Autistic Hedgehog

I have no idea, but probably. Well, unless one flaps for reasons other than happiness. I tend to flap out of some form of anxiety. I think. I don’t fully recognize the emotion that causes me to flap.

But I suppose if it is your happy stim, then it makes perfect sense that doing it more means you’re happy more often. 

Oh boy. I’m not entirely sure I, personally, should be answering this question. My relationship with school was uh, rocky, to say the least. Usually when people bring up education, especially education for people like me, my communication skills go all kind of…camel-like. 

What I think is that the way schools divide children up into “good kids” and “behavioral problems” is majorly problematic and fucked up, and that right there makes the question a bit tough. However, basing it on the system as it currently stands: I think it’s a horrible idea to put autistic children with rowdy, loud children for long periods of time. I was always, always in with the wrong group of kids in one way or another and now I can’t go into a school building without having panic attacks. 

Mind you, there are a lot of reasons kids are loud and troublesome, and just saying they have behavioral problems and handling them all that way is in itself a very bad idea. But autistic people especially have an extra issue when it comes to all our sensory problems. No autistic person should have to be in a loud, chaotic situation they did not choose to put themselves into. Ever. 

Well, I do occasionally get so overwhelmed that I can’t speak. It happened recently, too.

Last week I had to go for blood work. I loathe needles; they terrify me, due to some trauma I don’t even remember. It’s gotten worse as I got older, especially since I moved to Sweden, since for some reason people here have a damn hard time finding my veins. One of the last few times I went, they ended up with three people crowding me trying to find a vein. They had to stick me three or four times in several different spots, and one of them refused to listen when we said they couldn’t take blood from my wrist (I bruise badly) and caught the spot where my RSD is.

This time went very smoothly, but even so, by the time it was done I couldn’t speak for a little while. I knew what I wanted to say, but the words simply wouldn’t come out. All I managed for a while was a few little squeaks.

So these sorts of things can and do happen to us, I think. Anyone else experience these kinds of things? 

(Not a clue. If you’re referring to who I think you’re referring to, though, I think the word ‘asshat’ fits said person nicely.)

I’ll try not to ramble too much. Basically, as of this point, I don’t get a lot of submissions; most of the hedgehogs come from my time spent on tumblr and other places online. 

But you see, this year I’m doing NaNoWriMo. For me, it’s a discipline exercise. I’ve been having all sorts of writing discipline problems and–well, it’s a long story. But I’ve discovered that part of my problem is that I’ve allowed myself to get too into the habit of being distracted by the internet. In order to succeed, I need to keep my browser closed and really focused. Thus, I don’t know how much time I’ll have to spend on hedgehogs.

So I kept those two in reserve. Because I don’t know if I’ll get submissions, and that way I’ll have at least a couple of things to post in November, so AH won’t be completely idle the entire month. 

(I’m a resource hoarder like that. Seriously. I’m the easiest person to beat in games like Monopoly and Carcasonne because I hold onto everything. Because what if I don’t have it later!? XD)

I’m not sure, but it sounds plausible. I don’t tend to have such problems, so I can’t really comment reliably about it.

Anyone else find they have similar issues?