Akaroa, South Island, New Zealand

Elf cups

what up witches

embracing the calmness of the lake🍃

Pause ⏸️

“what if kids identify with something and it ends up just being a phase-?” good. stop teaching and expecting kids (and adults honestly) to formulate permanent traits and ideas of themselves. everything in life is a phase. that doesn’t make it any less legitimate while you experience it. let people explore themselves and know it’s okay if what you think about yourself changes.

I love personalization. I love stickers on water bottles and on laptops. I love shitty marker drawing on the toes of converse. I love hand embroidered doodles on jeans. I love posters on walls. I love knick knacks on shelves. I love jewelry with goofy charms. I love when people take things and make them theirs.

one of the things that makes autism a disability (and why some of us choose to label it as such rather than an “alternate neurotype”) is the stress. 

part of autism is just being incredibly stressed. overstimulation? stress. holding a conversation? stress. something happening to our schedule? stress. people talk about how often autism is recognized and diagnosed via our stress responses (like meltdowns) because it is just so common to see autistic people stressed because of lack of accommodations to how our brains work.

and this matters because stress kills. stress causes a lot of health issues, or it can trigger pre-existing ones by making certain chronic conditions flare up. i once had a psychiatrist very unhelpfully tell me i “just need to manage my stress” when the stress i was describing was things i could not avoid in neurotypical society and can’t “just get over”. i can do “self care” all i like but i cannot at the very base level change the way my brain inputs information and reacts accordingly.

sorry systems are so funny. *turns you into 7 smaller people to fix your problems * (all 7 people refuse to work on their problems) 

going here would fix me actually