[Image source: YouTube— The history of the entire world, I guess; Bill Wartz]

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Well shit, Henry Jenkins, out here in 1997 dropping truth bombs

Oh hey I need this for a research paper I'm writing, thank you!

i mean he had been out here since 1988 dropping such bombs:

"'fandom' is a vehicle of marginalized subcultural groups (women, the young, gays, etc.) to pry open space for their cultural concerns within dominant representations; it is a way of appropriating media texts and rereading them in a way that serves different interests, a way of transforming mass culture into a popular culture"

Jenkins, Henry. “Star Trek Rerun, Reread, Rewritten: Fan Writing as Textual Poaching.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 5, no. 2 (1988): 85–107. https://doi.org/10.1080/15295038809366691.  

there are even some earlier works in fan studies but that’s what i have ready to hand. 

Henry's been amazing for a long time.

when you're heavily dissociated and people are trying to talk to you

after seeing people write alternative criteria for their own personality disorders, i decided to try my hand at writing an alternative set of criteria for avpd that i think captures the experience of it better than the dsm criteria.

i’ve felt for a while that the dsm criteria aren’t great for communicating the entirety of what it’s like to be avoidant — they focus a lot on the external presentation, and don’t really give a super developed idea of what the internal experience is like. i also just think it’s better for the definitions of neurodivergencies to be in the hands of the people who live them every day rather than a bunch of doctors.

i decided to put it somewhere other than tumblr so that editing it in the future if i need to would be easier. if you have any questions about it, or if you also have avpd and want to suggest an edit/addition, feel free to message me! i’d love for it to eventually be more of a community effort than just a personal one.

I'm just now learning about AvPD recently and after looking into it I think I probably have it, but while researching I couldn't get the thought out of my head that probably 95% (and that's a conservative estimate) of people who have this think it's just bad social anxiety and will die thinking it was just bad social anxiety. But the difference between normal social anxiety and AvPD is that AvPD never goes away. Social anxiety is when you're anxious when meeting new people but after a while the anxiety is gone. AvPD is preemptively assuming every social interaction you ever make will go wrong even with people you've known for a long time and are close with including basic things like sharing your favorite color or song, and even if and when it does go right, feeling like it was wrong and feeling an enormous amount of regret after talking to anyone. I would not be surprised if a lot of autistic people have developed this after struggling significantly in the social realm but just mistook it for autism, because part of it is believing you're terribly socially inept, and when you're autistic it's kind of treated like a fact to begin with so you never question it.

the AVPD criteria: “unwilling to get involved with people unless certain of being liked”

what people think: so you just don’t want to talk to people who don’t like you? that’s normal, no one likes trying to be friends with someone and finding out they don’t like you, why would that be a symptom of anything?

what it actually feels like: i am Not Allowed To Speak Unless Spoken To. if i try to join this interaction before someone directly invites me into it, i will break some unspoken rule and they will hate me and i will be punished for it and it will ruin everything. i can’t say anything or do anything until someone tells me i’m allowed to, even if it means i lose this chance at connection that i want so desperately. if i make my existence known right now it will be directly threatening to my safety somehow so my brain has entered freeze mode about it. now i literally have no choice but to sit silently and pray that someone cares enough to invite me in, which i know they won’t because they think i just don’t want to interact with them and i am incapable of speaking up to prove them wrong

My three mental ages: a defenceless kid, an adult who’s had enough and [static noise]

sometimes i feel like i’m not mentally ill or neurodivergent enough.

which is stupid because i very clearly am both.

but when it comes to overarching symptoms or things that a majority of people i share a condition with have, i simply don’t have it or don’t experience it.

i have bpd but i don’t have a favorite person. i have autism but i don’t have special interests. i have adhd but i don’t experience intense episodes of hyperfixations.

it’s hard to feel like i belong in those communities when something that we’re supposed to all experience and share just doesn’t happen for me.