jumpingjacktrash:

queeranarchism:

I’m disappointed in a lot of the conversations about neuro-normativity in inter-personal interactions, mostly because of how absolutist they tend to be and how useless that is in most real life interactions.  

A lot of conversations ignore that you can’t be sure you’re not talking to another non-neurotypical person but more to the point they also overlook the fact that ‘neurotypical’ people (which I sometimes think is more a society wide enforced ideal than an a human reality anyway) can be emotionally hurt, triggered, sensory-overloaded, extremely exhausted or emotionally fragile in some other way. Neurotypical people have meltdowns and panic and moments when they are so so fragile. 

So when someone doesn’t respond well to your non-neurotypical behavior, maybe they’re a huge ableist asshole, or maybe their needs are incompatible with yours in that space, maybe your bouncing leg is pushing their sensory overload over the edge or your directness is something they are too emotionally vulnerable to deal with, or your uninterrupted talking is speeding up their panic attack, etc. Maybe their melt-down is as unavoidable as yours. 

Like, maybe it’s just me, but a lot of my bad experiences seem to come from incompatible neuro-needs, like when my partner really needs to hear that one song to calm down and I really need to not hear it to calm down, when I really need clean uncluttered spaces to relax and a friend really needs company in their own home, which is a cluttered space. Our needs clash, and the language or neuro-normativity in the ‘you are ableist, I am not’ absolutes doesn’t cover our situations well. We can’t use the language of privilege vs. oppression to handle these moments. We need tools about neuro-diversity that work from a place of mutual understanding and assume that we are both vulnerable and we are both doing the best we can.   

my theory about stimming and other autistic behaviors is that nt’s (i’m using this here to mean ‘has no neurological disability’ not ‘has no mental illness’) do the same things when stressed to the same extreme, it’s just that sensory processing disorder and other elements of autism mean i’m pushed to that point a lot sooner, and by a lot of things nt’s aren’t bothered by.

but you take an nt into the megamall on black friday, and after a few hours of shopping they’re going to have the same planked stare that i get from hanging out with six friends having fun. they’re going to be stimming, too. look for it. they’ll be fiddling with the zipper on their coat, running it up and down, or twisting their hair around their fingers, or some other ‘nervous habit’ that you’d call stimming if an autie was doing it. they may go semi-nonverbal – although, not realizing it, they might yell at people or say stupid shit instead of accepting that talking is not working right now.

a lot of what we talk about as autistic behaviors are really universal human stress behaviors.

it’s just that you see me doing them a lot more often because nt’s don’t experience a flickering fluorescent light like a moth fluttering against your eyeball, and can put up with hours and hours of it while i have to shield my eyes from it by hunching over, and thus look like i’m too stupid to understand sitting.

tl;dr: everybody stop gatekeeping useful terms like stimming and spoons. stop now. that’s over. you’re done.