If a tree falls in the forest and there’s nobody around to hear it does it make a sound? What if I’m around to hear it but the tree is very small and the wind is very loud and my hearing has been damaged by years of listening to rock and roll records too loudly?

It’s generally accepted that the “reality” we perceive through our sense organs may be very different than the perceptions of other people with a different set of sense organs may be very different, and we have ultimately no way to verify this.  My experience of the color red, say, and yours, are probably not the same, but we both point to an apple, a lobster, and a fire engine and agree that the thing those objects all share is “red,” and that’s good enough for us.  “reality” is the agreed upon shared names of our individual experiences.

What about when we disagree about the shared names?  Are the hare and the owl I see in the wood grain of the bathroom door “real”? what if I point them out to someone else who says “I don’t see it,” are they still “real”?  what about connections, correlations, patterns, that I “see in” things and you don’t?”  Returning to colors, what if I point at the apple and say it’s red and you say it’s vermillion? Where is the line between green and turquoise? Studies have shown that people who grow up speaking a language with more color words can differentiate between differences in hues more easily than people who speak languages with fewer color words.  

When I had a psychological assessment done, the questionnaire included questions that were intended to diagnose psychosis, such as “do you see or hear things that other people don’t hear?”  I thought this was a very unclear question; I clicked “no” because I understood the intent behind what the question was trying to find out and didn’t want to unnecessarily muddy the waters of my diagnosis with my ontological tangent, but I wondered, what about the hare and the owl?  I understand that my perceived animals in wood grain aren’t “real animals;” I wasn’t hallucinating that they were moving and breathing, neither did I have delusions that they were trapped in the door, I didn’t have psychosis, I was “in touch with reality” in that respect.

To my mind, seeing animals and patterns wherever I go is a normal and acceptable thing to do, but I have heard from other people, especially allistic people, that they don’t “see in” things to the extent that I do.   I’ve gotten to thinking: why is my experience of things that other people don’t perceive more “normal” or legitimate than what people with psychosis experience?  The last few years since my autism diagnosis, I have been immersing myself in the world of disability theory, the neurodiversity paradigm, neuropride, etc, as well as anticapitalist theory.   This has included discussions on how the baseline for “mentally healthy” and “normal,” as well as what brain states, conditions, or symptoms, are pathologized and seen as needing treatment, is fairly arbitrary and dictated by the needs of capitalism.  Proponents of mad pride and psychiatric reform have written a lot about the overmedication and general over-treatment of psychosis, with antipsychotic medications used to make an individual more controllable or eliminate societally unacceptable symptoms.  The mad pride movement frames conditions like schizophrenia as neurotypes rather than mental illnesses and thus offers that the symptoms and behaviors associated with them do not need to be eliminated, but rather managed through peer support and accommodations to ensure the safety and happiness of the individual.  Studies have found that in cultures were “perceiving things that aren’t there/other people don’t” is less stigmatized, psychotic people tend to have less upsetting hallucinations.   Stigmatizing the state of being “out of touch with reality” is fairly useless due to the subjective nature of reality.

Regardless of what is “real,” in the end the imperative remains the same: do your best to treat other people with kindness and love.

Currently playing on a loop: The Kinks – Rock n Roll Fantasy

                According to a quick look back through my meager archives I wrote a post about starting to use a planner and lo! three (three???) years later I’m still using it.  I’ve started and stopped and started again, just like my attempts at blogging, but since the pandemic started I’ve refined my system and been able to develop the habit to keep it up somewhat consistently, which gives me hope that maybe I can do the same with blogging.   The main thing that has helped me keep up with my planning and journaling is moving away from an all-or-nothing mentality, reassuring myself constantly that it’s okay to miss some days or weeks and putting a few lines on paper is still worth doing even if it isn’t a full page.  Having said that, I’m going to state that, although I will probably start and stop many more times in the future, this is the last blog post I’m going to write apologizing for not posting consistently.  From now on y’all get what you get when I feel like giving it to you.

                I’m trying to reduce the pressure I place on myself, including a making a shift in the way I use social media.  I think I’m finally managing to embrace my weirdness and deviance in a non-performative way.  I’ve given myself permission to use my personal facebook as a dump for what I call the “autism juice” without worrying about if it’s coherent or not, and since my friends and family haven’t seemed to mind too much I’m going to try the approach on my public Instagram.

                I wrote a little ramble on Instagram about doing things for yourself without the expectation that they will eventually be consumed by an audience.  Since I graduated college I’ve started making somewhat mediocre drawings in an art journal, blowing in my harmonica or tin whistle whenever the hell I feel like it, letting myself dance freely to music real and imagined, attempting to reclaim my singing voice from dysphoria, snapping pictures of the pretty things I see without needing it to be “worthy” of posting somewhere.

                Freeing myself of the need to make everything into consumable content has made me want to start sharing things again.  I may not have made any big impressive projects lately or done anything impressive but I have experienced a lot of beauty and had a lot of feelings and thoughts! Thoughts and feelings and sensations are worth noticing and sharing even if they aren’t polished or profound or professional or “productive” or palatable. 

                We’ll see how much I end up posting or what sort of things I end up talking about.  I’m purposely going into this with no expectations and so should you, if you’re reading this.  Welcome back y’all.

Edit: Shoot, I forgot the music! Eloy- Time to Turn from the album of the same name.

Also, I would like to point out that my last post from 2018 effectively predicted cottagecore.

I wrote a few weeks ago about trying to add more intentional structure to my days.  I got thrown off a bit by getting the flu the day after I wrote that post but I’m back on track.  I’ve managed to develop two different morning routines, one for days when I go into town and one for days when I stay home.  I wrote the steps for both morning routines plus my night routine and my shower routine on index cards so that I can get back on track when my brain blanks out, and it’s been so helpful.  I’ve been remembering to eat regular meals, sleeping better, reading for pleasure more, spending more time outside… you get the picture.  It’s amazing how little things can make a big impact.  My new planner has also been really helpful; not that I have that busy of a schedule but it’s nice to have a concrete way to keep track of what I’m doing each day.

I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts/reading a lot of blogs about slow living or simple living lately, and the idea really appeals to me.  The thing is that slow living is often associated with minimalism and the assumption of “you’re doing too much.  You’re too busy.  You need to do less to be happier.”  I imagine this is helpful advice for most neurotypical folks but I have something of the opposite problem as an autistic person.  I have trouble “doing things.”  This is mainly due to my absolutely horrible executive functioning.  Most evenings I look back on the day and realize that I did absolutely nothing.  Or rather, I paced around the house, very slowly ate some potato chips, possibly fell asleep at some point, refreshed my Instagram feed for an hour, and maybe flipped over a record.  I manage to eat up the entire day without doing anything productive, meaningful, or pleasant.  It’s just one of the struggles I have with how my brain works.

The point here is that I need to find or create an alternative lifestyle that is designed to help me be able to DO, instead of being focused on doing less.  I also want to be able to reduce my anxiety, environmental impact, and dependence on capitalism while increasing mindfulness, the beauty of my environment, my ability to create, and general happiness.  Some ideas I’ve been thinking about:

1. Slow or Simple Living: I already incorporate many aspects of the slow living movement into my life with my craft and my farm but I want to be more conscious about it.  I don’t think being entirely self-sustainable is a realistic goal for me as a disabled person, but I do want to increase my self-reliance.  Right now I eat eggs from my chickens and sometimes herbs from my garden; I dream of eventually having bees, a couple of fruit trees, and a small kitchen garden.  I want to spend more time baking, drying flowers, making jam, all that fun stuff.  This will probably for the most part have to wait until after I graduate, though.
2. Minimalism: I am attracted by some tenets of minimalism, just not all of them.  I really like the idea of having nothing in your house that is neither useful nor beautiful, although I’d rather have everything including the functional things be beautiful.  I like the idea of cutting down on disposable packaging and things like paper napkins in favor of reusable products, and just the idea of cutting down on plastic in general.  I’m really attracted to the philosophy of quality over quantity.
3. Mori Kei: I used to be super in to mori fashion a few years ago but I kind of abandoned it as I began to explore my gender identity and needed to wear less feminine styles.  I kind of want to revisit it.  The mori lifestyle has a lot in common with simple living, but with more of an emphasis on visual aesthetics.  Mori encourages collecting and the accumulation off trinkets, which is what I miss in minimalism.  Small useless objects are good as long as they are visually pleasing and help tell your story.
4. Bohemianism: I took a class last semester on the Bohemians of the 19th and early 20th centuries: the people who laid the foundations for the counterculture movements of the 60’s and beyond.  Bohemianism is kind of a hard idea to pin down and it could look very different across space (in New York, London, Paris, Vienna…) and across time.  The basic goal of most Bohemians was to defy traditional bourgeois values & conventions and to live a life that is in itself a work of art.  There’s a lot to learn from the lifestyles of people like Alfred Jarry, Sonia Delaunay, and Augustus John.  I recommend Among the Bohemians by Virginia Nicholson for those interested in the original Bohemian lifestyle.

Soundtrack: more psychedelic folk today, from Debbie Harry’s pre-Blondie band The Wind In The Willows

 

This spring is my last semester of university.  Not only do I have my thesis to contend with, but I also have to start preparing myself for post-student life.  My plan is to take a year or so off to explore some creative ideas (I want to learn more about music production and synthesis!) that I haven’t had time to think about the last four years and to recover from the autistic burnout I’ve been suffering from.

My worry is that without the structure and routine that being a college student provides I will basically do nothing and waste a year.  I tend to fall into a depression during the summers and although part of the problem is the sensory hell of hot weather I think a big factor is the lack of routine.  I’m going to try to be proactive and start establishing a daily routine right now, one that is not dependent on my class times.

I’ve been really inspired by Megan Rhiannon’s youtube channel lately.  I really admire how intentional she is in structuring her day in a way that is optimal for her as an autistic person, and I love her planner/bullet journalling videos.  I’m really intimidated by the idea of starting a bullet journal since I’ve never been in the habit of writing my plans down and I’m really horrible at keeping up with journals and things (see: this blog).  Watching Megan’s videos helped me figure out what I might want from a planner though, and I was able to find this one on Amazon that I thought would meet my needs, with monthly pages for deadlines and events and weekly pages where I can keep up with my routine and habits.  I really hope I can transition to a bullet journal eventually because I love the idea.

I’ve got a pretty good evening routine established.  I get in bed early and color in my coloring book I bought in Finland while I listen to a podcast like The Adventure Zone or Tabletop Genesis (or just listen to music for a while).  I haven’t managed to come up with a good morning routine yet but I think that by having an evening routine to wind-down I will be able to get up earlier and eventually a morning routine will come to me.

My brother gave me a beautiful pouch made of a recycled sari for Christmas that I’ve been keeping my stim toys in instead of leaving them loose in my bag.  This has made it a lot easier for me to stim in class and when I’m in town, which has reduced my stress levels significantly.  I’m trying to find the best time to work designated stimming sessions and time to engage with my special interests into my daily routine.

Soundtrack: Agincourt, Fly Away I stumbled across this gem on youtube, apparently it’s quite obscure but I adore it

Hello hello, bonjour, terve!  I realize everyone wants to know how the fashion show went and how the Big Fashion Show Thing turned out, and I promise I’ll get to that at some point.  I’ve been doing some super exciting stuff and I have a lot to catch up on, as you can see here:

Look at that! It’s Trafalgar Square!  Where the Bee Gees played a concert on January 1st 1973 and Grace took pictures some time in May 2017!  That’s right guys, I’m in Europe.  As soon as the fashion show and final exams were over I left to tour London and Paris with a group from my university, which is why I haven’t been blogging the last few weeks.  Right now I’m in Finland, and I’ll be here for a while.  My plan is to do some catch up posts on the fashion show and the first part of my trip spaced out over the next few weeks, and also blog about my  adventures in Helsinki (which should include some outfit posts, since I mostly packed vintage clothes)

In the meantime, here’s some more pictures of me wearing Halston and having afternoon tea in London

Soundtrack for chilling in my apartment in Helsinki: Peter Frampton – I’m In You

It’s April 2nd, which, depending on your point of view, is either Autism Awareness Day or Autism Acceptance Day.  Being autistic myself, I celebrate Autism Acceptance Day and #REDinstead rather than Autism Awareness Day and #lightitupblue.  A lot of people have written about the difference and why Autism Awareness Day is, as I said on Instagram, unhelpful at best and actively harmful at worst, but I just wanted to write a few of my thoughts here.

I love being autistic because I love being me.  I love the intensity and fierceness of my love for my special interests, I love the feeling of stimming, I love how easily I am moved to tears by beauty and emotion because of my hyperempathy, I love how my autistic sensory processing lets me experience music and rain and velvet and hot chocolate chip cookies.  I’m not over here trying to say that being autistic is always a walk in the park, because it’s not.  It’s hard.  It’s really really hard.  The sensory overload, the social difficulties, the executive dysfunction (hoo boy the executive dysfunction) can all be incredibly difficult at times, but here’s the thing: the autistic brain has a variety of tools and skills pre-installed, so to speak, to help us cope with these difficulties.  It’s perfectly natural for us to stim to regulate our sensory input, to use echolalia to communicate when we’re having trouble putting words together, and to find ways to escape when we’re in overwhelming environments.  The problem is that we’re taught that using these skills is bad thing, either explicitly through harmful therapies or implicitly by being exposed from birth to a society that mocks and degrades anyone who isn’t neurotypical-passing.  “Awareness,” in my experience points out visible autistic traits and basically says “look at these autistic behaviors!  horrible!  terrible!  we need to help these poor children to stop doing these terrible, terrible, things like not making eye contact;”  while acceptance is just that– advocating for the wide-spread cultural acceptability of a range of behaviors, and encouraging our more socially-adept allistic friends to meet us halfway in matters of socialization.  Acceptance says “look at these autistic behaviors!  They are normal and helpful and there is nothing wrong with them!”  True autism acceptance in our society would have so much impact on making autistic lives easier.

Another issue I have with “awareness:” it doesn’t even work.  I suppose it did work to some extent for a while since nowadays most people at least have heard the word “autism,” but the wide-spread understanding of autism is completely inaccurate.  A lot of us get told “you don’t look autistic!” like it’s some sort of compliment when we disclose our diagnosis.  I don’t know what neurotypicals think autism “looks like,” I guess maybe Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man.  This inaccurate picture of autism leads to the under-diagnosis of poor people, people of color, and anyone who isn’t a cis man.  In reality, we are all races, come from all socioeconomic backgrounds, are all sexual and romantic orientations, and we can be all ages.  Autistic people can be any gender, and a lot of us are trans or nonbinary!  We needed to be accepted as who we actually are, instead of only being acknowledged if we fit the mold created by faulty “awareness.”

I want to end on a positive note, so here’s some shoutouts to some great people in my life who practice autism acceptance:

• My friends, who, when I text them in the middle of a meltdown ask me “do you want to infodump?” and then let me tell them stuff about the Bee Gees until I’ve calmed down
• My dad, who has a special way of hugging me.  I cross my arms over my chest and let him squeeze me, which is a form of pressure stimming and helps keep me from getting understimulated.  He knows that even if I don’t “hug back” I still love him very much
• My professors who let me ask questions in class when I’ve gone nonverbal by handing them my phone with the question typed out
• My big sister who is autistic, we show each other affection by listening to each other infodump about our special interests and getting really excited when our special interests intersect

The shirt I’m wearing in these photos is from Vintage Code, one of my favorite vintage shops on Etsy.

My soundtrack for writing this post:  Pink Floyd– Meddle

Hi!  My name is Grace, and this uh, isn’t my first time writing a First Post On A New Blog but I still have no idea what to say.  I’ve tried blogging several times before but all my attempts have petered out after a few months.  I’m going to try to keep this one going by putting less pressure on myself: I’m going to stop trying to show the world an idealized version of myself and instead just show the world me, which means being very open about my autism and not setting a pace of regular posting that I can’t keep up with in the long run.  I guess my aims here are to a) become part of the amazing blogging communities that I’ve been following for a while but never participating in (the vintage fashion community and the historical costuming community!) and b) use the blog as an incentive to always keep creating, since now I have a place to share what I create.

I have no idea if any of that made sense outside of my head, so here’s a couple of nice bulleted lists about what this blog is going to be about:

Things you can expect on this blog:

• Updates on various sewing projects that I’m working on
• When I have time and enough executive function these sewing projects might include historical costuming
• Possibly posts in the style of a traditional fashion blog about my vintage outfits, we’ll see
• Occasional rambles about how much I love the Bee Gees
• A very candid look at my life as an autistic adult
• Every now and then I might write a post to share some information I’ve found in my research on historical fashion

Things you probably shouldn’t expect on this blog:

• Good photos.  I’ll just go ahead and say it now, I do not own a camera.  What I do have, though, is a very old iphone, and various apps that emulate vintage film and make my horrible photo quality look like it was intentional
• Tutorials.  I know tutorials are a Big Thing in the blogging world and if anyone’s interested in a particular technique that I use in my sewing I’ll be happy to share as much information as I can but I don’t anticipate having enough time and executive function to write Real Genuine Proper Tutorials with process photos and numbered steps and all that shebang.
• This is not a neurodiversity/disability rights activism type blog; although that is a topic that I am very passionate about I don’t really have the brain resources or the emotional energy to dedicate to writing such a blog.  Instead, may I direct you to some of my favorite neurodiversity blogs: Autisticality, Musings of an Aspie, and The Caffeinated Autistic

I’m planning on dyeing some silk for a project this afternoon, so hopefully there’ll be some actual content here soon!