stray autistic cat / is on Nostr

Just a stray autistic cat. That's it.

I'm here to share and interrelate with other cats (or humans on occasion).

Any pronoun.

Mutiply-neurodivergent:

Autistic, ADHD, also dyspraxia, dysgraphia, very likely dyslexia, PTSD, C-PTSD, and other neurodivergencies.

#CelebrateNeurodiversity

#climatechange 🏴 ☮️ 💚🌱🌳🌲🌿💚

[Header is a photo by photographer Pepe Soho of a colorful magical forest in Nanacamilpa, Tlaxcala, Mexico. Avatar shows the face of a cat wearing a hoody.]

Last Notes

2023-09-15 21:42:11

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@npub1yxj…2cf9 @npub1mew…tau6 @npub17vk…9n4k @npub1ml0…qlgq
I did give complete details of what has happened in the past on Twitter which included some folks coming up with an alternative tag, #allautistics. This is part of the history on twitter. It's information. It wasn't a suggestion that we should no longer use #actuallyautistic. I use the tag constantly.
I suggested that we need to constantly explain that the tag is inclusive.
EDIT:
If you read through the replies to my post (the one I linked to) you'll see several say that they thought the tag excluded self-diagnosed. It's far more common than people think for people to misunderstand the meaning.

2023-09-15 21:32:55

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@npub1yxj…2cf9
Let me see... how to describe in an empathetic and sensitive way how all this erupted.
For people wondering what this is about, this discussion began about a week or more ago, when an autistic person on mastodon (who said they were going through meltdowns online due to trauma and who was lashing out because of this), made a series critical posts and comments about "late diagnosed autistics" who were allegedly acting "superior" to "early diagnosed" (in terms of age), as if they were a dominating autistic spaces online.
It was much like accusing late diagnosed as acting similar to what some autistics say about "aspie supremacy" autistics. It was suggested or implied in the discussion that "early diagnosed" (in childhood) were more autistic or more representative of autistics than the late diagnosed who were said to dominate the tag.
It came up in these discussions that some of the "late diagnosed" are also self-diagnosed, and the discussion included some misconceptions about the purpose of the #actuallyautistic tag and whether it was inclusive of self-identified/self-assessed autistics. If I recall correctly there were also criticisms of autistic "identity" as a concept.
So just as a public service announcement I posted this on my own timeline:
https://neurodifferent.me/@obrerx/111030772799404421
Nowhere in my post did I suggest dumping the #actuallyautistic tag.
I provided a history so that people would understand how and why it arose as a tag.
But it did spark a huge discussion across #autistic mastodon about tags, and I think many didn't know or see how this discussion began.
@npub1mew…tau6
@npub17vk…9n4k
@npub1ml0…qlgq

2023-09-09 00:09:12

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I'll probably delete this within an hour or two. And then try to talk myself into staying away from toxic social media.

2023-09-09 00:07:08

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Part 3:
Now tell me how different my life was from those who were "early diagnosed".
And how "superior" am I acting? I want to know, because I feel so beaten by the world I can't even fucking work right now.
It's autistic burnout according to some. For me it's just autism... because that world out there? It's too intense for me. Just generally too much to deal with.

2023-09-08 23:34:53

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Part 2:
This is my childhood as an undiagnosed autistic:
I wouldn't let my mother touch me, I'd scream as an infant when she came near me, I'd have meltdowns (I remember being on the floor having these spasms and fits) when, for example, my father asked me to clean up when I was very small child. My mom became estranged from me. I was literally told she didn't favor me when I was four.
I would not interact AT ALL with other children in kindergarden, to the point my mother was told by the teacher that she (the teacher) had failed. She also said she completely failed to get me to interact at all with her, the teacher.
EDIT: Because of this estrangement from my mother, and my brother, she wanted to leave me behind in a boarding school for children when I was 9 years old, when we lived outside the US, and my family was preparing to go back to the states. I cried... and she looked at me and said: "I thought you wanted to stay here". As if she actually thought I was so strange and unresponsive that I didn't want to be with my family!
During all this time my older brother was terrorizing me on a nearly daily basis. He'd come at me, get me down on the floor, pound his fists with all his strength into my head, making me wonder why my brains didn't spill out. He was as if deranged with older sibling rage toward me.
I clearly have PTSD from this, and C-PTSD, low self-esteem, I react to aggression (such as aggressive, judgemental, invalidating treatment online). My entire life was derailed from all that happened.
When I was in my teens I was placed in a psychiatric facility for three weeks for "evaluation" and declared to have schizophrenic affective disorder, until a year or so later another elderly doctor of psychology said that was an error and not true, and withdrew that diagnosis.
This came after my father told everyone in my world (childhood kids, teachers, my yoga teacher as a teen, everyone I knew) that I was schizophrenic and to "not give me drugs" (I'd been taking LSD in large doses in my early teens). I was stigmatized, given anti-psychotic drugs, all for an incorrect diagnosis.
I was taken out of school for no reason and placed in an all-purpose "alternative" school.
Now, did my father go around to all the people he told, retracting that diagnosis? Of course not. It ruined my teen years, to the point I wanted to escape into a yogic cult to get away from my family. Yeah, that happened. I did that.
This story goes on and on.

2023-09-08 23:21:02

@npub17vk…9n4k
@npub1mew…tau6
#autism
#autistic
I'm gonna ramble a bit. I usually try to be coherent, and take my time, but I don't even know where I'm going here just yet.
There are assumptions I see in current Mastodon #autism discussions that are misleading or even wrong about so-called "late diagnosed".
One is that those who weren't screened as children must not be "very autistic", and that these late diagnosed persons assume superiority and higher status, and then dominate spaces and talk over the early diagnosed.
Trying to get a sense of this, because I'm very late diagnosed. No doubt there is some validity to this point for some. I haven't seen it, but that doesn't mean it isn't there.
But I will say that some of these "takes" are very much like the toxic views of the "autism parents" on Twitter, who think adult autistics are all "high functioning" or not autistic at all, just people who are frauds and wannabes.
Having said that, being neurodivergent isn't new to me. I knew I was different in my early teens but saw myself as having a very different "consciousness" than others, rather than a different neurology (long story). And I was dx'd as ADHD 23 years ago, and self-diagnosed as autistic 8 years ago, and then received a formal diagnosis of ASD about 2 years ago. So is that "newly diagnosed"? Lol. I've lived the autistic life longer than most on the planet at this point. I'm hardly uneducated in the topic.
So I've known about my differences for a long, long time. ADHD is anything but "new" to me.
As to autism, I think it will always be "new" to me, and yet it will always be something I've lived with all of my life. And I've been alive for awhile.
Included either directly or by implication in some of the comments I've read is the pathologizing of autism, and separating the autistic community into severity levels, a concept that is clumsy and inaccurate, and often results in withholding assistance to those who are perceived as "mildly" autistic or underestimating and infantilizing those seen as "severe".
And it also misses the fact that people who grew up before 1980 (and especially before 1970 or 1960) would not likely be screened as autistic, and instead could be treated as a "terrible, strange, misbehaved child" with resulting parental neglect and abuse (raises hand), or misdiagnosed as any of a plethora of other conditions including schizophrenia (raises hand) or intellectual disability.
They might be hospitalized as needing in-patient psychiatric care (raises hand).
They might be terrorized by siblings (as in fearing for my life in repeated, prolonged, and constant attacks) and left to fend for themselves leading to lifelong trauma and all the poor self-esteem issues and others traits of PTSD and c-PTSD (raises hand).
Undiagnosed autistics can be treated with a high degree of neglect, misinterpretation, leading to severe estrangement from parents, and outright physical abuse by parents and siblings.
My mother was autistic (I'm quite certain). My brother was autistic (quite certain). My grandmother was institutionalized and I think that was autism.
But no one knew about autism when my grandmother and mother were born. My mother was delayed in speaking, potty training, tying shoelaces, delayed in learning to read. Because of her differences she was horribly abused by her aunt who raised her.
Oh but she was undiagnosed so she must not have been very autistic. Right?
She had no friends throughout her shortened life, although she managed to do well in college, and received a masters in family counseling from CalTech in her 40s. She spent most of her time reading, sitting in bed at night, when she wasn't teaching "educationally handicapped" children (that was the term in those days... so interesting that she chose that as her career).
She died by suicide when I was 26. I gave her CPR at 3 AM, and I'll never fucking forget those staring, dead eyes. Fuck, fuck, fuck.
That's my family life.
This is part one. Part 2 follows.

2023-09-08 17:45:41

@npub17vk…9n4k @npub1mew…tau6
#actuallyautistic
#Autistic
#autism
#autist
#autistics
This is written to the #autistic community, as well as to the non-autistics among us. My apologies if this offends, I'm just trying to be informative to anyone and everyone about this topic.
I'm just gonna say to everyone that the "actuallyautistic" tag initially strikes many #autistics as gatekeeping or exclusionary. This happens *all the time*.
There's no way for anyone to know intuitively or by inference that it is actually intended to protect and include *all autistics*, whether self-assessed, professionally assessed, and regardless of so-called "levels" of autism.
At first glance, I think most people would interpret the tag, which says the tag users are "actually" autistic, as claiming authenticity and distancing themselves from the self-diagnosed in our community.
This is why this discussion arises so often. It's confusing. I've seen this come up constantly on twitter in years past. And it comes up here on Mastodon, too.
Of course, the history is that the often abusive and misinformed parents of autistic children were aggressively and hostilely invading into online discussions (especially on Twitter) among and between autistics, disagreeing and talking over us, talking down to us, arguing over their insistence of "severity" levels of autism, telling us we weren't autistic, that we're not qualified to discuss autism, that we don't represent autism, that we're frauds, assuming all of us are just pretending to be autistic, that we don't know what it's really like to be autistic, and in various ways and forms invalidating us.
These often were full-on attacks upon our community on Twitter. Some of these "autism parents" or "autism moms" made this a daily affair, acting as if "parent activists" who are out to set the world straight with their presumably "correct" perspective on all things involving autism.
Often their views were shockingly ablest, invalidating, erasing our voices, forcing outdated and ignorant misconceptions upon us.
So the #actuallyautistic tag was created to declare autistic-initiated discussions to be just for autistics (including self-diagnosed). Allistics could ask questions by using the #AskingAutistics tag, or if they entered an #actuallyautistic discussion they were expected to be respectful of autistic viewpoints.
It's actually a good idea to describe this history often, not just for autistics, but for all the well-meaning non-autistics who want to communicate with us.
Because... to repeat, the tag comes off as gatekeeping. It sounds as if intended to gate-keep. Any reasonable person might take it that way. And it is gatekeeping in the sense of giving non-autistics a warning to respect autistic spaces and discussions. But it isn't to keep out self-identified autistics.

2023-08-17 21:17:04

I'm going through something awful and unexpected, and I'm not feeling very capable at the moment.
My brother died suddenly. My last living original family. Looks like it might be a drug overdose. He and I were very close but also had a difficult relationship, and there was trauma from him when I was a child.
His adult daughter and son from different marriages have flown into town. I've never met them in all of these years. There is a very strange history... lots of misinformation, things said about me, tension due to my brother's various actions, and the son doesn't like me, it seems. He's taking care of all the details and I'm kept entirely out of planning or details of what he's up to. I feel, once again, the same old vibe I always get from family.
And there are mountains of issues and memories to process... this is a bit much.
And now they arrived in town, my niece texted me, and wants to have dinner with me.
Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit. I am financially stressed these days, can't deal with much, don't want them coming to my little apartment. The niece married into a rich family, the nephew makes a high income... I feel so out of place and as if from a different world than theirs. And they both are just meeting me more or less to give perfunctory respect.
I wish I could run away and hide. I'm older than both of them, feeling annoyed that they've communicated only necessary details with me, and I'm the one who knows most about my brother these days... I probably won't even get to see the inside of his home and what happened (feeling a need for concrete, literal, non-abstract information about him just for my own processing).
@npub1mew…tau6
#actuallyautistic