silver's garden of dreams...

being neurodivergent means i'm outside of what society considered to be "normal" and "acceptable" in the way my brain functions. neurodivergence is, as far as i understand, an umbrella term and does not inherently imply anything other than being outside of society's norms and expectations for the way people think, act, and exist. for me though, the difference is significant enough it impairs my ability to function the way society enforces me to, which does kind of.... ruin my life in a lot of ways lol. to be clear though, i don't see this as a problem with who i am so much as that our societies are generally not made to accomodate people like me, and instead of society changing to include people like me all us 'weirdos' are collectively punished just for being who we are. it's honestly awful.

anyway though being neurodivergent for me personally means a lot of things, though i'm not necessarily keen to talk about all of them on a semi-public website. that said, i am mentioning this at all as there are strange things about me people may encounter that i wish for them to be at least somewhat aware of:

• i often don't get social situations and tend to miss social cues.

  this means i am also sometimes unable to grasp jokes or tell when people are joking, don't get sarcasm, and consistently fail to grasp when questions are rhetorical. i will also not be able to "tell" if i am bothering you or not, and frankly find most peoples' reliance on unspoken subtleties, especially in text where they are next to impossible to pick up on, to be frustrating and arbitrary. please be direct and clear when speaking to me, and upfront with any grievances you wish to have solved with me. i am done playing guessing games with social situations where people refuse to communicate clearly, and won't tolerate you should have knowns; if no one has approached me with problems, i will assume things are fine. it's up to you to be upfront with me and say what you mean, as i try to be as direct as possible with other people myself.

  also related, i can't often tell when people are flirting with me, and for some reason a lot of times over the years people have taken what i intend to be simply friendly as being flirtacious. again, if you have some kind of Feelings for me or suspect i have them for you, please just directly have a conversation with me about it. these kinds of misunderstandings i find to be particularly distressing, especially as most people tend to be very covert or evasive about what they actually want or mean in regards to romantic or sexual feelings...

• i can be eccentric and scatterbrained, and act "younger" than my age.

  these things are not an excuse to treat me like a child! (and as an aside, the way adults in general treat children is horrific and more like objects than like living sapient beings...) they are simply ways my neurotype expresses; i am still an adult and will react to people treating me disrespectfully with the hostility that is deserved by said disrespect. please keep that in mind even when i seem "childishly" excited or exuberant about something, especially as i already am forced to keep in mind MANY neurotypical social norms and rules i find arbitrary and harmful to my mental health for the convenience of neurotypical people. extend me the same respect i am already showing you through playing by your rules.

• my "social energy" is very low.

  i can only deal with a maximum of a few hours socializing even with people i like a lot, and absolutely require being alone to recharge; this isn't anything personal, just part of who i am and doesn't mean i stopped liking you! i also find most social situations involving strangers to be anxiety-inducing (not all! just most.)

• i have a learning disability called dyscalculia.

  this means i need significantly more time than most people to do even very simple math, and may still sometimes get math problems wrong anyway. i also struggle to tell left from right and remember which way is clockwise and which is counterclockwise, and frequently get these wrong (not something that's normally relevant online, but i play almost exclusively multi-player online games and this affects content i do with other people...)

• my memory is extremely poor.

  this will manifest even when it is inconvenient or even distressing to other people. i can't control this any more than anyone else can control their memory, and forgetting something doesn't mean it's "not important" to me — how many times have you and other people you know misplaced your keys? left your wallet at home? are those things not important to you? people want to believe their brains are 100% formed by pure conscious willpower when nothing could be further from the truth. your ability to remember is HIGHLY dependent on a variety of factors, significantly the way your brain is structured, which isn't something anyone gets to choose or manipulate without literally having someone else crack open your skull. be understanding that my inability to remember things is just a part of how my brain is structured, and keep in mind if you don't deal with this you were LUCKY to be born formed in a way where your brain retains information regularly.

• i absolutely hate certain specific words and numbers.

  with words, this is purely because my brain loathes the way they sound and they "feel" in my head like someone rubbing sandpaper all over my thoughts. this is the best way i can hope to explain it but it is definitely a part of my neurodivergence, and i am mentioning this particularly and separately from everything else as this is the reason i don't like the word "enby" even as a nonbinary person and wish to never have this word used for me. there are a number of other words i feel this way about but this word is by far the one that comes up the most often; i will tolerate it being used for other people but will not tolerate being shamed for not liking it, or any accusations that i am rejecting it for being a new word (which. excuse me? i've claimed several different neo-identities, so fuck off with that shit. i'm fine with new things generally, just not people being assholes.)

i generally try to be understanding of other peoples' weirdness as long as they are willing to at least try to be understanding of mine. this does, by extension, mean i won't tolerate being mistreated for how i am.

to be clear, this is also the only context in which i wish to talk about this topic: as a neutral-to-positive and honest declaration of who i am as a person and that having a different neurotype is an unchangeable part of myself. i am privately pursuing treatment and working on things related to this that make existence difficult, and am not looking for anyone's input or suggestions outside of those closest to me. treating me as subhuman or like some inanimate object to be "fixed" is extremely hostile to me and will be taken as the personal attack that it is. again: don't be an asshole.

if you mean tone indicators in the form of a few letters: no, sorry. random letters are worse than useless for me, especially when they happen to intersect with abbreviations than have much more widespread usage.
if you mean tone indicators in the form of sentences or whole words: yes! this is how i indicate tone and intent myself, and i appreciate the clarity they provide without having to essentially learn an entirely new set of social rules (as is expected with "a few letters" tone indicators...)

no lol. open relationship just means one or more people in the relationship are open to the potential of dating someone else, and both people have had an honest and open agreement that they are both fine with this being a thing. my relationship is open primarily because of my partner still being interested in dating other people; i'm still fine with this, but i personally have no interest in dating anymore. i'm just old and tired, and done with delicate emotional things going to hell.

isn't that cheating? so what most people think of and accept as relationships are monogamous relationships, with a strong boundary that dating someone else at all outside this pair is forbidden. people love to conflate this specific boundary and all other types of relationship boundaries, which is incredibly frustrating and ignorant. all humans in the entire world don't have the same boundaries for other things, and it's ridiculous to expect that every single relationship will have the exact same boundaries. "cheating" is a breach of both trust and agreed upon relationship boundaries. for most people this is, again, dating outside the relationship, but for a polyamorous couple they may have agreed upon rules of "please just tell me when you get together with someone new and let me meet them, don't date people without telling me about them." cheating in THIS situation would be "dating someone but NOT telling your partner, even though they said they're fine with you dating other people as long as you tell them first." a different couple may have "i don't care who you date or sleep with as long as you're not seeing any of my exes;" again, cheating here would specifically be defined as breaching that boundary and trust by sleeping with your partner's ex anyway. this is how i define and see cheating. healthy non-monogamy doesn't breach trust or boundaries the same way healthy monogamy doesn't breach trust or boundaries; the difference is the boundaries aren't assumed to always be the same thing, but are explicitly defined and negotiated between everyone involved in the relationship and may differ from boundaries defined in other relationships.
but i still think that's cheating... cool. we don't have to agree. just don't make it my problem or shame anyone over your personal beliefs of what cheating is. live and let live.

i no longer read or even humor these. if you aren't mature enough to do things like block people you don't want interacting with you, or use tag filters on sites that support those things, you're not yet mature enough to be online without supervision. if this applies to you, either ask your parents or other guardians to install parental locks on all your internet-enabled devices, or don't go online at all until you're confident you can curate your own online experience without making unreasonable demands of every single person on the internet to cater to your whims and wants specifically.

i Do Not Like serif fonts. don't ask me why because i don't know why. there's a reason pretty much every font choice on my website is a sans serif font....
Verdana is basically the perfect font though, in my opinion. it's been my favorite pretty much since i started using computers as a young teen back in the '90s and discovered it, and my appreciation has only grown for it the more i've learned about it. did you know Verdana is dyslexia-friendly in addition to being lovely and simple? the perfect choice, especially if you're trying to use dyslexia-friendly fonts while avoiding comic sans. (not that comic sans is inherently bad, i just personally don't care for it at all and i know there are other people out there who also don't care for it.)

that said, i absolutely adore those ridiculously detailed graphical fonts that basically only look good at 72pt and had to restrain myself from using them so my headings would be readable to people besides me.... sigh. be grateful i did that!! otherwise you would all be suffering through some hideously amazing font with vines wrapping around all the letters or something. flowing cursive fonts are another favorite of mine, and believe me there were much less readable ones i found to be gorgeous and was sorely tempted to use as my title banner instead of the one i ended up using...