Littlebat-666 - 🦇

My doctor and therapist: now with this autism + ADHD diagnosis you need to learn to unmask because masking all the time will make you burn out again and feel like shit

Other people: well it's just interesting how after getting the diagnosis you suddenly start behaving like that I mean I'm not saying you're faking it's just funny how you suddenly cannot be normal like you were before

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.

ADHD and autism spectrum is funny in a way that isn't funny. Like hello, welcome to society, your brain is hardwired to function the most efficiently within certain parameters you'll almost never end up in. You're either so good at switching subjects that other people don't enjoy talking with you, or you're so good at sticking to the same subject that other people don't enjoy talking with you. Fuck you and good luck.

One single leaf turns orange

Me:

autism disphoria, where you're having such good fun at an event but when you see picture of yourself you were just :| the whole damn fucking time (as illustrated below)

Summary of my favourite autism tweets

The Beer Witch Post

(or how the stereotypical Wicked Witch is based in part on female brewsters*) 

Some background:

Women have been brewing beer for nearly 10 thousand years! 

That’s right! Beer is traditionally a woman’s drink, in that it was invented, produced, and drunk by women (and children) for all of recorded history. (src)

Beer only recently became associated with men (around the time it was commercialized of course!)  How did this happen?

Like many things, it involved the Church and a Witch Hunt.

(Note: this post is about a western stereotype; the action takes place in Europe.) Around the 11th cent., the Church realized that brewing alcohol was a great way for monasteries to generate revenue. At the time, brewing was the domain of Germanic tribal woman, and was important bc:

there was a huge demand for ale, due to its cheapness and the lack of potable water in most households

it allowed women to generate their own income at home.

That first part smelled like profit to the Church. That second part meant female independence, which they didn’t like at all. The solution was to get women out of brewing, and monasteries in. What better way than a witch hunt?

Of course, to have a good witch hunt, first you have to invent a witch.

Inventing the Wicked Witch

As female brewsters were pushed out of their fields (being denied licenses and guild membership), the Church set up shop. Monasteries & nunneries were sort of the perfect place to manufacture, what with their land & resources & free labor. Women were still the main brewers in many communities, but this would change over the centuries as the Church waged a War of Defamation against alewives & brewesses. 

The association between woman and sin has always been an easy argument to make, biblically. As women, alewives were ridiculously easy to defame. The rhetoric went something along the lines of:

women created sin

women are sinful

women use beer to spread their sinful ways & take money from men

Alewives, who ran alehouses, were cast as treacherous, deceitful women who cheated men by luring them into playgrounds for the devil, ruled by the sins of gluttony and lust.  

Alewives in hell became a popular Church-spread trope:  

“The Church specifically taught that alewives would be the only people left in hell after Christ freed all the damned.“ (src)

Thus, female brewers became easy target to associate with the devil, and with witchcraft. 

Whether or not brewsters were outright accused of consorting with the devil, the implication was there. And later, so was the imagery.

The Church’s centuries-long smear campaign worked too, helped by the fact that as brewing became more lucrative, more men entered the field, and were happy to help push women out. By the 17th century, the (European) brewing industry was male dominated, for the first time in human history. 

Witchcraft & Brewing: Symbology

The lifestyles, clothing, and tools of real women brewers were taken and used as iconography for witchcraft. 

Many of the props associated with the stereotypical Wicked Witch were just common objects alewives used to denote the brewing trade.

CALUDRONS & CATS: The image of a woman standing over a boiling cauldron once had a very different connotation: ale brewing. Cats, of course, were kept around to protect the grain supply.

BROOMSTICKS: these symbols of domestic trade were used as advertisements. A broom or ALESTAKE hung outside a home or alehouse was an easy-to-recognize sign that ale was available to buy. (Keep in mind that before literacy was common, most signs would be symbolic, not written.)

THOSE BIG, DISTINCTIVE HATS: This was a marketing thing too! Wearing a large hat to stand out in the market crowd was a symbol of a brewster with wares to sell. (src)

An Alewife, in her innocent witchy attire. Simple advertising like these allowed women to sell brews that they were already often making for their families at home.

The more you know! A shoutout to all those ladies brewing throughout history, from priestesses to alewives to homemakers alike. For thousands of years, generation after generation of families were fed & watered & kept healthy by women brewing at home. Thank you ladies, for your service.

if you enjoy my posts, i have a ko-fi! (this post took about 2 hours to research/write. links below)

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an indecision, but a large one

nb people are members of the fae