@awesometistic / awesometistic.tumblr.com
Autism Speaks is down to a 3.9 star rating on their facebook page. If you’re autistic, go leave a 1 star review to bring it down some more!
pls leave a 1-star even if you’re not autistic
it’s down to 3.6
i’d love if all of my followers gave a 1 star review
Here are the prompts for each day of Autistic Character Appreciation Week. Each day has a topic and some ideas for what you could write/draw/talk about, but you aren’t limited to just those ideas.
Day 1 (May 3rd) - Characters: An autistic character or characters (headcanon or coded autistic characters are welcome).
Day 2 (May 4th) - Stimming: How do your favorite autistic characters stim? Did they ever pick up new stims from other autistic characters? What are their favorite stims?
Day 3 (May 5th) - Special Interests: Do your favorite autistic characters have any special interests? What are they passionate about? Do they have a friend who they infodump to or with?
Day 4 (May 6th) - Sensory Stuff: What are your characters’ favorite forms of sensory input (scents, sounds, textures, etc)? What forms of sensory input do they hate? How do they deal with sensory overload?
Day 5 (May 7th) - Ableism: How often do they experience ableism? Who do they experience it from? How do they deal with it? How does it impact them?
Day 6 (May 8th) - Intersections: How does being autistic overlap and intersect with other aspects of their identity?
Day 7 (May 9th) - Freestyle: Anything you want.
Tag any posts you make during Autistic Character Appreciation Week as acawfc so we can find it and reblog it here!
Autism Speaks currently has an ad running on Tumblr. Given how many of us are autistic here, this is incredibly concerning and frankly frightening. So, I’m asking you all to contact Tumblr (Click on Help under your Profile button, choose any of the associated links, scroll to the bottom of the page it links you to, and click “Contact Us”). Tell them why Autism Speaks is dangerous and despicable. Explain why it is painful for you to run across those ads. Educate Tumblr!
We have a real chance to make a difference here. We need to make sure that Tumblr remains a safe place for us.
I know this is frustrating and hard to deal with, but please try to keep your messages civil. Write what you want to say, leave it for 10 minutes, read it again. Then rewrite. Maybe have a trusted and non-ableist friend look at it. When you’re ready and satisfied with what you’ve written, send it off. Tumblr needs to know that we will not stand for Autism Speaks invading this space.
This is our place. We need it to be safe. Let’s help Tumblr understand.
Does anyone know exactly what this advert is? I haven’t seen it (if it’s still around).
Hi, everyone! This is the obligatory intro post for Autistic Character Appreciation Week.
This idea was inspired by the fandom challenges for Asexual Awareness Week and Aromantic Spectrum Awareness Week. It’s meant to celebrate autistic characters (canon, headcanon, and/or coded) in fiction.
The basic idea is we’re going to set up a different prompt for each day of the week, and you can post metas, fanfic, fanart, playlists, or anything else you want relating to your favorite autistic characters.
This year’s Autistic Character Appreciation Week is going to be May 3-9. We’ll be posting the prompt list later today, so keep your eyes peeled.
-Mod Winter
P.S. I apologize for the super short notice and promise to give more advance warning this time. This was originally scheduled to be in April, but I screwed up.
Obligatory question of: do they have to be official/heavily coded, or do pure headcanons count as well?
be more autistic. rediscover the body language you have suppressed. Notice your stims, do them more, try other stims. Let yourself go mute when it feels natural. touch soft things. use earmuffs when it’s loud.
btw if anyone ever gives you shit for self diagnosing as autistic and tells you some bs like “you’re harming/invalidating real autistic people” i just want to say that i am a Real Autistic™ and you are not harming or invalidating me in any way and you have my full support
So there were these people who were pulling “Not Like My Child” on those of us at autistics.org, which is generally a bad idea because if you combined all three of us who worked there at the time, you’d cover pretty much every base of either “I am like your child” or “I was once like your child”.
So we did an “Actually, we are like your child” open letter to these people, detailing all this information about us from our speech delays to our toilet training and lack thereof. (Or, as in many of us, the fluctuations in such abilities over a lifetime.)
We also mentioned all the medical problems we had, because these parents were saying “You people who are adults now are different, you don’t have complex medical issues like the new autistic kids.”
Which made us fucking laugh because all three of us have major medical issues that aren’t easily solved. (In all cases, genetic and/or autoimmune as far as we know.)
So we listed those.
And.
Now it wasn’t “You’re not like my child.”
Now it was, and a guy actually told us this:
“Those medical problems are so easy to solve. Why should we listen to any autistic person who hasn’t put in the work to solve them?” [by going to DAN doctors, which, actually, I did in my late teens, and it made me seriously ill, but don’t confuse these people with the facts, apparently.]
It was kind of cool to list off our traits though because between us, and sometimes in just a single one of us, we covered all the high functioning stereotypes and all the low functioning stereotypes at once. Even our ages at diagnosis showed a nice spread (4, 14, 42).
But I couldn’t believe that.
They have sick kids that they work so hard to “recover” and nothing actually works.
And yet if we’re sick, it should be “easy” for us to fix those problems. Yeah. Please do, actually. Especially the adrenal insufficiency (which we didn’t know I had at the time)… but I’d better not ask for help with that; they’d confuse it with the non-diagnosis of “adrenal fatigue” and try bogus treatments on me. Makes me wish all quacks used was sugar pills.
I’ll probably be adding more since these keep coming to me.
i’m glad i’m not a huge fan of starbucks lol
So, don’t support Starbucks for a while
Your url makes me really happy. I recently got diagnosed with autism, after being misdiagnosed with ADHD, and I've had some cognitive dissonance because society presents autism as this inscrutable, alien thing with no known internal logic. And it's always framed in terms of allistic people interacting with us, always in the third person. And anyway your url is great.
I’m glad you like it! I was extremely pleased no one else had thought to use the URL when I was making this blog because I love it a lot.
Allistic people can be terrible, I’m sorry you have to put up with all that. Autism is always treated as a terrible thing that infects “normal” children and causes so many problems for their allistic families and carers. I try a lot to get people to treat it more positively.
If I was autistic when I was younger and the docs said I was "high functioning on the spectrum" and I have a 504 plan at school in the U.S.A. am I still autistic even though I'm 15 now?
Absolutely! Autism is not a thing you can grow out of.
(Although it is possible to be misdiagnosed and be ADHD or OCD or something instead, so if you don’t feel you’re autistic you could look in to other things.)
attackofthedork said: Autism is the physiology of the brain. It’s a lifelong condition. (Is that the right word?) It may feel like it’s gone away because we can adapt so well and completely blend in with neurotypicals, but you will still always be autistic.
Hi! My son is 5 and on the spectrum, and it looks like next week we will be winding up smack dab in the middle of a "light it up blue" type event. Gross! So I wanted to make shirts for us that say "autism acceptance" or "neurodiversity". I was wondering if their is any alternative to the awful blue puzzle piece- any symbol that is construed as autism pride? I read something about red sneakers once, is that a thing? I really appreciate any help anyone could give me!
Eww, I’m sorry! I think the most popular autism pride symbol is the rainbow infinity symbol I use as this blog’s avatar. Brains are also used.
There is a “walk in red” thing for autism but I’m not sure whether that’s specifically for autistics to do, I’ve seen some conflicting points of view on it. Wearing black instead of blue has been suggested, in memory of all the people killed for being autistic.
Good luck with the tshirts, it sounds a great idea!
ASAN also has a cafepress: http://www.cafepress.com/autselfadvocacy
nekobakaz has a design on zazzle
to ignore anything at all on tumblr whenever you need to for your health - mental, physical, or emotional.
It does not make you an uncaring or horrible person to have fewer resources than able people. Taking care of yourself is a priority, and it is important. You matter. You deserve to be safe and as well as you can be <3
And anyone who thinks otherwise is an ableist jerk.
This is also a reminder to able people not to write/reblog emotionally manipulative posts that hurt people who care but aren’t able to cope.
Another possible thing to to would be to mark posts with swearing in them with some sort of tag like "CW: Profanity", yes?
Ooh, that is a good plan, thanks!
I will remove things if people tell me specifically they want me to remove things, because they may rather skip posts marked with profanity than read them, but otherwise I will just start tagging posts with swearing with profanity.
If I was autistic when I was younger and the docs said I was "high functioning on the spectrum" and I have a 504 plan at school in the U.S.A. am I still autistic even though I'm 15 now?
Absolutely! Autism is not a thing you can grow out of.
(Although it is possible to be misdiagnosed and be ADHD or OCD or something instead, so if you don’t feel you’re autistic you could look in to other things.)
Hi! My son is 5 and on the spectrum, and it looks like next week we will be winding up smack dab in the middle of a "light it up blue" type event. Gross! So I wanted to make shirts for us that say "autism acceptance" or "neurodiversity". I was wondering if their is any alternative to the awful blue puzzle piece- any symbol that is construed as autism pride? I read something about red sneakers once, is that a thing? I really appreciate any help anyone could give me!
Eww, I’m sorry! I think the most popular autism pride symbol is the rainbow infinity symbol I use as this blog’s avatar. Brains are also used.
There is a “walk in red” thing for autism but I’m not sure whether that’s specifically for autistics to do, I’ve seen some conflicting points of view on it. Wearing black instead of blue has been suggested, in memory of all the people killed for being autistic.
Good luck with the tshirts, it sounds a great idea!
Hey, I wanted to ask; is it okay to be okay with physical contact from some people but now others?? Cause I can hug my mom and dad sometimes but I can't with my brother but I hug him anyway cause I think I'll make him sad but it hurts when I do.
It definitely is, contact is a weird thing and brains have weird feelings about it. I’m not sure how to avoid making him a bit sad, but tell him that it is not his fault and it hurts when you hug him, but not hugging people doesn’t mean not liking them (a thing many allistic people seem to have trouble with understanding).
mylordshesacactus said: Maybe you could have something you do with your brother that doesn’t involve physical contact–a signal or something (sort of like a secret handshake but minus the touching) that lets you have something special with just him?
Along those lines, while I try to avoid swearing on this blog, I do occasionally reblog posts with swearing in them. If anyone is uncomfortable with this, please message me and I will attempt to either delete or replace with [swear] those words. (Also I’m going to be replacing slurs with [slur] from now on, I think.) I have an autistic friend who is very uncomfortable with some swearwords and I want this to be a safe place.
Could you please tag the r word (r*tard and any variation of it) with #ableist slurs or something like that?
Oh no I’m so sorry I somehow missed that word while reading through the post I’m deleting it now that is my least favourite word in the world I do not want it on my blog thank you so much for pointing this out to me.
