Quaxlys Coiffe Looks Like A Kawaii Symbiont And I Cant Unsee It.

Quaxly’s coiffe looks like a kawaii symbiont and I can’t unsee it.

[ID: a close-up on the hairdo of the new duckling Pokémon Quaxly, which is a smug white duckling with a wide yellow beak and large blue eyes, similar to Donald Duck. It has a light blue coiffed hairdo (or feather-do) with a white accent in a curved “w” shape. The coiffe has a peculiar smoothness and flourish near the front resembling a hand raised in greeting. The w-shaped accent looks uncomfortably close to the uwu or :3 mouth shape used for chibi style characters, so I’ve added two white beady eyes to go with the hair, and a caption that says “hewwo” to solidify the implied sentience of this coiffe.]

the most unrealistic thing about the Amphibia finale was that Sasha Waybright could be a practicing child psychologist in the state of California at age 23

All. Of. This.

I desperately want all these kids on Tiktok to understand that autistic justice sensitivity and moral rigidity does not mean our definition of justice and morality is GOOD. I was raised an evangelical christian and my autistic traits made me an AWESOME evangelical christian. If my mom hadn’t been… not that I would probably be a Girl Defined/Trad wife type. One time I saw an article referencing the “God Particle” and I RIPPED IT UP because I had been raised to think that’s what I was supposed to do. Moral rigidity means it took me YEARS to even START deprogramming my upbringing. I have joked with my loved ones that if I was born a cis white man I probably would be Mike Pence.

Autistic people also often feel EXTREMELY disconnected from the people around us. We literally think differently and I know y’all know that the way NT people think often feels completely irrational. You know what that can lead to? Narcissistic traits. NPD is very comorbid with autism. This is also why I beg people to understand that narcissists aren’t like… subhuman monsters. They’re almost always deeply traumatized and that causes behaviors that often hurt those around them.

Autistics with justice sensitivity and moral rigidity feel like anything that breaks our moral code is a CRISIS that must be repaired. We also often think WE have the answers. This actually makes us VULNERABLE to being brainwashed into the alt right. Like it is a known thing that alt right groups recruit autistic and otherwise neurodivergent teenagers. The alt right pipeline is an autistic issue.

The year is 2002. You’re 7 years old. It’s Wednesday night, AWANA night. You and the several dozen K-2nd graders in your chapter are ushered from “table time” (reciting scripture) to “games” (gym). The game today is something chaotic. It’s either freeze tag or dodgeball, maybe both, you can’t recall, but there is mayhem and it’s hard to know what to do at any given point. For some reason the lights are dimmer than usual.

But you notice one of the younger girls, Becca (*not her real name), has gone to sit in a corner by herself, holding her knees against her chest. She is clearly distraught; she seems to be crying. Maybe someone hit her too hard with a dodgeball. Whatever the reason, she’s sad and clearly doesn’t want to play anymore. What feels like instantaneously, two of the adult leaders walk over to Becca to talk to her, presumably to check in with her and coax her to keep playing. You’re too far away from them to hear the conversation, but it seems that Becca is asserting she doesn’t want to keep playing, as she is still crying and shaking her head no. At some point, she starts bawling. One of the adults, a woman, picks up Becca to comfort her. At least that’s how you recall the situation.

You’re struck by the adult’s gesture. For reasons you can’t articulate, you move yourself to a corner of the room adjacent to Becca, sit down with your back facing the wall, and draw your knees to your chest. No one comes to talk to you. No one asks if you’d like to keep playing. No one picks you up and holds you while you cry. You keep looking over to Becca, who is being held by the adult leader. You’re not sure if you’re not being noticed or being ignored. In retrospect, you know they know you were copying and didn’t want to encourage your attention-seeking. It’s confusing. You don’t know why, but it hurts.

—

The year is 2022. You’re almost 27 years old. You’re crying on the floor in your apartment because you want someone (but apparently not your friend in the next room, seeing as you’re practically choking to suppress the volume of your sobs) to notice and hold you. You remember Becca, and you feel deep, unbearable shame. A better person than you would have gone over to her and comforted her yourself, not tried to steal comfort from someone who clearly needed it. You have no idea what you want to be comforted for, but three things are clear: you can’t let anyone know you want comfort, you have no reason to want comfort except selfishness, and you will never receive the kind of comfort you want, ever.

You’ve spent too many nights of your life in the last 20 years weeping over this asinine desire, to be understood and comforted by someone else without asking, a desire that will never be realized, that can never be realized healthily. Sometimes you rationally convince yourself that it’s unachievable and think you’ve moved on, for a week, month, year, decade even. But even on heavy antidepressants that blunt your ability to cry, remembering your desire leaves you sobbing.

You’re caught in the shame of wanting what you can’t have and feeling like your life is at a standstill without it, like if it would happen for just a moment, you could immediately die fulfilled. You’re also caught in the shame of knowing it’s probably been offered to you many times, and you never recognized it, or you forgot, because you’re fundamentally self-absorbed, a bad person, a drain on those around you, someone who creates misery and not goodness, or who at best is a net neutral on the world.

For a lot of the last 20 years, you started to adopt a strategy based on a flawed logic that if you cared for others the way you wanted to be cared for, they’d eventually catch on and do the same for you, unprompted. And when you think back on your life, sometimes they did. But it never scratched the itch, partially because you could never love others without thinking about yourself, so you never actually gave what you wanted to receive. You started to worry that all the “goodness” you dished out was coercive, manipulative. To rectify this, whenever possible, you actively suppressed your desires (all of them, not just for comfort) and acted as much like a need-less rag doll as you could while still having enough of a personality for people to keep you around. And most of them kept you around. A few didn’t, which led to your reality upending like a volcanic eruption. You eventually learned about needs and self-care. You went to therapy. You thought you got better. You thought you’d started to listen to yourself and your body and what you needed. But you weren’t allowed to need things from others. You had to meet those needs yourself. And of course, solipsistic narrative therapy only multiplied your self-absorption.

Sure, you’ve now heard of concepts like community care and mutual aid, but the object of your desire isn’t the same as those things. Community requires communication, honesty, trust, sharing. But you can’t share this desire for comfort. Because it’s peculiar. The moment someone knows about it is the moment its basic structure is compromised. If you ask someone, it’s tantamount to coercion. It doesn’t count anymore.

And even if it wasn’t coercion, you can’t ask someone to pick you up and pat your back and hold you, and read your mind about what you need while you just sulk and cry, to let you shrink into them while they somehow see the parts of yourself that even your parents, even god, couldn’t and say things like “I know this object is really important to you, so I brought it here for you,” or “I know how much this particular episode of this show means to you, let me put it on for you” and for them to be *right* about it and sit with you through all of it just focusing on you and you only. For someone else, or several someone elses, to direct all their attention and care to you and only to you for a moment, or an hour, that would be sufficient for the rest of your life. And for them to know how to do it. To know. To simply know.

And you know this is ludicrous, impossible, no one can just KNOW. Even the people who tried and knew you best have never known. This is why you prayed for years of your childhood for god to give you a friend who was “pre-loaded” with all the information about your feelings and your thoughts, who would actually see you and understand you, who would never leave you. You literally prayed to god above for years for a clone, even if they were a secret clone hidden to all but you and no one else ever understood you. You made imaginary clones, imaginary characters, imaginary worlds of your own design, a descent into a world of maladaptive daydreaming that you still visit frequently. You cried when you left the faith because you had to give up the concept of the indwelling Holy Spirit, the only entity in existence that had a chance at fulfilling your desire, if you were faithful enough.

And you know what’s sick? You’re so selfish that you never thought of being able to be that all-knowing, comforting person for someone else. You’re a sicko who doesn’t think about people that deeply, especially when they’re not physically present. And the voice that tells you you do is a liar. As far as you know, you just use people for emotional comfort, and only care for them out of some twisted moral urgency and throw-away hope of reciprocity.

And what’s worse, you can’t fulfill the desire yourself. No matter how much you focus inward, you can’t pick yourself up and let yourself turn off while you turn on and care for yourself. The logic doesn’t follow. Even with secondary structural dissociation, it doesn’t really work. When you try, you’re just left crying in the way a starving person does when they smell food through a window and can’t afford a taste, or when a bereaved person hears the recorded voice of a deceased friend.

You could probably ask your therapist, but again that won’t scratch the itch. In fact, if you bring this up to them, they might not recognize the primal intensity, the depth of emotion, that somehow this is the burden that defines the journey of your life, and it’ll just become another thing to “work on,” another nod back to a fucked-up family of origin, another “what is one thing you can do to address this today?” And that would only compound your pain. Because it’s not that kind of issue. It’s not an issue. It’s me. It’s me. In its wholeness, it’s me, all of me. There’s nothing else here, despite my convincing facade. There’s just a jealous kid copying Becca’s expression of distress to get a random adult to hold me. And I’m still waiting. And no one will ever come. So I weep on the floor 20 years later, knowing someday I’ll die in that corner, a victim of my own selfishness, with no one to save me from myself, because I’ll never take the always-available option to give up, stand up, and rejoin the game.

Inspired by a post by @saltypenguinfest I present to you…

Yet Another Marcy Wu Playlist™️

Marcy in “the zone”: Pigstep Freestyle - Prince Zuko

https://youtu.be/jhUcDwogifI

Marcy in the halls at school (my shameless autistic headcanon is showing): The Overload - Yard Act

https://youtu.be/tQ2ANR_vF2E

Marcy in True Colors: Born (Vocal Mix) - MiTiS

https://youtu.be/ubJODBpCeAA

Marcy’s subconscious ruminating in the tank: Bad Dream - Cannons

https://youtu.be/Fz4axHOyccQ

Darcy: The Becoming - Nine Inch Nails

https://youtu.be/QWDsyvIfbak

Any other suggestions?

omg you folks are awesome! I’ve gotten a large number of responses on this post, and am super thankful!

If you filled out the survey and didn’t include your email address, that means I can’t contact you to schedule an interview. So if you’re interested in being interviewed, please be sure to include that!

Also, I would love to hear from more people whose stories are underrepresented in academic literature on the topic, including BIPOC, people over 65, and people without a college degree. Adding a few tags to increase the reach :)

Thanks so much you lovely humans!!

sooo um hi! I’m a graduate researcher and wondering if folks would be interested in my study! 👉🏻👈🏻

Are you an ex-fundamentalist, ex-evangelical, or ex-charismatic Christian? Me too, and I’m looking for people like us to participate in an academic research study (IRBNet NO: 1873336) on identity development among ex-Christians. If you want to participate, please fill out the screener survey listed on the flyer (bit.ly/aposidscreener). And please share with anyone you know who might be interested! Please message me or email me at fio . haire @ mnsu . edu for more information.

Thanks!

Fio Haire (they/he), master’s student at Minnesota State University, Mankato

Primary Investigator: Dr. Aaron Hoy (he/him), Assistant Professor of Sociology at Minnesota State University, Mankato

[Image description: A multicolored flyer with text that says:

IRBNet NO: 1873336

Research Study for Former Christian Evangelicals, Fundamentalists, and Charismatics

Conducted by Fio Haire and Aaron Hoy at Minnesota State University, Mankato

Now Recruiting Interview Participants

Participants must be:

- 18 or older

- Live in the U.S.

- Be able to converse in English or with assistive technology

- Identify as ex-evangelical/fundamentalist/charismatic

- Not currently identify as Christian

Complete the screener at bit.ly/aposidscreener

Questions? Email fio . haire @ mnsu . edu

Scan here! - image of an arrow pointing to a QR code.

Share your story in a research study on the identity development of ex-Christians!]