#competing needs

[395nm]

Social justice conversations about the right to have children typically frame parents and prospective parents as an oppressed class: the focus is on indigenous, disabled, ethnic minority, and queer adults who are forcibly sterilized or have their children taken away by the state. This perspective is real and important, but there’s another side that’s often forgotten.

Parents are an oppressor class. Children are disempowered from resisting their parents. When having and raising children, the parent is not the primary stakeholder—the child is. The decision to have children primarily affects the children.

When a government says, “We know better than the parents what is best for their children,” this is an avenue towards repressing marginalized parents and ethnic cleansing. When we say, “parents know best,” it’s an avenue toward child abuse. There is a third option: the children themselves take the lead.

Here’s an example of youth liberation focused decision making. If a parent says, “I should have another child,” it’s not the government’s place to say no. But if their existing children say, “Our parent should not have another child. It would be bad for the child and/or bad for us,” then that parent should not have another child!

[euphreana]

Competing Needs, page 2

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She cookin up chaos!

[schrodingers-slut]

Some of y’all don’t want to talk about is how second and third hand weed and vape smoke can be extremely harmful and debilitating for many disabled people.

I don’t care what you do but sometimes your actions will affect other people in negative ways, yes even if whatever you’re doing helps you.

[just-antithings]

I usually try not to censor words, mainly cause a lot of censorship methods cause frustration for a friend who uses a screen reader. I understand why other people censor certain words, and was wondering if there's any alternatives we could normalize that make it easier for people who use screen readers?

TBH, you have a good point. It's espc relevant on twitter, because you can't censor words on twitter safely and still have them caught by filtering. I think that at this point, my stance on this is to stop censoring words in the name of them being caught by filtering and making them work with screen readers in the name of accessibility. I know this won't be everyone's. I always try to tag with the relevant content so people know it's there anyway so if they choose to read knowing it's there, they made an informed choice and it's out of my hands at that point regardless if I censored the word or not with asterisks or slashes.

I don't even know if censoring letters of a word helps with it not being triggering? Question for followers: does it? I don't actually have words that trigger me like that so I don't have personal experience.

[random-thought-depository]

Hypothesis: some of the weirdness and badness of radical feminism and what I call Miss Manners feminism comes from these movements attracting a significant number of very sensitive people who happen to be female, think being a very sensitive person is a universal part of the experience of womanhood, and interpret the ways our society isn’t set up to accommodate very sensitive people as gender oppression. The experience of these people is kind of like this, but they have less self-awareness about how atypical they are and they interpret this experience entirely through the lens of gender oppression.

This is part of how they we get takes like “I’m a victim of my 14 year old son; his slamming the door when he’s angry is emotional abuse and gender terrorism” (not something I’ve ever seen directly, but example inspired by this, which is what set off this chain of thought today), and it’s the source of some these movements’ strong emphasis on female unsafety and promoting a “Miss Manners” sort of disciplining of public and private conduct. I suspect that when you see feminists of this type talking about how terrified they are of men in ways that sound paranoid and neurotic, what a lot of these women really mean is “I’m afraid men will yell at me or something and that frightens and stresses me to the point that I’m a miserable neurotic, but I know a lot of people won’t take a description of my real pain seriously so I’m going to talk as if I’m surrounded by psychos who might murder me for looking irritated when they clumsily compliment my new hair-cut.”

Restating the same hypothesis in a way that chops off some important complexity and nuance from it but maybe makes one of its essential points easier to understand: a non-trivial chunk of feminist discourse comes from rejection sensitive dysphoric women who think RSD is a female experience; what these women really want is social norms that are friendlier to RSD people, but because they think RSD is a female thing they see this as a facet of feminism.

Significant point: if this is correct, these women are in real pain, have real unmet needs, and deserve our sympathy; the problem is that they’ve misidentified the cause of their pain.

[adultingautistic]

27/09 sorta urgent. (1/3) I highly suspect that I'm autistic and have ad(h)d. My problem is - while I have sorta talked with my parents about it - that one and a half of my stims (that I sometimes allow myself to do in the presents of my parents), is bad for my mom: she has a work colleague that has mental health issues who does this leg bouncing up and down and rocking forth and back (like forwards/backwards?) - this colleague is extreme (from what I've heard) and my mom can't handle me doing

(2/3) this. I don't do it that extreme (well, the leg thing sometimes) and I usually like rocking/swaying from side to side way more (on some chairs, the way I sit, that doesn't work and so I switch it up). I really, really understand that my mom doesn't like to see it (I have met her colleague and heard some stories), but I have no clue what to do.

(3/3) On one side I don't wanna "hurt" mom, but I also want to stim in the space I feel safe (other than alone in my room). Other stims I do, I don't wanna do with people in the room. Since we all have to learn to come to terms with my self-discovery(ies) and yeah. This got kinda long, sorry.

I’m not quite sure I understand your mom’s issue here.  She has a work colleague who is displaying neurogivergent behaviors at work, and so she’s uncomfortable with you being neurodivergent at home?  That...doesn’t make any sense.

Your mom is dealing with something internally, and it’s making her very sensitive to other people stimming, for whatever reason.  Neither you nor her coworker are doing anything wrong, and the fact that she has a coworker who stims is entirely unrelated to you, and your stimming.  

I can think of two possible reasons why she might have such extreme sensitivity to the stimming of others.

One, it could be stemming from her own neurodiversity.  If you have autism and ADHD, then the chances are higher that your mother does as well.  If this is the case, she may be getting Bad Sensory Input from others doing certain kinds of stims- and so her coworker doing it all day sends her into near overload levels, so then when she comes home and you do it as well, she’s at her limit.  Or if she has ADHD, stimming may be extremely distracting for her brain, making it hard for her to think and focus.  Or it could even be that subconsciously, she needs to stim, but is not allowing herself to, and seeing others doing it causes her more stress.

The second reason is that she might be incredibly ableist, and having to see a neurodiverse person both at her work and in her home may trigger her ableist feelings, and she may be saying whatever she thinks she needs to say in order to stop you from stimming.

Either way, none of that is your fault or your responsibility.  You mother having a coworker who stims is not a reason for you to be denied the right to stim in your own home.

If your mother is undiagnosed neurodiverse herself, then your stimming could be what we call “competing needs”.  This happens when two neurodiverse people have needs that are in conflict with one another.  For example, if one autistic person needs very bright lights to be comfortable, but another gets sensory overload from bright lights, then these two people need to work out a solution that is more complex than just “one of you must suffer.”  In that example, perhaps the main lights in the room can be on dimly, but the person who needs bright lights has a reading lamp near them.  

Without knowing what’s going on for your mother though, it is hard to have a discussion with her to figure out what it is she truly needs.  I don’t know how able she is to discuss the issue, though if you haven’t tried it’s worth it to make the attempt at least once.  It may help to have a frank discussion with her about stimming, and explain to her how important it is for the mental health of autistic people, and that both you and her coworker need to do it for your mental health.  It may be that she hasn’t drawn the connection that her coworker is only stimming (the fact that she called it ‘mental health issues’ instead of neurodiversity is a big sign there), and that you are only stimming, and it’s not a bad thing at all, but a healthy coping mechanism.  

If she is able to have some sort of constructive discussion with you, then you can say you’d like to work with her, to find a solution where you can both feel comfortable in your own home.

If she is not able to have a constructive conversation and shuts you down, then you’re left with two choices- either don’t stim in front of her, or stim in front of her and don’t care.  I hope it doesn’t come to that, but either way, neither of those would be a wrong decision.  It’s your home and you need to do whatever makes you feel the most comfortable there, whether that’s choosing to stim when she’s not around, or choosing to stim regardless of whether she’s around.

I’m sorry your mother is having such difficult internal issues that are affecting you.  You are a really good person for caring so much about her feelings, and that makes you kind.  But don’t forget to care about your own needs, as well.  Striking the balance between your needs and the needs of others is one of the hardest (and most important) parts of being an adult, and you’re already starting on the right path : )

[euphreana]

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[euphreana]

Competing Needs - Page 5

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Resistance is futile…

Posting this a little late - got tendinitis in my wrist a few days ago and had to take it easy. Also I'm going on vacation next week - next update will be on the 18th 22nd. See y'all then!