Audrey Hepburn and dove in St Tropez, 1967
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so i'm in this backyard chickens group on reddit and someone just discovered their hen is transitioning and everyone is stoked
anyway in case you didn't know chickens will sometimes spontaneously f2m and it's pretty cool
one of the things that makes autism a disability (and why some of us choose to label it as such rather than an “alternate neurotype”) is the stress.
part of autism is just being incredibly stressed. overstimulation? stress. holding a conversation? stress. something happening to our schedule? stress. people talk about how often autism is recognized and diagnosed via our stress responses (like meltdowns) because it is just so common to see autistic people stressed because of lack of accommodations to how our brains work.
and this matters because stress kills. stress causes a lot of health issues, or it can trigger pre-existing ones by making certain chronic conditions flare up. i once had a psychiatrist very unhelpfully tell me i “just need to manage my stress” when the stress i was describing was things i could not avoid in neurotypical society and can’t “just get over”. i can do “self care” all i like but i cannot at the very base level change the way my brain inputs information and reacts accordingly.
i only learned this year that loud noises aren’t physically painful for other people. i have lived 34 years in a world in which my friends and family regularly physically hurt me at random just by shouting, and i thought everyone else just thought i was kind of a wimp for not dealing with the pain as well as they did.
like. loud noises physically hurt. it’s like a static shock from my ears to my spine that doesn’t stop until the volume goes back down. i thought we all agreed that ‘that’s too loud!’ and covering our ears meant ‘ouch!’. turns out i’ve been dealing with a stressor almost no one else has, my whole life, alone.
autistic people have to keep functioning through debilitating levels of stress that no one else in their life acknowledges or helps them with. it’s no wonder that their most visible ‘tells’ are breakdowns.
I literally don't care when people are like "haha americans are so annoying/dumb/whatever" cuz I can take a joke, but I've been seeing tags on posts of mine from people who like. Deeply, Viscerally, Venomously Hate USAmericans.
They see us as the privileged oppressor class of the world who willfully and gleefully fuck everyone else over so "we" can enjoy luxuries. Our big cars, our extravagant restaurants, our Disney World and McMansions, right?
And it makes something inside me die a little bit, because the USA distributes TV shows, movies, magazines, newspapers and advertisements that tell you what America is like and what luxuries Americans enjoy...
...and it's propaganda. It's propaganda, not reality. These images and mythology of a luxurious, affluent America are so inescapable, constant and penetrating, like radiation, that even Americans believe it even in spite of reality around them.
It hurts that the propaganda is all anyone sees outside the USA as well, is what I mean to say, because inside the USA it's the same. I feel average, not poor, but I have always been demeaned by these depictions that tell me, "This is a normal American" showing financial privileges I would never hope to have and that my mother or her mother would never have been able to even imagine.
Like I looked up "average american neighborhood" on google images
And there are articles from American papers and publications that use these stock photos as images of an "American neighborhood" or "American homes" and it feels like being chipped away bit by bit, because when I was in middle school I went to the house of my friend and my friend's mom asked me condescending questions about whether my family ate instant noodles and "frozen food" (which they were too good for) and that year I was too humiliated to invite any of my wealthier friends over to my house, and yet they did not live in houses as big as the houses in these photos. THIS IS NOT AVERAGE. AVERAGE AMERICANS DO NOT LIVE HERE. WHAT THE HELL. There is a neighborhood in my town that looks like this and in my head I call it the "rich people neighborhood."
I come from the Americans that live here
and mobile homes/trailers are around 12% of houses in my state, so it's not rare, and when my mom was growing up everybody she knew lived in one of these. But this isn't what the world is shown. And even in America when this is shown it's something to be gawked at and pitied.
"Americans buy fast fashion every month and on average only wear it a couple times" I wear my clothes until they're falling apart and many of the clothes i have now are hand-me-downs from my mom or from Goodwill. "Americans eat out at restaurants all the time" Growing up I would eat out at Red Lobster as a treat with my dad about once a year, and sometimes we couldn't afford that. "Americans work so much because they're so obsessed with money" when I was a kid I remember when my dad would sometimes be working until 11pm or later at his construction and remodeling job, coming home exhausted and covered in drywall dust, and we barely got to see him because he was trying to dig us out of our house imminently going into foreclosure.
And I know that I have it so much better than so many people that came before me. Compared with the world my mom grew up in, I grew up in a world of fabulous luxury. My Mamaw's family was sharecroppers and by the time she was highschool age she started working in the cotton mills making gold-toe socks. And being white they've got a position of relative privilege even then. At least they didn't face violence and hatred over the color of their skin.
Why do the articles and writings say "Americans" live in big houses and eat in extravagant restaurants, but they don't say "Americans" live in flimsy, non-permanent structures propped up on cinder blocks and eat whatever cheap processed food is sold at the Dollar General, which is the only store for miles around and doesn't even sell fresh fruits or vegetables?
We're all trained to identify ourselves with the folks in the big houses, not the folks who have to camp out under tarps underneath the bridge, but I would say more of us are closer to the second one than the first. The images of America don't look like people I would talk to and hang out with, they look like the people that used to look down on me and my family like we were less than.
Fact is, "americans have it sooooo much better than all those people in third world countries, everybody there would kill to have the privileges you have" is a fundamental key part of the propaganda, and the purpose is to make Americans, especially poor Americans, think they're fundamentally different than working class people in other countries.
The mythology that the USA is the best place on Earth is a threat. Truth be told, a lot of poor folks are panicky conservative reactionaries in part because they can't afford to travel and see what the cities are like, let alone another country, and they have been told their whole lives that this is the best possible society, and they are scared to death of things getting worse.
Idk where i'm going with this, I just think seeing nation states as discrete categories of people that have more in common with each other than they do with anybody outside their country is a nefarious piece of propaganda
and also I have seen people claiming specifically that Black people in America have it better than the rest of the world by virtue of being American, which is so fucking stupid but i didn't wanna start shit but now i'm sick and in bed and kinda do
we are more alike than we are unalike and the people that say otherwise are mostly trying to get us to identify with a nation state that sees us as lower than garbage
This. I feel this so much. I hate living here and I hate the way the country is basically a plutocracy, so I'm the last person to chant "USA, USA!" But having grown up poor and later lived overseas for 3 years, I know that most media depicts a US that is very divorced from reality.
It sounds like op and I had really similar situations as kids—even down to living conditions and the parents of 'rich' friends talking down to me. Like the time my friend's parents brought me with them to see the Nutcracker on stage when I was about 7, and I remember the mom saying afterwards, "Oh but you probably didn't enjoy it, did you? I'm sure it was too boring." As if I was far too much of a peasant to appreciate something so sophisticated.
I'm in my 40s now, and even though my partner and I still rent, I feel unimaginably wealthy because we don't have to worry about being evicted if unexpected vet bills or something come up. But the vast majority of US Americans I have ever known quite literally live paycheck to paycheck. Most of us are just as downtrodden and trapped by the awful economic and political system forced on us by corporations and the very rich—and that's true in a lot of places besides the US.
So yeah, there are plenty of bad things to say about the US and Americans in general, but no one can truthfully claim that we're all wealthy and privileged compared to everyone else. A lot of US Americans have very little in common with the 'average American' depicted in media.
