Autism Acceptance Month: Autistic Headcanons

me aged 13: I will kill myself and everyone around me if I get another maths homework sheet 🤬😡 [gothic music plays]

me now: haha I can purchase a new beverage at any time. tee hee [gothic music plays]

Things that make me (autistic and goth) a vampire:

Sun? No, thank you. Instant kill.

Counting everything. Please don't throw rice at me.

Invite me directly. "You're always invited". No, I have to stand at your door and you have to say "Come in", else I can't physically enter.

Did someone eat garlic like 5 days ago? I can tell.

You don't want to be informed for three hours about the different sounds bats make?

Black cloths. Everything else is too overstimulating.

Very formal and rigid way of speaking and behaving, almost like a dark lord in 1894.

"I've recently started this hobby... wait, this was a decade ago?"

yes

cher tweets that i think about on a daily basis:

Me and my sister have actually been bonding over the whole late/undiagnosed ADHD thing, and ever since I brought up to her that maybe she should get tested too, she's been spotting all sorts of Holy Shit How Did Nobody Notice signs about both of us. After finding out about stimulant resistance/paradoxal reaction, she pointed out that would explain why she's been hooked on coke (the drink, not the snorty stuff) and how I started my unfathomable coffee habit so early.

I started drinking a whole pot of coffee every day since I was like 10. I'd come home from school and brew myself a pot of coffee. I wasn't secretive about it and I was unaware that adults literally did not know that I was doing it, because by the time my parents got home from work in the evening, the whole pot would be gone.

The thing with ADHD is about a chemical imbalance in the brains, below average amounts of the kind of reward chemicals that prompt you to do anything. That's why procrastinating until last-minute panic is a regular habit - the task itself isn't just boring, it's intolerably tedious all the way until the adrenaline from the deadline panic boosts the brain to function on a - well, functional - level.

A lot of undiagnosed ADHD people unconsciously self-medicate with caffeine. I'm not a chemist, but as a mild stimulant, the caffeine gives you a boost that helps balance out the brain. Not as much as actually being medicated, but it's still better than nothing.

I didn't do it on purpose because it would "help me focus" on anything important or constructive - I didn't do my homework unprompted, not once, ever, since I was like 15 - but considering that nobody noticed a 10-year-old drinking a whole goddamn pot of coffee in the span of 4-5 hours every single day, one could conclude that it wasn't making me noticeably hyperactive.

I didn't drink coffee because I wanted a specific effect, though. As far as I was concerned I was drinking it because I liked it. And the reason why I started the habit in the first place was because at the time, I was reading a shit ton of Garfield comics for some reason and that orange cat managed to convince me that drinking a shit ton of coffee every day is cool. Anyway, the moral of the story is

autism allies (and even a substantial number of autistic people) when you tell them your autism-induced picky eating is not “picky eating” but is in fact an eating disorder that you can’t magically get over in the next 5 seconds:

The idea that being autistic is now “trendy” and a diagnosis can give you social clout is so laughably divorced from reality. I can assure you that beyond Extremely Online Niche Communities, autism is still incredibly stigmatized. You can lose custody battles over your children or be coerced into a conservatorship based on an autism diagnosis in America in 2024, “Autistic” is still very much used as an insult among edgy teens, and I’m seeing the r-slur have a bit of a resurgence. I, an autistic adult, am afraid to tell employers about my diagnosis lest my superiors treat me like a child or decide that I’m not a “culture fit” and fire me. There are still “treatment” centers that use electric shocks on their autistic charges, and autistic students die in “quiet rooms” (aka solitary for disabled kids) at schools or end up being murdered outright by their caregivers for being “too much”. In many scenarios, it is unpleasant or unsafe to be visibly autistic, and the idea that people are somehow gaining “clout” with their autism diagnoses is a gigantic slap in the face to the many autistic people who are being subjected to horrific ableism right now.

Neurodivergent alt kids joking about “Autistic Rizz” on The Clock App do not an accepting mainstream society make. Please go outside.

Autism Acceptance Month: Autistic Headcanons

↳ Lydia Deetz (Beetlejuice)

“Well, I read through that Handbook for the Recently Deceased. It says live people ignore the strange and unusual. I myself am strange and unusual.”

Carrie Fisher hiding in the trash cans on the backlot of the Star Wars set, 1976.

Carrie Fisher inside a trash can while doing promotion for The Empire Strikes Back, 1980.

whenever i go to the grocery store i try to always line up at the goth girl cashier's counter. don't let this minimum wage job ruin your sparkle queen