neurodiversity

While a false love died, a true love was born. Slowly, almost silent at first, without me hardly noticing it until it carried me through my darkest hours, like Sam carried Frodo, helping him to throw the one ring into the fire. Brave and strong, neither afraid of darkness nor depth.

And while life is still hard and painful, I feel like the happiest person alive for finally finding a true friend, a neurokin feeling as deeply as I do. A love that I almost stopped hoping for, that I thought to be almost impossible for me to find as a late diagnosed autistic person, traumatized, isolated, as someone who always felt too much, wanted too much, was too much for this normative cruel world.

Never give up hoping for the love you are longing for. Never give up searching for the love you deserve.

Thank you for being you and for sharing all your thoughts and feelings with me.

#ActuallyAutistic #AuDHD #neurodivergent #neurodiversity #Queer #nobot

For me being pan means that I am attracted to personalities, not bodies or organs, which gives me the opportunity to create a safe space for trans people or people who struggle with their body image.

This includes the physical expression of the personality, through movement and interaction with the environment and as an autistic person, especially the interaction with objects. The most important physical features for me personally are eyes and hands, so the way someone moves a steering wheel, plays an instrument, types on a keyboard can be super attractive to me. This has a strong psychological component too, it’s the fact that someone has power over an object, which is super fascinating to me and can create strong feelings of admiration and safety.

In combination with my sensitivity to sounds, musicians can make me fall in love instantly, but it goes beyond that. It’s about being able to connect with people over special interests, topics that are important to me, like the use of words/language for example and giving me the chance to learn something (which created a limerence for my favorite English teacher that lasted for decades).

Another important area that is related to my autism are ethics and values.

This can have the opposite effect too, because no matter how physically attractive someone is from an aesthetic pov, certain aspects of their personality can cause aversion in me.

The most important aspect for me is personal growth and I don’t mean that in the sense of optimizing yourself to be a productive member of our capitalist society (boo!), but the wish to understand yourself and connect with others in your own unique and authentic way.

This makes online-relationships super exciting for me and created new and often uplifting experiences for other people too.

#ActuallyAutistic #autism #AuDHD #pansexual #queer #trans #neurodiversity #neurodivergent

Many women and marginalized people have experienced mansplaining, but what if you have just an autistic person in front of you, who wants to connect over their special interest or correct a mistake you made to provide knowledge? How can you distinguish the two?

From my personal experience the answer is "precision".

Autistic people are often very detail focused and have a strong need for being precise and correct, especially when it comes to their special interest. Because of communication differences this might come across as impolite and annoying and it's perfectly fine to say stop and protect your inner peace, but the intention is a different one.

Mansplaining is about getting attention, admiration and a feeling of superiority while providing superficial knowledge and rough concepts or just few facts communicated out of context.

And of course it can happen that autistic people mansplain, because they are raised in patriarchy too, but then it doesn't just comes across as annoying or impolite, but as seeking for admiration. In this case they don't care if you understand what they are talking about, they are talking down on you.

These are just my personal observations as an autistic woman who has experienced both and has been critisied by NTs for being impolite and attention seeking when wanting to connect over sharing knowledge and experiences more often than I can count.

I am very interested in the perspective of other autistic people on this topic.

#ActuallyAutistic #AuDHD #feminism #intersectionality #neurodiversity