Tag: autism tag

franklyautistic:

Shout out to everyone who is proudly autistic! Your feelings are normal and natural.

Shout out to everyone who really doesn’t want to be autistic! Your feelings are normal and natural.

Shout out to everyone who wants to be proud but is actually ashamed and feels guilty about that! Your feelings are normal and natural.

Shout out to everyone who just wants to get on with their life without thinking about their autism! Your feelings are normal and natural.

Shout out to all the other neurodivergent people! Shout out to all the NTs! Shout out to the penguins!

Stimming is not just a coping mechanism

realsocialskills:

I see this defense of stimming a lot:

  • It’s wrong to train autistic people not to stim
  • They use it to compensate for overload
  • Or to focus
  • Or to compensate for other problems
  • Or to express distress

All of this is true. But it also misses the point. Stimming isn’t just a coping mechanism. It’s much more than that. Stimming is a positive part of autistic experience, not an unfortunate-but-functionally-important thing we have to do.

Imagine if facial expressions and tones of voice were considered wrong, and someone defended them this way:

  • It is wrong to teach children to adopt a flat affect
  • Children need to be able to frown
  • Children need to be able to indicate through the tone of their voice that something is wrong
  • Children need to be able to cry. That’s a way of coping with pain and overload

All of those things are true. But if that’s all defenders of tone and facial expression said, it would be horribly misleading. Body language and tones are more than that, and they are good.

Stimming is like that too.

  • Stimming is not just necessary. It is also natural, and good
  • Flapping in response to a nice texture is not fundamentally different from smiling in response to the smell of a flower
  • Rocking in response to someone saying something offensive is not fundamentally different from frowning in response to a slur
  • It is ok for autistic people to have autistic body language

Learn About Autism with Non-ableist information!

isaacfloof:

Awesome thing with a bunch of important definitions! Read this first so you understand the following stuff. That site has tons of great resources, mostly aimed at autistics, but excellent for others to read as well. 

Slightly scholarly and dense short essay about What Is Autism.

Why “high functioning” and “low functioning” are bullshit labels and are used to discredit autistic people. 

Autistic people usually have at least some sensory issues. Here is general info about Sensory Processing Disorder and here are sensory-overwhelm coping things! 

Giant Masterpost about how terrible autism speaks is, with lots of good links and such! 

Here is a thing about making one’s habitat more autistic friendly. 

Cool graphic about executive function, which is something almost all autistics have trouble with.

Behavior/Aggression issues and their causes.

HOW TO BE AN ALLY

Vaccines don’t cause autism 

A lot of autistics benefit form stim toys (aka fidget toys). Some great places to get fidget are Stimtastic, Office Playground, Fidget Land, and ChewiGem. Ebay and Amazon usually have cool stuff too! 

Feel free to add more links! If there is a problem with one of these thinks or there is bad info/ableism I didn’t catch, please let me know!

thatautismfeel:

that autism feel when you just cant eat certain foods because the sensory experience is so awful and your parents/guardians are like “you don’t know what you’re missing” or “why are you so picky” or “come on its not THAT bad just eat it” or just generally poke fun at you/give you crap for having a strong dislike for specific foods, and they just roll their eyes when you tell them you literally Cannot eat the thing because of sensory issues and act like you’re being overdramatic

thatautismfeel:

That autism feel when you see your favorite band perform live, and the bass drum reverberates through to your soul, and you know each song they’re about to play based solely on the tuning chords beforehand, and you throw your head back and close your eyes and watch the lights through your eyelids and sing along and sway, and no one notices or cares, and you can just breathe in the sound of their music.