Your Local Hummingbird

Nina. 26. cerebellar hypoplasia. this is a sideblog, my main is @atardisoutoftime

[asmeesh]

Crawling out of a five day migraine hole

[asmeesh]

Added to this original piece

[gentlewordsdaily]

There is a very specific kind of sadness in realizing your parents loved you, and still did not always know how to meet your emotional needs.

Because it is confusing. It would almost feel easier if there was no love there at all. But sometimes there was love. In the way they tried to protect you. In the sacrifices they made. In the ways they worried about you, cared for you, wanted a good life for you.

And at the same time, there were still things missing.

Maybe comfort did not come in the way you needed it to. Maybe your feelings were not always understood, or noticed, or handled gently. Maybe you learned to keep certain parts of yourself quiet because it felt easier than trying to explain them.

That kind of hurt is difficult because it does not always come from cruelty. Sometimes it comes from people who loved you deeply, but did not know how to emotionally connect in the ways you needed. People carrying their own wounds, limitations, fears, or ways of surviving.

And you are allowed to acknowledge both truths at once.

You are allowed to recognize their love and still grieve what you needed but did not receive. Those things do not cancel each other out.

Forgiveness, for a lot of people, is not pretending nothing hurt you. It is slowly accepting that someone can love you and still fall short of understanding you completely.

That does not make your pain dramatic. It does not make them monsters either. Sometimes it just means everyone was trying with the emotional tools they had, and some of those tools were not enough.

And I think many people quietly carry guilt for still feeling hurt by parents they know tried their best. But being loved imperfectly can still leave wounds. It makes sense that it affected you.

At the same time, you do not have to stay trapped only in anger forever either. Sometimes healing looks like understanding that your parents were human before they were parents. People shaped by their own experiences, their own upbringing, their own emotional gaps.

That understanding does not erase your feelings. It just softens the sharp edges around them a little.

You deserved emotional safety. You deserved gentleness. You deserved to feel understood, comforted, and emotionally close to the people raising you.

And if they could not fully give that to you, it is okay to mourn it.

But I hope you also know this: the love you needed is still something you can experience in your life. Through other people. Through chosen family. Through the way you learn to treat yourself now.

The story does not end at what you did or did not receive growing up.

You are still allowed softness after all of it 🤍

[rabbiteclair]

auto immune disorders happen when the immune system ignores regulatory factors and begins attacking healthy bodily tissues, due to what scientists refer to as "sheer love of the game"

[catcrumb]

[jurassicpeanut]

No bond stronger than a disabled girl and her disabled cat

[differentlylimbed]

really don't enjoy the genre of post that's like "it's hard to accept that being physically disabled just inherently means never being able to do any of the activities you want to do or achieve any of your dreams and spending your entire life suffering. but that's how it is and that's okay 💕" like have you guys considered the possibility you are depressed

[differentlylimbed]

more thoughts on this... i've noticed these posts are often made by people newly struggling with chronic pain conditions and are often also struggling with the diagnostic process. and like i get it. pain makes you angry and bitter and terrified and makes everything feel like it'll last forever. and if doctors are telling you they can't find the answer or there's nothing wrong with you it can be easy to feel like this is your new reality. maybe posts like that provide some sense of control or comfort. but in saying this is just the inherent experience of being disabled you are 1. excluding a huge part of your community whose disabilities are a different way of experiencing the world and do not involve chronic pain (blindness, d/Deafness, limb difference), 2. telling those who've lived with high needs or chronic pain their entire lives, and in that time have learnt to live around it, that they're doomed to a life of misery, and 3. enforcing a horrible narrative upon others with a similar experience of new chronic pain and diagnostic frustration - that it doesn't get better, that their symptoms will always run their life and that they'd be better off just accepting that. if you're frustrated and want to vent then do your thing, but calling it "positivity" is so so harmful. people with all manner of disabilities lead fulfilling lives and achieve what they want to achieve. if you don't feel like that's possible for you then that's not "okay 💕". fucking fight for it

[berryautistic]

yeah sure you're not ableist... but are you cool with visible medical devices?

are you gonna be weird about feeding tubes? are you gonna ask invasive questions about catheters and ostomy bags? can you cope with seeing someone give themselves an injection? could you walk up to someone with a tracheostomy and talk to them? how about someone with a central line?

does your disability acceptance extend to people with visible medical devices?

[berryautistic]

please don't harass this person but lots of responses like this, lots like this specifically about the injection part. and here's what i have to say about it:

being squeamish is not the same as having a medical need. being uncomfortable is not the same as having a medical need. and furthermore, being uncomfortable or squeamish is not the same as having a phobia.

in the nicest way possible... if other people's medical needs make you squeamish or uncomfortable, that's something that you need to learn to cope with. this post is asking you to do one thing: be normal to people with medical devices/needs. and yeah if you can't be normal to someone with a medical device that makes you a little uncomfortable, that is something that you need to work on.

and the way to do that, as some other people have pointed out under this post, is exposure. the solution to being squeamish or uncomfortable around medical devices is not to avoid people with medical devices/needs or treat them differently, it's actually to be exposed to them more.

and that's not always easy, some medical devices are not common to see in public, but like... do some research? google is cool? look at some pictures? wikipedia is awesome? there are large communities of people with these medical devices educating about them on various social media platforms?

phobias are different. phobias are a type of anxiety disorder. they're not uncommon, but they are generally considered to be highly treatable! if you have a genuine phobia of needles or some other medical device, that's a different situation than being squeamish or uncomfortable. but it's still a situation that needs to be managed without mistreating other people with those medical devices.

it's okay to feel uncomfortable without it being a phobia. uncomfortable is not a life threatening experience. delaying a medically necessary injection could be. when i said can you cope with seeing an injection, that was intentional phrasing. you can be uncomfortable, but can you cope with that discomfort?

we're not asking you to do anything ridiculous. just be normal about medical devices. be normal when you meet people with medical devices. we're sick of being treated like we're contagious!!

(disclaimer: some of this might not be phrased well. i've been trying to formulate this post for hours, and have been thinking about it for days. i'm tired of myself and my disabled friends with visible medical devices/needs being treated this way.)

[catcrumb]

[tlirsgender]

I feel like . A lot of Being Autistic is giving people way too much benefit of the doubt cause you're trying not to have a social anxiety paranoia doom spiral but sometimes they really and truly just are treating you like that & you have to be the crazy one & be like I know you're fucking lying to me

Like oh yeah no it's not that I didn't notice. I've just been ignoring it. Yknow. Which somehow feels worse and stupider than if I really didn't know any better

[wizardarchetypes]

I used to work with a woman who was extremely nasty-mean to me for absolutely no reason at all. She was generally unpleasant to everyone, but it was obvious to me (and to another coworker) that she had something very pointed against me in particular and made it no secret. It got so bad that I made several official complaints, and my supervisor said, "that's just how she talks to everyone. She's super blunt, but she doesn't mean it! Maybe you're just misunderstanding her tone because you're Autistic?"

Later during my 6-month employee review, the same supervisor said, "sometimes when you correct people, you can come on a little too strong and intimidate or offend people."

We went over the specific instances he was referring to, and I said, "I don't think I was unfair or too harsh in any of those situations. I think I was just straightforward for clarity."

He said, "maybe you don't realize your tone is too harsh because you're Autistic?"

So there it is.

If someone's very obviously singling you out to be outright cruel and unfair, you must give them the benefit of the doubt, because you're Autistic and cannot understand.

If you're being straightforward and normal, but someone thinks you're being unfair, you do not get the benefit of the doubt, because you're Autistic and cannot understand.

And when you point this out to allistic people, either they don't believe you, do not care, or do not try to understand.

[pangur-and-grim]

I wonder if being bullied as a kid has any inoculating factors? like "I can do this now, because I could do this at 4 feet tall" type stuff. or does it just permanently make you into a quivery little prey animal? much to consider.

[pangur-and-grim]

oh yowch.

[pangur-and-grim]

I was built to be an anxious dog with a tongue that stick out the side and a very patient owner who makes me wear those little booties when it rains, but instead I have a mortgage. jesus christ

[creekfiend]

doing all the post COVID exposure stuff (saline sinus rinse, azelastine nasal spray) just to be careful bc we didn't mask today, and wondering why it's so seldom talked about to people who won't mask for whatever silly reason like "I don't like them on my face" or "they make me claustrophobic" or "no one can hear me talk" or whatever like... I've never heard anyone who refuses to mask say "and because I don't do that, I do all this other stuff to ensure I am lowering my chances of spreading respiratory disease." its always "I can't mask and I don't do anything else either" and no one ever goes "well, have you considered all of these other things you can do post exposure?" because those things aren't as effective as masks, I guess, but THEYRE WAY WAY BETTER THAN NOTHING if you do then right after you go somewhere unmasked (you can do the spray before, too, and it will help even more. even if you contract COVID the spray reduces viral load and symptoms.) it's weirdly absent from discussion of this kind of thing

[sera-moving-time-deactivated202]

based on something I saw a bit back

[succubusboyfriend]

practicing self care less out of self love and more for the sheer logical reasoning of it’d be kinda stupid of me to expect myself to be able to function without proper maintenance

[succubusboyfriend]

“oh i don’t deserve rest and relaxation, i haven’t done enough, i haven’t earned it” and my car’s breaks don’t deserve break fluid because they aren’t breaking well enough to earn it. that’s what you sound like!!!!!

[gatheringbones]

tbh a lot of my advice boils down to “hey you know that terrible horrible looming thing you’re doing your best to avoid and distract and escape as much as possible but no matter what you do it just keeps looming and looming and ruining your life”

“just, fuckign, run straight at it screaming.”

[quasarkisses]

i needed this as a background

[spectrexviiii]

[kosmogrl]

I will probably get through this just like I have gotten through everything before but I need to be really stressed and scared first