Sometimes Growing Up Is Being Given A Large Left Boot All Polished And Pretty But Nothing Else And Being

please stop associating the term neurodivergent with JUST autism and adhd. like please. there are so many ways to be neurodivergent and it’s not fair to assume that it’s just about autism adhd.

Beau is Afraid to me is a perfect representation of the abusive relationship between a parent and child.

The panic attacks and disassociation are no new story to the people watching it and at times it feels like it's happening exactly to you the way the movie draws you into the shoes of Beau himself.

The phone call between Beau and Mona is perfectly drawn out. The nerve in Beau's voice and the immediate disconnect between them emotionally are perfectly done. The silence tells you what you need to know, Beau is terrified of Mona and Mona has a hate for Beau that she can't even grasp herself. Disappointment not at the situation but at Beau. At Beau simply because he's her son and she's his mother.

When Beau hears Mona finally admit to hating Beau we see Beau snap. He loves his mother, he believes that she loves him even when he confesses his frustration and concerns in their relationship. He hears the person that practically controls his throughts, his emotions, his living situation, what stree he's on, the money he spends, and even the color shirt he wears hates him. He believes that Mona was protecting him from the outside world in some way he's finally understood that his mother wasn't protecting him. Mona wasn't helping him and she didn't even love him. He trusted her with his life and she hated him. He goes from kissing her legs begging to be forgiven to do anything to be forgiven to choking her.

When Beau is screaming for help from anyone, literally anyone. We see his eyes perfectly reflect the moment he knows no one will help him. He's trapped dying the death his mother planned for him with his feet stuck in the boards and not a single person believes that he's worthy of help or willing to help him. He's completely and utterly alone. Like the version of himself that was curled up crying on the forest ground because he searched for a home and comfort (interpreted family being comfort for him in general) in every corner of the world that the okay in his head could think of and it left him cold and hungry with just the hat on his head. Take this moment as a parallel to him sinking in the boat. He's searched in all the places his mother allowed him to search for some form of comfort from her and he's left without her love or her help in the end. Deprived of love, blamed by his mother for every emotion she felt raising him and accused of not caring at all. The masked woman telling him about his sins and guilts could be the voice in his head that agrees with his mother or the voice of his mother in general. Finally, we see him drowning and struggling under the pressure he's been convinced he created for himself and the story ends. And it's the perfect ending. It's so fucking horrible and perfect at the same time. My fucking God this movie was amazing.

It's a love hate relationship for me towards the fella, he was such a contradictory yet understandable person and as a neurodivergent person I found some serious similarities between him and people like me that fall under the category.

He wasn't some knight in shining armor but he is owed some due respect that I personally think The Great didn't do a good job at portraying even though they openly and I will admit pretty hilariously admit to not following the exact history as well as they could.

He had faults but it's important that people understand that neurodivergent people and royal who when where and whys have been demonized and negatively viewed throughout history. Especially to show favor and disfavor that would hopefully turn people's opinions willy nilly, Richard III of England is a good example of someone in history that was framed in bad light for political gain and what not.

We'll never really know because at the end of the day, he's dead and buried. But there's such an insane amount of assumptions around him that do more negative than positive when he himself didn't even want the title. There's always the annoying "They were a child" take but in his case, it's true. People's forget that most royals WERE young and if you haven't lived their life or a life similar you can't really understand the kind of damage someone takes going through some heavy weight like that and what all comes with it. He was orphaned too young and then brought up to be king of a country he didn't even want to commit to entirely. There's the theory that he was an age regressor and we can't really prove it but I think it has a fair standing. And if it isn't true, hey, adults can enjoy things people see as childish plenty.

It really sucks that in shows like The Great and so many more period dramas that the faces of historical figures are done such disservices by making them one dimensional people when there's too many dimensions to count. And besides, people sadly wouldn't be too interested in watching a show about a "Hideous" boy turned immature ruler along with his wife who was equally done as dirty as him and unprepared as him. Who's really good for a throne anyways?

Anyways, that's my rant and there's plenty I didn't cover and probably don't know anything about but it definitely rubbed me wrong that so many people don't actually look enough to scratch off the pure villain role he's been dealt.

Edited bit: He was a grown man yes again, there's no denying that. And I wouldn't even try to deny that.

Peter The Third of Russia, in my book, was somehow neurodiverse.

For the people who know him from the show ‘The Great,’ I do not like how that show portrayed him. From my research, he was less of an immature party boy, and more an awkward man who fully admitted he was not king material that happened to enjoy toys. Also, I could not find any reliable sources saying Peter abused animals, and, in fact, apparently some of the incidents described didn’t make a lot of sense when you look at the time period. (Pet bears were illegal in Russia when Peter supposedly shot his.)

Quick moral to the story: adults are allowed to own, collect, and play with toys, and still be mature people.

Very late but that second to last paragraph is too relatable my gods. They really captured that dread and constant nerve of never actually being alone. Never having a single breath be without the anxiety of what could come if you fucked up or accidentally fell into the same room as a mind reader that somehow heard everything you were thinking and would relay it to whatever person you wanted to have hear it the least. This movie traumatized me in a good way.

Beau is Afraid is the movie I have been waiting for

!Spoilers Ahead! *LONG POST*

TW: Child Abuse, Gaslighting, Narcissistic Abuse, Strangulation, Discussions of Severe Anxiety

Like many people I knew Ari Aster as the guy who made Hereditary and Midsommar. Weird and trauma focused horror and that is definitely what Beau is Afraid is classified as, but it is nothing like his previous films.

To summarize, Beau is afraid starts off with Beau meeting his therapist (well it literally starts with Beau being born but i digress) and here we learn that Beau has a severe and crippling anxiety disorder. From the moment Beau starts talking about his mother I knew exactly what this movie was going to be about(though i don’t think anyone could guess the plot). We see that he is planning to visit his mother the next day because it’s the anniversary of his fathers death. Due to unforeseen circumstances Beau oversleeps and as he is rushing his keys get stolen out of his door along with his suitcase. Beau calls to tell his mom just wanting to tell her what’s happened and as she began to speak I got immediately triggered. You can see him sink into a shell of himself as she tries to make him feel guilty for thinking he should stay at home since someone has access to his apartment. She hangs up on him and Beau begins to lose it a little bit.

A lot of things domino fall and this leads to Beau getting locked out of his apartment (this also leads to the first time we see Beau experience something i’ve never seen so perfectly portrayed in a film. executive dysfunction. and it happens multiple times, he simply freezes in place even though he knows he should move. Part of it is definitely his anxiety as he is afraid to move because thats a decision and he doesn’t want the responsibility of what comes after a decision)and learning that his mother was killed by a falling chandelier. Then we see him get hit by a car. He ends up in the care of a family and long story short he has to run from them and ends up in the woods with a theatre troupe.

This is important because we learn that Beau’s biggest dream is to simply have a job and home of his own with a family that loves him. That’s his perfect future, but even as he’s seeing it playing out his kind can’t help but conjure up the worst case scenarios. We also see it repeated here that Beau can’t have kids because he can’t have sex because of a genetic heart murmur that killed his father. After Beau is separated from the theatre troupe he makes his way to his mothers house(though he should have been healing after being hit by a car and being stabbed his ONLY CONCERN was his mother not being humiliated by not being buried). When he sees her body he isn’t at peace yet but he lays down and gets his first night of good rest in days. When he wakes up he is greeted with his old friend Elaine who asked him to wait for her and he did. Long story short, Beau and her have sex. He is under the direct impression he is going to die when this happens.

But he doesn’t. However, Elaine does. He is rightfully terrified and cowers in fear until the music Elaine was playing suddenly shuts off and he looks up to find none other than his mother staring back at him. She faked her death to get him home and then tries to turn this on Beau saying he couldn’t wait for her to die, when Beau admits he knew she was alive because of the birthmark on the hands on the body. But she’s not done. Out of the shadows steps Beau’s therapist as his mother begins playing a recording of one of his sessions where Beau admits reluctantly that he felt his mothers love was conditional. Since he feels like he has nothing to lose he chooses to finally confront his mother about the dream he has where he sees an identical version of himself ask about his father because Beau isn’t brave enough and he asks where his father is.

His mother takes him to the attic from the dream and tells him to go up there telling him it wasn’t a dream, it was a memory. There Beau meets his twin brother and his father(it’s a lot more batshit than this but that’s the gist of it). He begs to go back down and his mother finally lets him and he LITERALLY KISSES HER LEGS telling her he’s sorry. But she’s still not done. She goes on a whole tirade about how her mother blamed her for her mothers mistakes completely missing how she’s doing the same to Beau. She continues to berate him until she finally says what she means. She hates Beau. And at that point Beau puts his hands around her throat, strangling her. He eventually comes to his senses and lets her go, shocked at his own actions, but the damage has been done, she collapses and dies.

Beau leaves the house the look of shock frozen on his face and he reaches a motorboat on his mothers private little beach. He starts the motor and begins to drive the boat towards a cavern. For the first time the whole movie Beau seems like he might no longer be afraid. Until the motor mysteriously sputters and here’s where shit gets VERY REAL. SERIOUSLY IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN THE MOVIE GO WATCH IT BEFORE CONTINUING.

Beau is sitting in darkness for a few seconds and suddenly this cavern is flooded with light and he sees no, it’s not actually a cavern at all. It’s a stadium filled with people. They are all watching him. Through his (and the audiences) confusion a voice booms from a microphone. When Beau finds the source he is shocked to see that it is coming from a man on a mini stage high in the stadium sitting next to his mother. From a giant 4 sided jumbotron video plays of moments from Beau’s life dating back to when he was NINE. YEARS. OLD. All of of which is taken out of context. Beau’s only “defense” is a shitty lawyer who has yell because he wasn’t given a microphone and even when he is heard and things his lawyer says are reasonable his mothers lawyer simply writes it off and moves onto the next thing he’s “done wrong”. (To me this represents all of the times Beau tried to reason with his mother and make her see his side before he just had to succumb to her will for survival, because you can’t reason with a narcissist.) When his defense is literally thrown from his stage and dies on a steep rock Beau is left to defend himself. Through his anxiety and fear he still tries to make them see his side, but Beau is found to be guilty. He never really loved his mother, he was a manipulative child who took from her and never gave anything back.

As this is all coming to a close the motor on the boat begins to flame and the boat begins to sink. Beau is begging, pleading, screaming, for his mother as she watches him in distress. As the entire arena of people watches him struggling and does nothing. We can see the exact moment Beau succumbs to his fate, he says nothing and for the first time in the whole film his shoulders droop. All of his anxiety is gone. He knows his mother won’t help him, that no one will. And the look that crosses his face is one I understood so deeply. One of anger that he dedicated his life to this woman, one of realization that he couldn’t trust anyone, one of sadness that he was truly alone. And I relate to that so deeply.

I remember people talking about the relationship between Joy and Evelyn in Everything Everywhere All at Once and while I definitely relate to their story somewhat there was something missing and I didn’t know what it was until I saw Beau is Afraid.

On the one hand there’s the constant twisting of Beau’s actions that is particularly triggering to me. Him living in one of his mothers apartment buildings and using a card with her money is turned on him when for one thing the apartment is shitty and he is constantly in fear for his life. Number 2 the card was given to him by her to use, because Beau is literally agoraphobic because of HER ACTIONS. He can’t hold down a job even if he wanted to. His whole life is his therapist and his home. I find it so strange that mothers like this will stifle any interest their child has that falls outside of what they want for them and literally block them from opportunities to advance, but then get upset when their kids aren’t able to function on their own as adults.

But that’s not the main thing that stuck out to me and made me realize I had been carrying this massive weight with me I couldn’t explain.

This ever present fear I felt living with my mother that just never left. This feeling that she was always watching me even when I wasn’t with her and that I couldn’t trust anyone because they would turn them against me eventually. That I couldn’t say bad things about her because the words would find their way back to her. When I was actively going to therapy I would triple check my phone to make sure I didn’t accidentally dial her and she could every word I was saying. That’s how terrifying it feels and I’ve never seen that captured on screen. Tears were streaming down my face as I watched Beau’s cries be ignored and as people just let him die. In the silence of the theater I simply stared at the place Beau had been and thought “you have to leave, you have to get out.”

!End of Spoilers!

It’s a great movie and I think you should definitely go see it if you have 3 hours to spare. I’ve personally seen it twice and I relate so much to Beau it’s kinda scary. Sorry for this long post I wonder what anyone who saw it thinks though, i’d like to hear new perspectives. Now time to watch Queen Charlotte for something lighter 😭

Growing up neurodivergent coupled with abuse (mainly emotional) definitely shaped the way I see myself gender wise and existing in general.

I felt like a frankenweenie of a person. A stitched up creature in the shape of a dog that wore a shirt and pants.

It felt like my main abuser, my creator, didn't want me to be a human. That for some reason other children were stitched up with love and fresh flesh in the shape of a human while I was stitched up and patched together with wooden screws and dead flesh in the shape of a dog. And when people asked what the smell was she always pointed to me as if I'd chosen to wear a rotten suit.

I sat stuffed with organs that didn't belong at the table with my creator and others like her and tried to pretend I was made up of the same stuff. Everyone tried to pretend too. But there's a difference between a human's company and a dog. My tail always hit the table in loud thumps until it fell off and I would crank my head to chew while everyone else ate normally. Something always ruined the already horrible disguise. And then the whole table would point out how truly horrible the disguise was. I would retreat to the ground with my ears folded in.

My creator wasn't afraid of telling me how the green mold and cracking of bones were becoming too much of a problem. Most days it felt like she had given up on even looking at me. She had a dog for a child and I knew myself that I was in no way better than a real child. I was a dog. No dog made up for a human. And no human wanted a dog for a child.

I see myself in the mirror and try to imagine a version of myself that's human. A womanly me, a manly me. But I still end up poking and shoving that dead flesh back into its stitch before I get dressed. I know I'm human. I know I'm human, but here's a disconnect between the words me and human.

(Most of my posts have been me talking about my experience with being neurodivergent and having cptsd since Tumblr for me is a place where a bunch of skrunkly humans join and be skrunkly humans for however long this site stands up so here's another post about that.)

Anyways, that's it for tonight I got to scroll all the way back through my last searched tag since my Tumble crashed.

Sometimes I look back at my memories and think "Yeah no, my childhood wasn't that much it was pretty normal."

Cue someone asking me what it was like and the complete dread that passes through me as my brain intentionally tries to sift through the river for normal memories because you don't share some messed up shit with most strangers unless ya' want to and everytime it comes up really blurred or practically nonexistent. And that makes me realize that yeah, my childhood wasn't actually normal. Does someone with a normal childhood need to search every nook and cranny of their memories for a single memory that they can comfortably share with someone and come up short each time? Probably not.

Alone I can convince myself of having a normal enough childhood but that's because my brain accepts a single moment out of hundreds that was relatively normal enough to count and then immediately takes it as a "Yeah that works, it was a good childhood."

Hell my brain can barely remember most of my childhood not because of a lack of memory but because it just won't show up. I search and search and it's all a blurry mass of "Yeah I was alive at that point." But like, that's not what I'm looking for. I'm looking for what I did when I was alive. But yeah, brains are flippin' weird.

My favorite dynamics firstly include lovers to friends except the relationship is stronger and or friendly and does not come in the way of any relationships they have after (points if they're aspec).

Secondly, people who decide to raise children together platonically biological, adopted, or so and so (points again if they have separate lives that do not interfere with each other, spend literally every waking moment together, or live the world's best and ideal romantic and sexual relationship would seem but aren't romantically involved).

Thirdly, "I have a car." "Cool, I've been wanting to leave this place since the moment I breathed the air here want to hop in and ditch?" "Yeah that works." (It's leaving home for bigger and better things, that's it).

Tiktok is banned. If you need me you can catch me neck deep in ao3 to a degree I have never been neck deep in ao3 before

If it sounds like the composer is trying to blast you with the orchestra until you're as deaf as he is, it's Beethoven.

If it sounds like the composer might be a vampire, it's Bach.

If it sounds like the composer is trying to set the violins on fire, it's Vivaldi.

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