others’ excitement when fall is coming: chill in the air, sweaters, steaming coffee in big mugs, crunchy leaves, Halloween, misty evenings
my miserable slavic nature: mushroom time mushrooms mushrooms mushrooms mushrooms MusHROOms
very small
if your spore dispersal radius isn’t at least 6ft don’t fucking talk to me
Shakespeare April: Richard III
i trust them all
ive been watching a lot of vine comps lately
“If autism isn’t caused by environmental factors and is natural why didn’t we ever see it in the past?”
We did, except it wasn’t called autism it was called “Little Jonathan is a r*tarded halfwit who bangs his head on things and can’t speak so we’re taking him into the middle of the cold dark forest and leaving him there to die.”
Or “little Jonathan doesn’t talk but does a good job herding the sheep, contributes to the community in his own way, and is, all around, a decent guy.” That happened a lot, too, especially before the 19th century.
Or, backing up FURTHER
and lots of people think this very likely,
“Oh little Sionnat has obviously been taken by the fairies and they’ve left us a Changeling Child who knows too much, and asks strange questions, and uses words she shouldn’t know, and watches everything with her big dark eyes, clearly a Fairy Child and not a Human Like Us.”
The Myth of the Changeling child, a human baby apparently replaced at a young age by a toddler who “suddenly” acts “strange and fey” is an almost textbook depiction of autistic children.
To this day, “autism warrior mommies” talk about autism “stealing” their “sweet normal child” and have this idea of “getting their real baby back” which (in the face of modern science) indicates how the human psyche actually does deal with finding out their kid acts unlike what they expected.
Given this evidence, and how common we now know autism actually is, the Changeling myth is almost definitely the result of people’s confusion at the development of autistic children.
Weirdly enough, that legend is now comforting to me.
I think it’s worth noting that many like me, who are diagnosed with ASD now, would probably have been seen as just a bit odd in centuries past. I’m only a little bit autistic; I can pass for neurotypical for short periods if I work really hard at it. I have a lack of talent in social situations, and I’m prone to sensory overload or you might notice me stimming.
But here’s the thing: life is louder, brighter and more intense and confusing than it has ever been. I live on the edge of London and I rarely go into the centre of town because it’s too overwhelming. If I went back in time and lived on a farm somewhere, would anyone even notice there was anything odd about me? No police sirens, no crowded streets that go on for miles and miles, no flickery electric lights. Working on a farm has a clear routine. I’d be a badass at spinning cloth or churning butter because I find endless repetition soothing rather than boring.
I’m not trying to romanticise the past because I know it was hard, dirty work with a constant risk of premature death. I don’t actually want to be a 16th century farmer! What I’m saying is that disability exists in the context of the environment. Our environment isn’t making people autistic in the sense of some chemical causing brain damage. But we have created a modern environment which is hostile to autistic people in many ways, which effectively makes us more disabled. When you make people more disabled, you start to see more people struggling, failing at school because they’re overwhelmed, freaking out at the sound of electric hand dryers and so on. And suddenly it looks like there’s millions more autistic people than existed before.
“…disability exists in the context of the environment.”
Reblog for disability commentary.
That last paragraph is absolutely important.
“How come nobody ever heard of ‘dyslexia’ until widespread literacy became a thing?”
Some of y’all know I spent the fall semester researching English fairy traditions and tbh it’s pretty common for the “switch” to be perceived as happening right around the same time that autistic children begin to diverge behaviorally from other children. This often resulted in rituals meant to force the fairy into reversing the switch—some of these were largely harmless, but others were intensely abusive. From the limited case records, it seems like most of the ones that resulted in child death were meted out on physically disabled children, whereas children who were relatively more able bodied were often accepted back into the family once the rituals failed to work any tangible results. From my limited knowledge of the subject, I would tentatively suppose that autistic children probably had a high rate of being accepted back in, and may or may not have been regarded as Yes Definitely Changlings, But Our Changelings I Guess, based on the particular mood of the family in question
some recent drawins
on all levels except physical, i am a young, charming bachelor of ambiguous sexuality in the 1920s with a seemingly bottomless disposable income which i sometimes literally burn on lavish parties and other pointless, hedonistic pursuits despite the great economic depression and my actually rather shy and reclusive personality, only distinguishing myself from my silly, careless rich friends who only pretend to enjoy my company for the benefits of my money through my obsession with my own mortality and the decline and fall of society, which i contemplate with an air of wistful sorrowfulness while standing alone on one of the upper-floor balconies overlooking the guests mingling below, half-empty champagne flute in hand, and my concerned and only true friend of equally ambiguous sexuality watching me silently from behind the ivory screen curtains blowing in the wind
People become attractive over time as you get to know them. Someone who you once felt completely neutral towards can make your stomach do somersaults. It’s not that they were not good looking to begin with, it’s just that things happened which made your conscience ease up and your heart changed. Good character can contribute to how someone perceives you.
tea and someone you once felt so much love for can become so physically ugly after they hurt you
