to plushies is good.
Taking plushies everywhere with you is good, out in public and all.
Collecting plushies is good. There is no such thing as too many plushies.
Plushies are good. They are the best.
it's not that I want to specifically talk about my interests, I just want to exist near someone with the same interests so we can just vibrate excitedly in each other's presence
obsessed with Miles Edgeworth's conversation skills in turnabout samurai btw. he just walks to you, stares at you and after a while says "say sth Wright. I'm not good at small talk". King. I'm stealing this strategy
I may never buy another form fitting dress, or new shoes that aren't sneakers. I may never again leave home without sunglasses, noise canceling headphones, and a mobility aid. And all of these are not only ok, but also good things. Making adjustments and working with myself according to my needs is how I can have an easier time in this abled neurotypical world. I'll do what it takes to make living more comfortable for myself, no hesitation and no shame.
“You don’t look autistic!”
Can everyone please stop saying things like this? Just because we don’t show traits around certain people doesn’t mean that we’re faking/don’t have the disorder. I had to learn to the best of my ability to be, what society says, is normal. And not be so “weird”. It’s harder than people think. And it really drains you too.
Autism
We really do live in a society lads
Due to popular demand, here is the Typography Final comic that I did at VCUarts, originally posted over here as simple illustations. It was an informational comic about Autism.
Please take into consideration that this is based on my own experiences and is meant to be light-hearted and very basic. This is not an official medical guide to autism and was instead a theme to an art project rather than a medical study.
That being said, I hope you enjoy it none the less. Tbh I rushed it because finals are crazy lol
It's too much. Starting uni is just too much, all the new stuff all the fucking decisions. I'm so tired I don't know how I'm meant to do this
goomba loaf
things i did as a neurodivergent person to get straight a’s for the third year in a row
hi hello hi how’s it going. welcome to the 3am-burst-of-motivation-tumblr-post-of-the-day, where i’m sharing all of my study tips that allowed my adhd/austism/ocd/bpd brain to somehow squeeze out straight a’s for the third year (sixth semester) in a row.
1. study differently for different subjects. contrary to popular belief, flashcards and rewriting your notes does not work for every subject (unless it does for you, in which case ignore me and do what works for you). different subjects, at least for me, require different environments, techniques, and associations.
2. association! sensory stuff works great for me because i tend to associate physical things with emotions and even personality types, so have something be constant every time you study. example: i have two tubes of chapstick, one peppermint and one pomegranate. i put on the peppermint one right before i go to bed and the pomegranate one after i eat breakfast - i associate the different scents with different activities (going to bed and starting my to-do list).
3. to-do lists! mine are written on sticky notes and stuck to my mirror because i hate hate hate having the sticky glue stuff from sticky notes on my mirror and i’m not allowed to clean my mirror until all the sticky notes are off of it. when i can’t see my mirror, they’re on the outside of my backpack because they’re bright pink and the social anxiety makes me think people are staring at me if they are on my backpack.
4. change your location often. specifically for my adhd peeps who have the attention span of an overexcited puppy, walk around. do things. go to a park or a coffee shop or a grocery store or a sidewalk or a bench somewhere or my personal favorite, the bank. when you’re understimulated go somewhere with lots of different noises and when you’re overstimulated so somewhere quiet or control noises (listen to music, noise-cancelling headphones, humming).
5. keep a piece of paper next to you for the Random Thoughts That Come at Inconvenient Times and write down the stuff you want to look up/do/tell someone about and like… i don’t even know why that helps but it does. just having your thoughts out there i guess?
6. body doubling. find a person who will study with you. bonus points if it’s another neurodivergent person. they are depending on you to finish the studying and get the good grade. THEY ARE DEPENDING ON YOU. DON’T DISAPPOINT THEM. (side note anxiety people i would not recommend this for you)
7. go to a place that will remind you to pee and eat and drink things. starbucks is great for this. so are most restaurants.
8. get a new thing to study with every week. i like new things. if i have a new thing i am going to use it until it’s no longer exciting. i get a pencil, just a boring, manual pencil from the drugstore every monday afternoon for like sixty cents. it’s a fantastic method, at least for me.
9. don’t drink something with caffeine in it while studying. you will either fall asleep or end up on a roof. it is not a good situation. caffeine for neurodivergents is like sleep pills, for me at least and most of the other ND’s i’ve met. if not for you, you’re lucky.
10. spaced reps. in other words, find a big pair of dice and write vocab terms on each side, then hurl it at the ground and define each term. do this for like an hour. it’s fun and gets a lot of energy out.
11. stim. vocal stims, physical stims, self-talk, fidget, yelp, squeal, tap your foot, walk around, shrug your shoulders, twitch your nose, jump up and down, ribbit like a frog. stim, stim, stim. it helps.
anyways. it’s 3:17 am. happy studying!
Yo! Your clarifications about 1980’s studies about the theory of mind talked about a test for kids that involved hearing a story and then answering questions about it. So, like. Does every autistic person have a lot of trouble with this kind of exercise? I’ve always had a lot of trouble with sounds and some other things and idk i guess I’m trying to figure out if autism is something I need to look at more seriously. Sorry if this is crossing a line and totally understand if you choose not to answer. Thanks for your time!
Not every autistic person has trouble with auditory processing, but many of us do.
One of the issues with autism is sensory processing disorder. Different parts of the brain process different pieces of sensory data. How well you process any particular sensation depends partly on how well that part of your brain works, and partly on what pathways your brain has to convey information to and from the various parts of your brain. In autistic people, the axon pathways that connect sensory processing areas tend to be atypical. Temple Grandin once gave a talk that included scans of her brain and put it up on Youtube, and I took some screencaps of it so I can share what it looks like:
On the left is Temple Grandin, on the right is a neurotypical person. The highlighted bits are the axon pathways connecting the visual processing area (at the back of the brain) with the speech processing areas at the front. Notice that Temple's pathways are much bigger and not connected in the same places? Here's a side view:
You will notice that in Temple, the axons are connected with just about everywhere in the brain except the place they're supposed to be.
This is a view of the axons connecting the part of the brain that processes hearing vs. the part that creates speech.
Looking at these view of Temple Grandin's brain, it should not be surprising to learn that she is very good at visual processing--look at how her brain connects visual data to everything!--and not very good at processing things she hears. This is why she talked late and has never been able to learn a second language. It's just not the way her brain functions.
Pretty much every autistic person has issues with sensory processing, because the axon pathways in our brain are nonstandard. But! and here's the key! they are not uniformly nonstandard! So my pathways wouldn't look like Temple Grandin's, and they wouldn't look like my brother's, or my father's (both of whom are autistic). We all have sensory processing issues, but they will vary from person to person.
Problems hearing and understanding speech is very common; it's why so many autistics learn to speak late, or have to take time to process what's said to them before they can understand it. But for some autistics, auditory processing is fine, it's touch or smell or taste that's the problem. Or multiple senses. Or specific sensations! It's not unusual to have someone who can't wear jeans because the fabric feels like sandpaper on their skin, but they might walk around all day with a deep gash on their leg because they didn't feel it. Personally, my sense of smell is not very sensitive in general, but even a whiff of gasoline and I am in distress.
The other thing to keep in mind is that Sensory Processing Disorder is a thing. There are people who have problems with sensory processing and other than that their brains are pretty typical. If I were you, I would investigate both Sensory Processing Disorder and autism and seeing if one of them seems to fit.
deeply missing the rituals of elementary school
same routine every day.... going to the library as a class... eating lunch with your friends... having a teacher read to you from the same book every day.. packing your little backpack... now what do i do? emails?
Being autistic isn’t a bad thing. It isn’t a disease. It isn’t curable. Autistic people aren’t broken.
The world is simply not built for us.
Our brains just work differently. We perceive things differently. We understand things differently.
If the society we live in doesn’t work for us, it’s society that needs changing. Because we can’t change, and we shouldn’t have to change.
Also, Autism Speaks is trash.
The Autism Community is not inclusive.
I have been clinically diagnosed with autism since the age of 6, not that big of a deal – therapies, visits to neuropsychologists and the standard procedure – I never had many friends, I was never very verbal but I continued my life. As I grew older, although, I felt the need to find more people like me, I felt the need to find a Community.
I used to be ashamed to tell people I am autistic, I didn’t want anyone to know because I was afraid they would treat me differently. Now, at 19 I am ashamed to tell people I am autistic because I am afraid they will associate me with the Autistic Community on social media.
Even though I speak, communication can be extremely hard for me. Most of my days go on without me speaking a single word. I have always found profoundly difficult to maintain friendships and to feel like I belong somewhere. This has caused me great frustration over the years. I figured that maybe if I looked for other autistic people on social media things would be a bit easier and spoiler alert: they weren’t. Even when I tried my hardest to interact with them, I had the feeling they were just a small group of people who would barely let anyone new in.
Whenever I did manage to join some kind of group chat, I was always left behind because I couldn’t possibly keep up with their conversation. It was hard for me to make and keep friends and no one seemed to care about trying to include me as a person with higher support needs.
The only time I was actually noticed by the autistic community, was when I shared a slightly impopular opinion on my private social media account. Suddenly, all these people that had been ignoring me, excluding me and talking over and for me, were attacking me because of a 50-word opinion from someone who is also in their community, from someone who has absolutely no power in changing anyones views’ on autism, from someone who no one has a little bit of empathy for.
I got so much hate from my own community for having different views that no one even asked me to explain in a better way. Suddenly all of the autistic community knew who I was and they hated me because I didn’t agree 100% with them.
This is not a community. The Autism Community was never a community. You aren’t supposed to hate on someone just because they share different views on something. It is not like I was defending eugenics. All of these people got offended by one single comment of mine. Have they thought of how offended I have been for the past years while I am trying to form some kind of connection to this ‘community’ but no one will make an effort to include someone with less communication skills?
There is a reason why autistic people on social media who actually get to be heard have higher communication skills, there is a reason why everyone prefers autistic people who can speak up. I know the world prefers to hear those who look more neurotypical – I just never thought I would experience something like this in the autistic community.
I was made fun of because I said I have a harder time to communicate in groups of people. People mocked me and kept saying that I changed the DSM-5 and now the criteria of diagnosing autism is by having difficulty communicating with group chats on the internet. They told me I was invalidating experiences of autistic people who are able to communicate in group chats. But what about us, with lesser communication skills?
What about us over here, who are barely verbal? Who are non-verbal, who use different communication methods? We have been left out, our voices aren’t heard inside and outside of the autistic community. We keep being left out.
I am ashamed to be associated with this Autistic Community. I am ashamed that people will think I act like I know everything about autism, I am ashamed that people will think that as soon as they spit out something slightly different from what I believe in, I will hate on them and tell them they are being ableist.
I have never felt more disappointed, sad and alone in my entire life. I had never expected to be treated the way I was by peers who have the same condition as I do.
The Autism Community is not inclusive, it never was. You need to do better. You need to hear us with higher support needs. You need to be patient with our skills, you need to be patient if it is hard for us to communicate. We deserve to be heard, we deserve a space in this community.
You know what? I don’t want neurotypicals to see me as “normal.” I want them to be okay with my wackiness.
I want them to be okay with autistic people being fucking weird when that’s what we are! I don’t want you to suddenly dismiss our unique behaviours. I want you to be okay with the fact I go extended amounts of time without talking. I want you to be okay with the fact I move my arms in a weird way. I want you to be okay with the fact I will be in genuine pain if I hear that seemingly harmless noise just one more time. I want neurotypicals to be okay with the fact that sometimes, they WILL find autistic people wacky and that we STILL deserve respect regardless.
Why is the process to access support so draining? Like oh these people need extra help and find some things more difficult I'm gonna stick a bunch of hoops for them to jump through, that'll help /s.
I feel like the most ironic thing is me just staring at the box asking me how my disability affects me with the only words I've managed to put in the box is "communication is difficult" because my disability is making it hard to communicate how it affects me.
