Tucker - 27 - white - enby, any~ pronouns/
Icon drawn by moomin-mommy
21 11 / 2024
How many of you are older than 23? I turned 23 in 2020. It feels like a lifetime ago. What would it have been like if, amidst all the chaos of the initial emergence of COVID, I also had to deal with my home being destroyed? With a shrapnel injury? I’ve barely been holding together, honestly, but I shudder to imagine where I would be if I didn’t live in a safe place, if I didn’t have a home at all.
How many of you are younger than 23? Imagine if that was your future- a destroyed home and a shrapnel injury. Imagine if your only hope for a future, to get medical treatment, was to leave everything you loved. That would be a future more terrifying than you can imagine.
Someone named Fadel asked me to share his story. I would like you to donate to his GoFundMe and share this post.
i wonder if, in the decades and centuries to come, the long international fixation on the 67 borders in palestine, let alone the byzantine process from oslo, will come to look like the various antebellum compromises in the united states internally demarcating the boundaries of legal slavery. an unsustainable, temporary stopgap against and prelude to an eventual conflagration that will leave previous concessions on either side looking quaint and gerrymandered and, above all, unscrupulously desperate in retrospect
just woke up from a dream in which “having a two year old alter” was such a common identity facet among the general public that you could buy like mugs and gift bags etc related to this at any walmart or target
bumper sticker reading “watch out: i’m letting this fucker drive!” alongside the universally understood symbol for two year old alter
last time my mom visited I was talking to her about parenting and how I appreciated a lot of the choices she and my father had made about raising me and my brother and she agreed that just listening to the child and taking them seriously was the One Weird Trick to cutting out like 60% of conflicts between parents and children. and she said one time I was about three or four years old and we were all going to the grocery store, and at the threshold of the store I just had a meltdown. i was overwhelmed, I was crying, I was just at the end of my rope like kids get sometimes. and instead of dragging me through the store my mom and dad stopped what we were doing and just asked me what the problem was. and I was able to say I didn’t want to be there, I couldn’t do it, I wanted to go home. and she says she and my father just looked at each other and back at me and said “okay” and we all went home that day instead of forcing the grocery store trip. and I had so few public meltdowns as a kid despite being pretty autistic because, I think, I knew that if I ever really needed to leave, my parents would understand and back me up. and that was the case throughout my childhood. which paradoxically (one might think) resulted in me having fewer incidents of being overwhelmed in the first place, which then made me better able to handle increasing amounts of stress and so on. it also taught me that expressing feelings and communicating them to my caretakers wasn’t going to be punished or ignored or called weird, so unlike many other autistic kids who get judged or rebuked for expressing sensitivity or opposition, I didn’t need to constantly blockade everyone and internalize everything all the time.
it’s a pretty simple concept whether your kids are autistic or not, but most parents don’t seem to get it. their parents taught them to just force everything and let the child deal with it alone so they just repeat the cycle even though they know how it feels.
