Scatterbrained writer and poet

Call me Reaper | they/them

[reaper-writes]

And if you loved me?

If you held me and

Hated me, and liked the way

You could crush me in your arms,

Did you like how fragile i felt

Or how strong i looked.

Did you want me to hurt you

Or did you want me broken.

So you could pick up the pieces,

But it was never about putting me back together.

It was about licking my blood off the floor.

You are no star. You are a black hole

No light can escape from

But really you're just a man

And that scares me more

Stars can be mapped and explained

Even as the universe expands but you

Confuse science with inconsistency

And conflate truth and reality

I don't know what i believe

But I know your beliefs are lies you tell

To keep accountability from your mouth

[reaper-writes]

Fuck You

A rabbit with incisors

call that Bunnicula

A hunter, wishing he was a fox

piss-poor Robin Hood

There is no stealing to give only

taking rabbit for stew

Hands and mouth, disgustingly

rouged with sinew

But Bunnicula survived

red belongs to who?

Not I, said the rabbit

a grinned reminder

Prey is not food for greedy

foxes get got when this bunny

runs hot.

[mirethos]

[weltenwellen]

Taking Care  Callista Buchen

[ionomycin]

twin pearls

[reaper-writes]

Satisfaction Brought It Back?

When I hunger with curiousity

I court satisfaction

With no guarantee it will

Love me back.

I can always go home,

Starving and empty-handed.

[antlered-vixen]

I am so tired of short-attention-span, trim-the-fat culture. All writing advice these days is for how to write like Chuck Palahniuk. "Cut 'think', cut 'feel', cut 'wonder' - only action, only pushing forward, show and move and move and move." What if I could emulate this style, and still don't want to? What if I want to write like Henry James, with three paragraphs of introspective musings between each dialogue line? The music advice is, "make it shortform, make it Tik-Tok compatible, make it punchy, hit the refrain as soon as possible." What if I want that 10-minute prog rock piece? What if I want that symphony? What if I want it slow and luxurious and lazy? Movies. Series. Poetry. Bodies. Everything is "trimmed trimmed trimmed trimmed, stripped bare, you have three seconds to win me over, make it airport chic." I don't want to win you over, then, I guess. I want the fat left it. I want the pleasure and the indolence and the indulgence. Fuck this art-advice that's always "your art needs Ozempic."

[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?

[shamebats]

Trauma in the strict sense is not required for a young human being to suffer the loss of essence, the sense of oneness with all that is. Infants come into the world fully present and alive to every possibility, but they soon begin to shut down parts of themselves that their environment is unable to recognize or accept with love. As a consequence of that defensive shutdown, says the psychologist and spiritual teacher A.H. Almaas, one or more essential qualities such as love, joy, strength, courage or confidence may be suppressed. In its place, we experience a hole, a sense of empty deficiency. "People don't know that the hole, the sense of deficiency, is a symptom of a loss of something deeper, the loss of essence, which can be regained. They think the hole, the deficiency, is how they really are at the deepest level and that there is nothing beyond it. They think something is wrong with them, something is basically wrong." Such thoughts are not necessarily conscious but may take the form of unconscious beliefs. In either case, we develop behaviour patterns and emotional coping mechanisms to cover up the emptiness, mistakenly believing that the resulting traits represent our true "personality." Indeed, what we call the personality is often a jumble of genuine traits and adopted coping styles that do not reflect our true self at all but the loss of it.

Excerpt from 'In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction' by Gabor Maté.

[creekfiend]

its interesting bc i would personally define this as cptsd. like that IS trauma to me. but then cptsd is not broadly recognized as a legitimate form of trauma by psychology authorities, so i understand why someone would frame this process as not inherently traumatic

[bipedal-lizard]

I'd be curious to read some newer things and see where Maté would make the split between distress and trauma now, vs when Hungry Ghosts was published in 2008. I haven't read, in particular, The Myth of Normal : Trauma, Illness &Healing in a Toxic Culture (2022); I have heard that in his discussion of "modern-day living," his definition of trauma/traumatic has shifted to encompass a lot more.

[shamebats]

The Myth of Normal is a must-read. He doesn't talk about autism directly, but the book is all about how trauma responses that helped us survive childhood (which is what masking is) end up causing all sorts of issues in adulthood.

The exploration of how repressing our feelings and authentic selves can negatively impact our health — to the point where we can be at high risk of developing chronic health conditions and even other illnesses, like cancer, and having worse outcomes — was really eye-opening for me. Since I'm trans and came out later in life exactly because for my entire childhood and well into my 20s, I essentially had an assortment of maladaptive coping mechanisms where my personality was supposed to be, and I also have a pretty severe incurable chronic illness.

In Realm of Hungry ghosts he was also, a lot of the time, already describing what is essentially cptsd — because he was working with hard drug addicts, the most likely to be severely traumatized population there is — and also disproportionately neurodivergent, he noticed that many of them were self-medicating their ADHD, which...the book was written in 2008. He was way ahead of what the state of medicine & psychiatry was back then. He doesn't name it, but if you know what it is, you can recognize it in every story, in every chapter.

[reaper-writes]

Microdosing inefficiency by going to the DMV because I'm sick of everything being innovative

Sandra's not innovative. She hates my guts and we haven't said a word to each other

[aquilacalvitium]

Write it badly or it'll never be written

Write it badly or it'll never be written

Write it badly or it'll never be written

Write it badly or it'll never be written

Write it badly or it'll never be written

[aquilacalvitium]

Please keep interacting with this post because when I come to tumblr to procrastinate, this shows up again in my notifications and guilts me into writing again

[hempkitty]

can someone please be proud of me like fuck I’m trying

[gremlin-pattie]

reblog to let prev know you’re proud of them

[reaper-writes]

Song of the moment:

[cilceon]

Only thing from the Met Gala that matters btw

[random-questions-fairy]

Oh my gosh. I just found this website that walks you though creating a believable society. It breaks each facet down into individual questions and makes it so simple! It seems really helpful for worldbuilding!

[theredscreech]

Heads up that this is a very extensive questionnaire and might be daunting to a lot of writers (myself included). That being said, it is also an amazing questionnaire and I will definitely be using it (or at the very least, some of it).

[heroineimages]

Bookmarking this…

[reesepiece2]

Twitter

[thesweetiepienovels]

Actually, you are enough. Even if you don’t work. Or study. Or go out. Or have friends. Or have family. You’re enough because you exist and your existence is enough to be enough because you are not a product. You are not a sum of output. You are not a task to complete. But because you are something the universe wanted and put here even if you’ll never understand why. Somewhere in the cosmos your existence makes a difference, even if it’s not the way others existences do.

[closet-keys]

"biological" really just means "state enforced" at this point

"what is your state enforced sex?" "there are two state enforced genders" "use state enforced pronouns to identify students" "transition is against your body's state enforced purpose"

[capnsoapy]

When some TERFs started saying "biological name" (instead of "deadname") it really said this out loud.