one of the things that makes autism a disability (and why some of us choose to label it as such rather than anĀ āalternate neurotypeā) is the stress.Ā
part of autism is just being incredibly stressed. overstimulation? stress. holding a conversation? stress. something happening to our schedule? stress. people talk about how often autism is recognized and diagnosed via our stress responses (like meltdowns) because it is just so common to see autistic people stressed because of lack of accommodations to how our brains work.
and this matters because stress kills. stress causes a lot of health issues, or it can trigger pre-existing ones by making certain chronic conditions flare up. i once had a psychiatrist very unhelpfully tell me iĀ ājust need to manage my stressā when the stress i was describing was things i could not avoid in neurotypical society and canātĀ ājust get overā. i can doĀ āself careā all i like but i cannot at the very base level change the way my brain inputs information and reacts accordingly.
i only learned this year that loud noises arenāt physically painful for other people. i have lived 34 years in a world in which my friends and family regularly physically hurt me at random just by shouting, and i thought everyone else just thought i was kind of a wimp for not dealing with the pain as well as they did.
like. loud noises physically hurt. itās like a static shock from my ears to my spine that doesnāt stop until the volume goes back down. i thought we all agreed that āthatās too loud!ā and covering our ears meant āouch!ā. turns out iāve been dealing with a stressor almost no one else has, my whole life, alone.
autistic people have to keep functioning through debilitating levels of stress that no one else in their life acknowledges or helps them with. itās no wonder that their most visibleĀ ātellsā are breakdowns.Ā
So I just saw a post by a random personal blog that said ādonāt follow me if we never even had a conversation beforeā and?????? Not to be rude but literally what the fuck??????????
Iāve had people (non-pornbots) try to strike conversation out of nowhere in my DMs recently, and now Iām wondering if they were doing that because they wanted to follow me and thought they needed to interact first. I feel compelled to say, just in case, that itās totally okay to follow this blog (or my side blog, for that matter) even if weāve never talked before.
Also, Iām legit confused. Is this how follow culture works right now? It was worded like itās common sense but is that really a thing?
Saw a sharp increase in my follower count after posting this. The legitimacy of it is driving me nuts so I also feel the need to say that you can follow anyone on here regardless of whether youāve interacted with them or not. People like the above mentioned blog are exceptions. Perhaps they themselves think they arenāt and therefore will act like they arenāt, but they are, trust me.
Just follow anyone you wanna follow. The worst thing that can happen is maybe getting soft-blocked by the other person, but if they do soft-block you, then they were never that worth following in the first place.
Idk why but as a kid I used to get hysterically upset everytime I would imagine a gif of a rotating cow because I could never stop the cow from rotating no matter how hard I tried and I would be crying and no one knew why
This is probably an unnecessary addition, but OCD is missed in cases like these because it's deeply misunderstood by most people.
It's talked about like being obsessively neat or repeating pointless tasks is the main part of it, when really those are just potential symptoms.
The main thing behind OCD is not being about to turn off a thought. There's a thing where most people can just stop thinking about something. If it's over, it's not relevant, it doesn't matter anymore, people can turn their attention away. For OCD, that mechanism can get stuck. And some thought that was supposed to just temporarily pass through your head just stays there. An image of an object rotating. An anxiety about something bad happening. A wish that you made on a dandelion. These are all things that have at some point gotten stuck in my head, sometimes for years at a time.
The compulsions, the rituals, are the person trying to address the thought so it can go away. After all, if you're worried about the door not being locked you can check the lock. But for someone with OCD, that doesn't make the stuck thought go away. So they check it again. And again. And they made a ritual, maybe if I check it exactly five times, I'll know that it's locked and I can let this worry go.
It helps a little. It feels like you're doing something. But it doesn't solve the problem. Actual therapy for OCD involves not doing the compulsion. Instead, you ignore the thought, move around it, try not to give it space in your life. Your mind won't let the thought go normally, so instead you fill yourself with other thoughts. Other parts of your life.
It's not easy at first. Your mind fights you on it. But as you get practice, it gets easier. You learn tricks around your own mind, ways to look at the thought and go, hm. I guess I'll go distract myself now. It does get better. I promise
Iām a person thatās into studying historical and contemporary religions for personal curiosity scholarly reasons but Iām also a practicing Christian so for the sake of intellectual honesty Iāve had to develop two different brains for studying Christian texts and history. An analytical student of literature and history brain and a spiritual religious person brain.
These days when I look at passages about hoarding wealth being corrupting in the New Testament my studying brain is like itās kind of interesting how Christianity says wealth is a bad thing because a lot of polytheistic religions in the ancient Mediterranean took the exact opposite approach so this was probably pretty weird to people at the time but maybe thatās also why some people found it appealing.
Meanwhile my spiritual brain is like dear Lord God if it be your will please haunt JD Vanceās dreams with these passages about how being rich is stupid thank you for everything good in my life like my cats and cheese on bread and if it be your will please haunt JD Vance with visions of camels trying to fit through the eye of a needle and make him really uncomfortable about it k love you amen
it's really gross how you can be self aware enough to know what's going on in your head but you can't actually stop it from happening. i need to grab it like a pigeon that got stuck in a house and throw it out the window. be free
I hope you donāt mind that Im only answering this part of your question, but it was a lot to reflect on and unpack.
I think the best way I can describe it is likeā¦. You know how when you do a puzzle, and most people start with the border and work their way inwards?
I think that most people are just the border of a puzzle.
I can look at a crowd and kind of guess whose finished picture is a landscape, or a bunch of balloons, or a classical painting. The colours and shapes give an impression that makes everybody a tiny bit different.
But then likeā¦ a LOT of people are puzzles of, say, a field of white flowers. And I can only see the border, so I have to think of likeā¦ which borders have more flowers or more grass, more grass or more sky, etc, and whatever is in the middle isnāt even put together yet.
But if someoneās border has, say, something fluorescent yellow in the top left- that makes them easier to differentiate from all the other field-of-white-flowers puzzles. I can remember that. And then later if the bottom half of the puzzle is covered, I can still see the big spot of neon yellow at the top, and remember that no other field-of-white-flowers have that.
And then likeā¦. The more I see them, or the more unique features the have like tattoos or scars or birthmarks or whatever, unique proportions or deformities or injuries or gaits- the more pieces are filled in. So I can retain more parts of the picture in my head
So now instead of just being another border of a puzzle of a field of white flowers, YOU are a windmill in a field of white flowers, or a castle in Ć” valley of white flowers, or a mix of white and red flowers.
And if I see someone often enough for long enough, I get so many pieces in their ten-thousand-piece puzzle that even with a few gaps, I still know exactly who they are, and can still pick them out of a crowd. Because Iāve filled in enough of the picture to know what it is
Like
Like. These arenāt literal. I can SEE your whole face in front of me. I could draw your portrait while I looked at you.
But until Iāve been in consistent contact with you over several years, the first two sketches are how you exist in my head
And from what Iāve heard from other people with face blindness, itās not even the same for everyone
The current research holds that itās due to an atypical Fusiform Gyrus, which is a little structure in the back of the brain that, in ānormalā folks, lights up specifically in response to human faces.
So. Basically. Face Blindness is what we call it when folks do not have the additional, specifically face-detecting hardware in their brain, and have to rely on the Object-Recognition hardware.
Granted, this is an area of active study, and more details may emerge with more research. Weāll see
because im normal about The Amazing Digital Circus' character writing, i've been mulling over how a few of these guys are written, in particularly Jax because his brain is just a wonderful little pile of neuroses, and I came to an interesting conclusion in light of the new information from episode 8
Jax may be one of the smartest people in the circus
now before you all jump down my throat about how he's a jackass and a piece of shit, please know I am the first to agree with you. he's an asshole with a rainbow of issues and that's why he's so fun as a fictional character. if I met him in real life I would be compelled to remove myself from the room lest I punch him in the throat.
however, those personality flaws are exactly what conceals something quite interesting about Jax. he has incredible intelligence that is essentially obscured and kneecapped by how his personal fears and insecurities lead him to behave.
let me elaborate
Jax's intelligence isn't in a particular discipline like Kinger's 7 years of computer science, or in a profession, but rather in the realm of intuition and making connections.
we can tell as an audience from quite early on that Jax is good at problem solving and analysis. he picks up on the tropes being used in the adventures quickly and plays along with the bit, and he also figures out the insecurities of other people fairly quickly. (he does Use These Powers For Evil, but we'll get to that later.) we see this most clearly in his little speech in episode 6 to Pomni in the hallway.
in this speech, we learn that Jax has intuited the nature of the circus' rules - IE, that they are only limited by what they believe they can do. Jax believes he is a cartoon character with cartoon physics and therefore cartoon abilities, such as hammer space, and perfect Rule of Cool aim. therefore, he does.
none of the other characters, bar Kinger, have ever figured this out. this is despite Jax actually being one of the younger humans present at only 22 years old, and presumably a comparatively recent addition to the circus. Ragatha, despite having been in the circus for nearly 9 years (if we assume this is set in 2017, and she entered in 2008) has not got a grasp on this at all.
this mindset allows him to essentially sidestep the handicap given to all other humans in the circus in regards to conjuring - an act that Kinger says is perfectly possible for all of them, but requires immense visualisation and concentration, even for a veteran like Kinger. right up until midway through episode 8, Jax doesn't believe any of this is "real" in most senses, and so he doesn't get caught up on what should and shouldn't be possible, unless told to him otherwise by Caine.
and we all know how mad he was specifically about Caine lying to them
Jax has enough intuition about the situation he's in to correctly identify the following:
Caine is only nice to them because he likes them, and thinks that being nice and holding back will get the humans to like him back. (Ep4)
Caine can mess with their minds and does so, regularly, as well as their bodies. he comes to this realisation in Ep5, but only vocalises his full suspicions in Ep7 during the button scene.
the circus operates on cartoon logic and you can choose to operate on this logic as well - rather than just believing only he has these powers, he encourages Pomni to embrace the same mindset and she sees immediate results, as he expected. (basically all of Ep6, and in ep7 when he just opens the Chinese Room door because Rule of Funny applies).
so if he has all of the pieces of the puzzle to how the circus works, why doesn't he act on it, or at least tell the others about it?
because he has āØtrust issuesāØ
Jax uses his incredible intuition to maladaptively protect himself from danger, which to him includes social vulnerability. to this end, he sorts people into categories and boxes, not just by personality archetype (which helps him maintain his delusion about nothing being real, and fuels his nihilism) but also by "safe" and "unsafe". the only person he ever tells about any of this seems to be Pomni, and that's because he's clearly (accidentally) started to trust her and place her in the "safe" category.
(the proof for this is evident in his Ep8 torture scene, wherein Pomni is one of the shadows who rips off his skin and makes him vulnerable)
he then, rather than using his intuition about people's behaviour to better understand them, uses that same information to push them away with targeted pokes and prods at insecurities and fears. (sound familiar, Caine?) he uses his understanding of the circus' wacky reality not to figure a way out, but to further immerse himself in denial so he doesn't have to face the terror of going back to the real world and face consequences for his actions.
as soon as he starts to realise that, as far as him and the others are concerned, this is reality (a conclusion he comes to very quickly once he sees Kinger actually "breaking character" and speaking lucidly, after the one two punch of Gangle and Zooble apparently showing care for him as well), he promptly has a panic attack and has to excuse himself from the room as years of denial are stripped away from him as much as his own skin was earlier.
what does this mean in the wider context of the series? not much really. the path of episode 9 is very unpredictable, and Jax himself will need to make a lot of very difficult choices in terms of trusting the others and not falling into old habits to protect himself. however, i think if he can break past those barriers, the full depth of his natural intelligence might just get a chance to shine.
The fact that one of these moves is significantly more difficult for me than the other two at least tells me which nerve is probably the most fucked up
