lemonmint50

[lemonmint50]

Recipe towards happiness with finding the balance

If you don’t check yourself sometimes, you’ll remain a stunted person, never growing, and be oblivious to the problems you can make for yourself & others. So it’s important to always strive to be a better person and not be blind to your shortcomings. When you’re a person who’s always striving to be better; it’s very easy to feel hurt by feedback that challenges all the progress you’ve made. Instead of dwelling on negative feedback, try to reframe it into a learning experience and not a regressive setback. If you're trying, that is so much more important that staying a stunted person. And you should try to appreciate yourself for your effort. Perfection is not something someone should want to achieve anyway. Think about it, if you were a perfect soccer player you would win every game. Imagine how boring that would make the game. The challenge would be taken from it, and there would be no more excitement. Perfection is a dead end. This perfection concept applies to everything. A person that never offends anyone at any time does not exist. To achieve perfection would mean turning everyone’s experience into a uniform consensus on everything. The world would be a dull place because everyone would think the same. So beating yourself up over not achieving an impossible dull standard just causes unneeded heartache and unhealthy guilt. Perfection is a dead end and boring, and not something to ever want to achieve. I used to have depression in my school days and since graduating I’ve discovered the pointlessness of perfection and have learned to reframe feedback, and not be so hard on myself. I have not been depressed since, and have found a way to break out of that past miserable cycle. I think finding happiness starts when you can strike a good balance between striving to be better and being comfortable with there being no dead end. 

I think people falsely equate true happiness to mean a dead end outcome where you'll never be sad again, which is unrealistic. Just because I found happiness doesn't mean I don't get sad sometimes. But being sad is so much different from being depressed. Sad is a normal fleeting emotion that anyone will encounter from living life. Depression is a debilitating soul crushing feeling and can feel like there's no end to it once you're in it. Its hard to gather energy to get out of bed, interact with friends, or do basic things. It's problematic when people use them interchangeably. Someone very important to me passed a few years ago, and my dog died in March of this year. I was sad at those times and mourned them, but I didn't have that soul crushing enduring feeling that I surely would have developed if it happened earlier. I'm lucky that I was able to learn to break my mind's negative spirals, and I'm hoping I can spread the message so people can apply this and break out of their own negative spirals to find happiness. It's not easy. Once I discovered it, it took me a whole year of consciously making the mental effort of reframing negative things when they come, and changing up my mindset each time until it finally sunk in, and it no longer took me effort to grasp it. The result of true happiness realistically looks like still having some sad times, but never again to the point of depression. This was my recipe to achieving happiness and I hope this advice can be helpful to someone. 

#finding happiness #better person #self healing #self love

[lemonmint50]

Why I use the gold infinity symbol for autism instead of the puzzle piece

My autistic identity is very important to me and so is educating people about my condition as well as problems we are facing every day. It’s disheartening to me when neurotypicals outside our community use the puzzle symbol for us. Even if it's well-meaning; it's surface-level. It demonstrates an obliviousness to the issues plaguing the autistic community. This post will mostly be about the history and implications of the puzzle symbol and its association with the problematic organization Autism Speaks... 

First of all, the puzzle piece was chosen without input from the autistic community. The first icon had a puzzle piece with a crying child which gave the notion that autism is a "tragedy" that children suffer from. The puzzle in general insinuates they're incomplete as people cause they're missing a piece of themselves, or they're a problem to be fixed. Autism Speaks popularized the blue puzzle symbol. Using blue perpetuates the common misconception that autism only shows up in boys. Autism Speaks is considered a hate group by the autistic community and is probably the biggest reason for hating the puzzle icon. 

Although this report came from 2018, I doubt budget distribution changed much in four years. Almost half of their budget (48%) goes to lobbying & awareness, 20% for fundraising, but it's more like fearmongering and misinformation. When directly asked, the founder won't even confirm that autism is not caused by vaccines, despite that that myth has been debunked for a long time. At one time, they advised that bleach was effective in curing autism... 

Their presentation from their site paints a depressing, inaccurate picture. Like autism “robs children of their dreams,” they “live behind a wall.” "Burdens, tragedies, diseased" it's an "epidemic." In 2009, Autism Speaks made a commercial called "I am Autism," that says it's scarier than aids, diabetes, or cancer. And guarantee to make marriages fail... They've put 28% of their budget into research which focuses on how to detect or what causes autism so that that they can find a way to prevent it. (Not sure if the prenatal side of their research is applicable anymore with the new abortion law). 

They fund Applied Behavior Analysis therapy (ABA) programs which only takes into account the end result and ignores the individual's mental health. The concept of the therapy parallels that of gay conversion therapy. ABA changes every autistic behavior so that they look indistinguishable from a neurotypical which is the end goal. But it's at the cost that their identity and self-expression is erased because it's deemed wrong to be as they are. Soon after starting ABA therapy, so many autistics develop PTSD as a result; somewhere in the range of 80%. 

The Judge Rotenburg center created a custom device to torture patients, which did not use safe electroshock therapy protocols. Patients were not put to sleep like what would have happened in actual electroshock therapy. While conscious, they delivered many daily shocks more painful than a police taser. The center also used aversion therapy like sleep & food deprivation, pinching, slapping, sniffing ammonia, etc. Six people have died from the practices used at this place. 

The center's founder had an ally that allowed him to avoid jail and continue using his dangerous practices. The torture used in this center became public knowledge at least by 2007, and still, Autism Speaks began promoting the center in 2013. When the center's founder later stepped down, Autism Speaks came out with a statement that they don't condone aversion therapy when they've been endorsing it for years... Autism Speaks budget only spends 1% on actually helping people with grants and family services. 

Autism Speaks talks about advocacy and inclusivity, but out of 24 members on their board of directors, none of them are on the spectrum. The only autistic to join them resigned because his input about focusing on how to actually help autistics and fix their organization was constantly ignored. Many autistics don't feel disabled or that they want a "cure." Autism Speaks ignores input for acceptance and accommodations because fearmongering to uninformed patrons makes them richer. 

Unfortunately, Autism Speaks is the most popular autism organization out there, but most people don't know how unhelpful and stigmatizing they've been for the autistic community. If Autism Speaks somehow fixed everything wrong with their organization, they still tainted the symbol forever for us. We can’t really forget or forgive all the years they’ve reinforced the ableism narrative for the public. This is why you might see red instead/ light it up red campaigns to counter Autism Speaks’ light it up blue. 

The puzzle piece personally makes me angry cause of its association with Autism Speaks and I think about all the ableism and the torture that they've funded, so I prefer the gold or rainbow infinity symbol. It was chosen by the autistic community. It doesn’t imply we’re missing something. It implies a wholeness with infinite potential to take any path in life. 

Let’s be clear, I have no problem with other autistics using the puzzle piece, cause it's not my place to police other autistics on how they feel best in identifying. Some autistics will police other autistics and I just think it’s damaging and counterproductive. We should all try to respect each other’s individual voice within our community. We already have to deal with neurotypicals silencing and invalidating our experience; we don’t have to be the part of that. My issue is with seeing neurotypicals using an ableist symbol to try to show their “support” without informing themselves to what they are supporting.

#red instead #actually autistic #light it up red #actuallyautistic