Vintage moon and stars banjo heads
Someone in an autism facebook group I'm in just asked "How am I supposed to earn enough to make a living without burning out?"
Someone replied: "You're not. Even neurotypicals can't right now in the system designed for them. We're the canaries in the coalmine. When we start failing, they know something is wrong."
People keep saying, "Oh, everyone thinks they're neurodivergent now!" or they'll say it's the foods or chemicals or whatever other nonsense they've fallen for, but to me the answer is so obvious?
We've gotten to a point that more and more people are being left behind by the system, making it so that neurodivergent parents who could get by fine *enough* in decades/centuries past are bringing children into a world that cannot and will not attempt to accommodate them. There's nothing in the water and people aren't faking, it's just that this is no longer sustainable or livable and of course people with disabilities will be hit first and hit the hardest. There aren't more people with it, it's just harder to go through life without being aware that you're not functioning the way your peers seem to be able to.
im always like hehe im so smart i will avoid shame by never doing anything ever but then i feel ashamed of not living and it turns out i didn't escape any sort of discomfort i just traded it in for a less rewarding kind
sometimes plushies make me cry because it’s like. they’re little guys made to be loved. their only purpose is to be held and hugged and loved. we made them because we love making things and we love loving things. and they’re so cute
Years back, I was working at a specialty store, and we got this HUGE crate of plushy toys. They were all insanely cute and squishy. I knew kids would go nuts for them, as it was the first week of December, so parents and grandparents often had kids with them while shopping for furniture, lamps, cooking equipment, lights, etc.
One night, I was working my last hour of my shift covering the Customer Service desk, which meant when I wasn't busy, I was supposed to help clean up around the cash registers, including taking back items people changed their minds about at the checkout. Earlier, I had witnessed a kid carrying thos cute plushy toy. It was a brown and white hedgehog. The kid, at the checkout, saw a remote control car and he told his dad he qanted it. The dad told him, "The plushy or the car- you can't have both" (by the way, I respect boundaries with kids and parents sticking to their guns about it), and the kid picked the car.
So, I'm cleaning up, have less than an hour left of my shift, and I see the little plushy hedgehog. Somehow, he never got put back nor had anyone else seen him and decided to buy him. He was just sitting there, slumped to the side, unattended.
It's Christmas and I'm a sentimental old sap at heart. My brain starts replaying the scene from RUDOLPH where he's on the Island of Misfot Toys, and is told a toy is never truly happy until it is loved. I picked him up and quickly took him back to the bin with the plushies but... It was empty. He was literally the last plushy toy and my boss was about to wheel the bin out. We weren't getting any more toys till November, so that meant any toys left at this point needed to sell or they'd be sent to the dump.
I brought the little hedgehog to the front, figuring someone would see him with the candy, candles, & Christmas brick-a-brack, and fall in love with him. When I finished my shift, I went to ask my manager a question and as I passed the Christmas candle display - there he sat, the sad little slumped over hedgehog plushy. No one had bought him, or even moved him.
My manager, Phillip, saw me and the hedgehog. He asked how the hedgehog got there. I told him how I'd put him there when the bin got sent back, and he was the only plushy left. Philip had kids, I figured he'd probably get sentimental and buy it for his kids. Nope. He shrugged and said he'd send it back to be disposed of.
That night, I came home with a plushy hedgehog in my passenger seat. My mom saw him and just thought he was the cutest little hedgehog and asked what I wanted to do with him. I told her the story, then added I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do with him.
My mom is a child psychiatrist, specializing in children with PTSD and brain damage that results in learning problems/issues with processing their emotions. She asked if she could have the plushy hedgehog (even offered to pay me for him, she didn't expect me to just give him over), so kids could hug him when they were upset in session.
Murphy, the plushy hedgehog that still slumps a little to the left when seated, has been hugged by hundreds of kids. Little girls have held him tight while explaining about bullies, little boys have held him tight while crying over their panic attacks, younger siblings have held him to whisper secrets while elder siblings and parents talk about self-soothing techniques, teenagers have hugged Murphy while talking about the worst day of their lives. Murphy has also been hugged by kids excitedly chatting about a new friend at school, a teen girl excited to be called by her name instead of her dead-name, little kids proudly saying they've mastered their ABCs, and even staff members who just need to come chat over a case they are having trouble with.
Every now and then, my mom brings Murphy home for a weekend. He gets washed (she calls it a Spa Weekend, to her coworkers, all of them laughing), dried, and sits outside with my mom in the sunshine to get aired out, then on Monday, they are back to work. Some kids even just ask to hold Murphy while they talk, no matter their mood or what they want to talk about. They just want to hug Murphy.
So yes. Plushies are made for one purpose. To be hugged and loved. To be a comfort.
seen a lot of these with your favorites, but reblog with the CURRENT book you are reading, show you are streaming, the last movie you watched, and any game/puzzle/crafts you’re working on
listen to me. listen. finding a romantic partner is not nearly as important as cultivating a group of friends with whom you can comfortably live long-term. romance is great if that happens for you that's awesome but you need to have people you can count on and be in community with regardless of whether or not they're dating you.
I feel like anxiously attached crazy type people are like over represented like I want to hear from the emotionally repressed girlies and gays who like literally are like :| when they passionately want to jump someone’s bones. The true stoics who know it’s weird but literally cannot even force themselves to express their attraction to someone unless they 110% know it is reciprocated because they have repressed their emotions so much they no longer can authentically generate ways to convey their feelings
not caring if people think you're stupid is a life hack. recognising that you are kind of stupid is an even bigger life hack. we build entire societies to take care of each other bc we're all kind of stupid. it's fine.
If safety in your ideal society is entirely based on care by networks of affinity, and does not provide care for people who are not liked by anybody, then your society is actually even worse than the situation we are in now.
Pissing off people close to you or over-exhausting your social network or isolating yourself is often an inherent part of many mental health problems, addictions, etc. By the time people need care the most, they have often lost all their networks of affinity, and with some bad luck, any of us could find ourselves in that situation.
There has to be unconditional care available for the more unlikable of us, or there isn't really a safety net for any of us.
The thing that concerns me the most is that the people I see arguing for only informal/community support networks are often in communities that have a lot of interpersonal drama and poor conflict resolution skills. So it's like...this should be your primary support network, but also people get excommunicated on a regular basis? That's a terrible idea for everyone involved. People who have caused harm still deserve help, and people who have been harmed deserve the ability to set boundaries and remove people from their lives in ways that aren't sentencing that person to losing all their options for basic support.
when setting a boundary comes hand in hand with sentencing someone to a slow and painful death by isolation and neglect, setting boundaries becomes incredibly frightening and painful for everyone involved. help should be available to everyone, free of charge and judgement, no matter how bad they fucked up.
Yeah. Like, this is also necessary from the caretakers point of view.
How many of us are stuck accepting kinda shit, maybe even abusive, behavior from our elderly parents because they would literally die without us? How many are not setting boundaries because while a person is very shitty to us we still love a part of them and we don’t want them to die?
Safety nets of unconditional care also mean none of us are individually forced to care for someone who is uniquely toxic to us.
When conservatives say that the poor should be cared for entirely through personal charity and not government support, this “networks of affinity” model is exactly what they mean.
Also, they’re perfectly happy with these “networks of affinity” when it comes to college (legacy admission, admission by recommendation, etc.) and employment (“networking”).
