Hewwo

Freddie. Late 20s. This is my complaining blog

[bi-scuits]

posted about a situation i was struggling with on the autistic women subreddit and this reply was like "people stop treating you like this once you do the work, you're comfortable with yourself, and you look good. Then you'll exude a better energy". And I was like "I am comfortable with myself but this still happens. It sounds like you're saying I need to seem less autistic." and everyone up voted her reply acting like I just gave a crazy bad faith reading of what she said??

Truly a bad subreddit.

[gothhabiba]

in response to people saying things like "men aren't allowed to cry in public, unlike women" other people will then say things like "women are penalized, not rewarded, for public displays of emotion—the fact that women are presumed to be overly emotional & irrational is misogyny, not a privilege"

which is often true but like, it's contextual innit. lest we discount the phenomenon of White Woman Tears

[gothhabiba]

I've recently had white women in professional contexts tell me that they were quote "hurt" and "gutted" by what amounted to very minor professional faux pas on my part. I remember reading a white woman academic's essay on Jane Eyre that began with recounting her emotional upset upon having Jane Eyre "taken away from her" by postcolonial / anti-racist scholarship. white women's emotions do have currency in personal and professional spaces in selective contexts, i.e. when wielded against people of colour 🤷🏽‍♀️

[cybervalkyrie]

[winningmachine]

Being small Nobody quite recovers from being a child: the asymmetry of power between parents and children always leaves a trace

[dragongirlsnout]

y'know i don't really love how people use "butch" interchangeably with "handy"

[dragongirlsnout]

*north american approaching lesbian couple* so which one of you is useful and which one of you is the woman

[dragongirlsnout]

Sorry but the point of this post is that knowing how to drywall doesn't make me masculine, this is not a safe space to talk about your noble butch identity or whatever

[trangoldin]

NYC Dyke March 2026

[thepoisonroom]

that post that's like "we see it as indulgence when others express the things we suppress in ourselves" has genuinely done more for my emotional health than going on meds did

[thepoisonroom]

i wish i could find the original post bc once you start noticing that others see it as indulgence when you express that which they repress in themselves you can't stop seeing it

[afloweroutofstone]

You should loudly boo every Democrat who attacks Trump’s deal with Iran for being too Iran-friendly. Any deal to end this war is a good deal. I do not care that we are returning the assets we stole from them. Cry about it. If you don’t want to make concessions to a country you consider an adversary, don’t start pointless wars with them and kill schools full of their children

[must-be-mythtaken]

"Over time, body positivity has made its constituency clear. It has widened the warm and fickle embrace of beauty standards ever so slightly. Now it showers its affections not only on beautiful, able-bodied, fair-skinned women under a size 4 but on beautiful, able-bodied, fair-skinned women under a size 12. Body positivity has widened the circle of acceptable bodies, yes, but it still leaves so many of us by the wayside. Its rallying cry, love your body, presumes that our greatest challenges are internal, a poisoned kind of thought about our own bodies. It cannot adapt to those of us who love our bodies, but whose bodies are rejected by those around us, used as grounds for ejecting us from employment, healthcare, and other areas of life."

-Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

[bi-scuits]

its cool how they made refilling an existing adhd prescription at the same pharmacy you've always had after the correct amount of time a form of torture

[bi-scuits]

Read this as them revealing their baby's gender was boat

[parkchanwoohoo]

Once you start noticing how the incapacity to handle discomfort affects how people live their lives it's actually pretty shocking how it ruins pretty much every conceivable aspect of existence. Interpersonal relationships, romantic and platonic. Career and education opportunities. Your politics Your willingness to go anywhere. The kind of food you eat. The kind of art you expose yourself to and your ability to read it. It's never just one thing, it touches everything, and once you notice it it's like suddenly being able to see germs or something. Just this horrific catastrophe people look at you askance for screaming about. As I grow older and see what became of my friends and peers who could not learn to handle discomfort, the more I'm like. This is a genuine societal issue

[werewolf-beans]

Increasing my discomfort tolerance has also been one of the greatest assets to improving my mental health.

[bi-scuits]

I love posts that are like

Mainstream news are biased and they only tell you about scary, upsetting stuff. So they might not tell you all the good stuff that has happened recently!:

* a cop helped some ducklings cross the street

[bi-scuits]

I am obsessed with people who act like the doctor who gave them (or their kid) prognosis that they overcame is like. a hater who didn't believe in them enough.

[afloweroutofstone]

US Defense Secretary Hegseth's plan for giving even more power to military contractors is deeply dystopian.

Current and former corporate executives are now being directly embedded into the Pentagon solely to influence its decision-making. Many of these executives are acting on behalf of companies that make billions in contracts from the government agency they're influencing.

[bi-scuits]

im not anti rpf per se but when i see people shipping the actors who play two characters in an already popular ship im always amazed like why did the fictional ones not do it for you. like what's happening there

[bi-scuits]

Not to be a bitch but tumblr users' confidence that they are politically engaged compared to their actual knowledge of current events is absolutely staggering.

[creekfiend]

I understand that there is discussion of masking by autistic people that is much more honest and in-depth, but so much of the stuff I see sort of leans on the assumption that masking is something one chooses to do in order to appear "normal"

In reality, I think the behavior pattern that we name as "masking" is the natural behavioral and psychological result of being consistently punished for attempting to acknowledge your own reality during formative developmental periods. And I'm not sure that "masking" is a clarifying word to use for this

[creekfiend]

OK OK OK, someone in the tags said that they don't know the degree to which they are masking, bc they don't know what is normal/expected and therefore have no way of knowing how much they're altering themselves to fit into that expectation (thank you for articulating that!!) and I think that clarified a lot for me about my problems with the framing of masking.

Because that method of trying to "unmask" will always fail, bc it hinges on the assumption that there is a core underlying Self that is being Covered Up with the mask.

In reality, one does not have a chance to develop a true "self" due to the circumstances of their development. this is broadly true for almost all humans (SHOW ME AN UNALTERED TRUE HUMAN SELF,) because of the heavily social nature of how our selfhood intersects with other people's perception of us, but in some people it is much more marked and detrimental than others. What I think is the issue at hand is not the Self, but rather the internal experience. The Self is a construction we build to understand ourselves as beings, and it is heavily informed by our understanding of our own experiencs. understanding of those experiences is the actual issue. Being able to identify and name the effects that moving thru the world have on you. And teasing out how those acknowledgements of one's internal experience have been punished out of us.

The "recovering from burnout as a high masking person" post does use this framework, but I think that referring to people whose sense of their own internal reality has been so warped and shattered that they have to completely learn from scratch as "high masking" is just not intuitive and that it communicates what is being discussed... Poorly. I understand that that is the language that is used by the community broadly rn, and I don't object to individual instances of its use, but I do think that we would be better served in these conversations by framing it differently than "masking"

[grison-in-space]

I also see people framing even the most basic social skills (things like "tolerating mild discomfort" and "avoiding offensive phrasing of desires") as masking. At a certain point I think we have to be aware that there is a degree of curtailing one's personal self expression inherent in existing within a society, and that autistic people are not the only people who have to be aware of societal norms and contort selves to exist within them as part of experiencing that society. The difference is of course in the degree of contortion required to fit neatly into the society, not the phenomenon of having to contort in the first place.

It bugs me! And I think it creates unnecessary friction among communities of people first discovering autism and is susceptible to a weird kind of reverse curb cut effect where unmasking (== "stretching out and de-contorting from the society in which you live into a more comfortable shape") is set aside as something Just For Autistics, as if there aren't lots of groups of people whose existence is policed and shaped and bonsai-trimmed into painfully stunted or twisted shapes. Which, of course there are, and not all of them are groups where a mental health framework is remotely appropriate (e.g. constraints on the acceptable behavior of black people especially in gendered contexts), so why are we framing so much advocacy this way?

[creekfiend]

YESSSSSS