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How do you explain the depth of joy and enchantment that you can feel, from seeing a single wildflower growing out of the rubble of an abandoned lot. Or how you can feel the flight of birds swooping and darting through the sky. The wind in the trees making you sway and laugh to the rhythm of their song. Or communing with a blade of grass, glistening and shimmering with the sunlight caught in its dew. How all these single moments can stretch into an eternity and depth that is hard to escape from. Or how the puzzles you can see in them can spread and interact. The pieces coming to you from all the connections of that single moment.
How do you explain how you feel and see and understand so much. How it affects you and how you can interact with it. The depth of your feelings, of the rawness of your emotions. How your soul can dance to a tune played over and over again. How your body moves to the rhythms of the world it's immersed in. All the joy, the sadness, the contentment and frustration spilling out into a dance of its own. A communication of your own part in all of this, the song you're adding to the whole. In the sounds and movements, the gestures and repetitions.
How do you explain any of this to a world that doesn't see it, or understand it. To a world that only sees what it wants to and to understand only what's true for it. Who will misunderstand and blame, who will censure and try to erase all that we are saying and all that we are expressing. Who will spend all their energy trying to convert us into them. How can we learn to trust ourselves. To let our song grow and mature and learn to see it's worth and the path we should always have been on, How can we do this when all we can see is that we are alone and that they are many and always singing the same song, in the various ways of love and hate and so all we can do is to learn to mask early. To deny and ignore our very selves in self-defence. To eventually learn to see only our wrongness and their rightness and then carry that always through our life, the final barrier between us and who we could have become.
@pathfinder @actuallyautistic Earlier today, i thought... I wish someone would invent a device that could show a visual representation of how we feel. A real measurement, like people measure brainwaves and ultra-red colors outside of the visible spectrum.
Surely our feelings are emitting some kind of energy, I wish we could show them, how much we glow.
@GreenRoc @pathfinder @actuallyautistic
Weirdly, I think this could be possible... but maybe a little invasive. Psychology has worked out quite a lot about the mechanisms of feelings, with neurotransmitters, neurohormones, activation of certain brain regions, chemicals in the peripheral nervous system, and IIRC a few other really interesting factors.
A person willing to be hooked up to the right things could probably (?), even with today's technology, broadcast their feelings to at least a basic degree. Those could be turned into any transcode you want: colors or shapes or movement on screens (or cool-ass reactive clothes), smells, sounds, etc.
Some of the subtleties would be lost unless a person wanted to run around with many electrochemically-sensitive needles installed in their brain and other places, but I think some solid basics could be displayed.
Now I have to think about whether I think this would be a good idea, you know, socially, not just for one person. It's probably one of those things that would end up in a dystopian sci fi novel, because many of my ideas are like that.
@guyjantic @GreenRoc @pathfinder @actuallyautistic
"Please click YES to accept the Terms of Service."
@xris @guyjantic @GreenRoc @actuallyautistic
or, "not just now".
@xris @GreenRoc @pathfinder @actuallyautistic
Wow. So few words to express such a horrifyingly big thought.
@pathfinder @actuallyautistic "How can we learn to trust ourselves"? I learned by trying out all of their ways they told me to do things, and to have every single one of their ways utterly fail.
I had to reach the end of everything I was taught, to find out that I've always known what I truly needed, by the "feeling" I feel.
I observe the feelings.
I recognize if I like the feeling or I dont like the feeling, or the feeling is neutral. I choose, based on the like or dislike. I choose the like
@pathfinder @actuallyautistic ah, yes! And for me it’s braided with the deep grief in seeing how all the beauty, joy and enchantment is being deliberately destroyed and trampled.
I am beginning to wonder if the beauty and joy and enchantment somehow triggers pain for the destroyers.
@CuriousMagpie @actuallyautistic
I doubt they even see it. So often things are just a flower, or a weed, or in their way. Just, is a terrible word, it is the ultimate othering.
@pathfinder @actuallyautistic oh yeah - I am going to hold on to this one: ‘Just’ is the ultimate othering.
@pathfinder @actuallyautistic You made me cry, but I think it's the good kind.
@BernieDoesIt @actuallyautistic
Thank you. It was something battering the edges of my mind for some time. The awareness that I needed, that masking is not just what we do and therefore can undo, but ultimately comes from assuming that we should, not just for safety, but because we don't have the authority not to have to. That is the ultimate mask, the failure to see that we were never the other, the problem, the one who had to bow, in some way at least, to the reality we lived in. The reality we were bowing to, was never our own and ours was no less valid because of that.
@louisffourie @actuallyautistic
This one hurt to realise. Thank you.
@pathfinder @actuallyautistic "How do you explain how you feel and see and understand so much. How it affects you and how you can interact with it. The depth of your feelings, of the rawness of your emotions."
Yes, all of this. So hard to explain the effort to rein in and self-govern the socially embarrassing state of overwhelm experienced by simply, fully perceiving the qualities of air on a pleasant spring morning
@lmorchard @actuallyautistic
Indeed. It can be a gift and a curse. But, certainly something very special that we should not be afraid to hide.
@pathfinder @lmorchard @actuallyautistic
I remember being blown away, at the age of maybe sixteen, by the sight of some grass that was balancing seedheads on what looked like a ridiculously frail stem, and stem is totally not an adequate word here. So thin and seemingly fragile. How could it not break by the sheer weight of the seeds? Let alone in a storm!
1/2
@pathfinder @lmorchard @actuallyautistic
And yet, even after a heavy rain, lying on the ground, flat, seemingly defeated - it was merely resting, having yielded to the onslaught, unbroken, only to rise up again, slowly, gently, when the storm was over. Unbroken, with its own fragile strength that could be mistaken for weakness.
„just grass…“
2/2
@Tarrenvane @nellie_m @pathfinder @lmorchard @actuallyautistic
That song was written by Malvina Reynolds. Probably the most famous version was by Pete Seeger.
@bardmoss @nellie_m @pathfinder @lmorchard @actuallyautistic I think that's the version I ended up sharing, but I think the first version I heard was recorded by Tom Paxton and Anne Hills (I could be wrong about Anne though.)
@bardmoss @nellie_m @pathfinder @lmorchard @actuallyautistic Oh wow! Not sure if I've heard that version. I have a Malvina Reynolds album, but I can't remember if I have that song on it.
@nellie_m @lmorchard @actuallyautistic
Indeed! The most remarkable and wondrous thing, such a simple thing is. 
@pathfinder @lmorchard @actuallyautistic
I used to be frightfully thin, especially at that time, and it struck me that if I took that grass as an example, maybe I wasn’t all that weak, either. Maybe I could also let the storms blow past me and still be patient and gentle, even strong, in my own way.
@pathfinder @actuallyautistic Maria Skłodowska-Curie once said that a person who feels and sees as much as she does must hide it because the world would not understand. Nowhere has it been openly said that she was autistic, but reading her biography there is too much overlap for one to ignore the possibility.
@dawiidio @actuallyautistic
It does sound familiar, so I wouldn't be at all surprised.
@pathfinder @actuallyautistic
.
feeling like I’m noticeably absent, it’s not because I don’t relate, it’s because it hurts. I want share, I have a lot of such things to share, I even have people that need what I know about myself and my family, kids, but they won’t have it, there are zero witnesses to my actual life.
.
Damn kid is even demanding something - but nothing I give is it. Maddeningly sad. 
@punishmenthurts @actuallyautistic
This is why I post what I do here. 