In Case It’s Helpful - Here’s A Link To Marsha Linehan’s Full DBT Skills Training Handouts & Worksheets.

Nouveau recueil d’osteologie et de myologie (1779 - Engraving) - Jacques Gamelin

House Of 1000 Corpses (2003)  

Witches’ Sabbath / The Great He-Goat, 1823, Francisco Goya

Medium: oil,canvas

me: “I have social anxiety”

what people hear: “I am a bit shy”

what the internet reads: “OwO cute shy boi,,must protecc!! hehe so quirky!1!!”

what social anxiety really is: taking months of knowing someone to feel comfortable enough to have a real conversation, your mind going blank during small talk, inability to participate in groups of more than three people, mentally rehearsing “simple” tasks such as ordering food or making a phone call and your heart racing anyway, constantly feeling watched, being afraid of getting places too early or too late, fear of being judged over the most random things (”is this a socially acceptable ice cream flavor to buy?” “what if they think my shampoo is weird” “will they hate me if I get up to throw my trash away?” “what if I emptied the dishwasher wrong!”), having panic attacks when you have to ask a teacher for help, constantly feeling left out or excluded even with friends, your hands shaking when you get called on in class, being overwhelmed in crowds and public transportation, disliking being touched, perpetual fear of disappointing those in authority, overall difficulty forming relationships, missing out on milestones or social events because you either have no friends to go with or know it will be overwhelming, preferring to be in groups of three so that conversation isn’t solely up to you, making so many everyday tasks so much more difficult than they need to be due to a crushing fear of being judged by random strangers you will literally never see again and needing to be seen as flawless

When the fuck did the social model of disability go from "the way society is structured makes disabled people's lives harder than they have to be" to "the only thing wrong with you is capitalism"?????

Sun Cat. 7 x 5 inches, oil on hardboard.

I still catch myself thinking things like “but at least I wasn’t homeless” and “at least I wasn’t parentless” when I think about my abusive childhood. But then there’s voice inside of my head, reminding me. 

“Hey, you lived terrified of being thrown out on the street and left to starve to death. You were reminded almost every day that you are going to be abandoned and left for dead unless you do everything you’re told, and be useful enough to keep alive. Remember when you were 14 and you spend entire day painting and re-painting a wooden garage, and you were crying entire time? Nobody even looked at you. You weren’t allowed to stop, and you weren’t allowed to cry out loud. It was just silent tears all day. You had to do it if you wanted to live. And it was like that every day, no matter if you were sick, wounded, upset, dying inside - you had to work if you wanted to deserve to eat. You watched this family be family without you, how many times were you crying silently just listening them all laugh in the living room, having a good time, and you couldn’t join because they would all start insulting you and glaring at you if you did? You watched your mom hug your siblings and she wouldn’t hug you. You were convinced day after day that you were lazy, worthless, vermin and a burden on everyone around you. You were beaten, slapped, threatened, screamed at, insulted, attacked and picked up by your hair when someone wanted to take their anger out on you. You were scared of getting killed by violence, because you knew if they killed you, they would all say you deserved it, and were asking for it. Like they always did after hurting you. You were denied privacy, resources, safety and freedom. You were sexually abused at the age of 7. Nobody cared.  You started having panic attacks at the age of 16. Nobody cared. They all knew you were cutting yourself by the time you went to high school. They laughed at you.  And the worst is, you cared. You cared about all of them. You would never do anything to hurt or damage any of them. You were there for anything they needed. You were betrayed and kept in this state by those you loved. Your heart was so heavy - and still is, you feel physical pain in it for the most of time. You have ptsd now. You can’t work. You can’t even look at yourself and examine the damage done to you because it’s too much of a shock and you can’t endure the pain of knowing it. I don’t think it actually gets that much worse than that. You don’t have to compare it to anything.”

How do you expect me to be nice when I feel like dying

In defense of pre-natal screening

I’ve seen a lot of protests against screening fetuses for things like Down syndrome, autism and so on. Here, I’ll explain why I, an autistic person, disagree fundamentally with those.

(PLEASE NOTE: My reasoning is based on the idea that abortions in and of themselves are morally fine and that a fetus is not a person.)

“In a few years, there won’t be any people with Down Syndrome born anymore, because these days everybody chooses to abort them!” Ridiculously unlikely. There’s always going to be somebody who doesn’t have an abortion. True, there won’t be exactly as many born as there are now, but who’s to say that the current number is inherently better? How, exactly, do you calculate that?

“Well, what if everybody with Down syndrome fetuses gets an abortion, though? Just what if?” I say this with a maximum of respect: While obviously Down syndrome people have the same value as humans that everybody else has, it’s still true that Down syndrome causes a huge risk of poor eyesight, poor hearing Alzheimer’s disease, cancer and an early death. If a condition kills people then we do not need to actively try to preserve it.

“This indicates that people with Down syndrome or autism or whatever are undesirable!” No, it doesn’t. For many reasons.

Simply telling a woman that her fetus has, say, autism is not the same as saying it’s an undesirable fetus.

That a woman aborts an autistic fetus doesn’t mean that she wants everybody to do the same. It just means that she wants to have an abortion. As is her damn right.

All abortions are based on the idea that the potential child is undesirable. That’s why women choose to get abortions instead of having the kid.

The fact that people want to abort Down syndrome fetuses and autistic fetuses and so on might make them seem undesirable, but not whether the abortions are allowed to happen or not.

“If your mom had felt like this, she would have aborted you!” Once again: That’s the case with all abortions, regardless of reason. So unless you find all abortions immoral, this is not a valid argument.

“This is eugenics!” No, it’s not. It’s not a concentrated effort to eradicate black people–or any other people. It’s just letting women make an informed choice about their own bodies that affects nobody else. Lemme use a simile to explain: If a political magazine gets forcibly shut down because it criticizes the government, that’s censorship. If it gets shut down because nobody is interested in buying it, though, then that’s not censorship at all.

“This is offensive to many people!” A woman’s right to choose is her right. Regardless of whether you find it offensive or not.

“It’s discrimination!” If a woman who got raped has an abortion, does that mean she’s discriminating against actual people who were born from rape? No. And this is the same. Actual people cannot be discriminated against by an abortion because we’re not affected the slightest bit.

“Well, what if a woman wanted to abort a black fetus because she hated black people?” Then we still can’t force her to have the child. A fetus doesn’t become a person just because of the reason that a woman aborts it.

“Look, it’s not that I don’t think women should be stopped from making choices about their bodies.” But you do clearly want to stop them from making informed ones. After all, you want to withhold information about a woman’s body from her, so that she won’t make the choice she prefers with, but instead do what you’ve decided she should.

TO FINISH OFF: Since we have info about a woman’s fetus–or at least the ability to easily get it–denying it to her is blatantly anti-woman. It’s saying “We’ve decided you don’t get to know things about your body, because then you’ll do as you want instead of doing what we’ve decided that you should.”

... Pls cute girls and boys... Tag your cuteness right with #cute rather than #cut...