Lydia Deetz From Beetlejuice Is Autistic!! (not In Canon But She Fits Some Of The Traits Rly Well)

Sometimes I hyperfocus so hard on something, I forget I’m a person until someone interacts with me. I feel like some wild animal seeing a human being for the first time. I’m like “oh yeah I’m supposed to speak and stuff”

UNIVERSAL MONSTERS TITLE CARDS

Meirl

I actually hate that I can’t learn shit.

 I’ve been tested for everything from autism to ADHD, for every learning disability that exists and is out there, and I have none of them, none. I got tested, I’m cognitively above average in everything except for math, where I scored the exact average. I pick up patterns and gain info from context clues instinctively. There’s literally no reason for me to be unable to learn anything.

 I’m also 26 and can’t read an analogue clock. I know that when all the pointers are pointing to 12 then it’s 12, and if one pointer points at 12 and the other one points to a different hour, then it’s probably that hour, but other than that, it’s all white noise to me. I literally can’t learn valuable skills or information purely because they’re valuable. It’s IMPORTANT and USEFUL to know what time it is, and therefore I can’t learn it.

 There is literally no cognitive reason for me to be like this.

I said this months ago but I'll say it again: if you're transgender you HAVE TO LIVE

Beetlejuice (1988)

As a kid, I wasn't taught any concept that there's a difference between wanting to do something, and enjoying it. I was a largely unsupervised kid with undiagnosed ADHD and parents who expected their kids to just raise themselves on their own. So when I was capable of spending hours drawing or reading a fun book, but couldn't even remember that I had homework, ever, I was told that I simply didn't want to do well in school. And who was I to question that, I'm eight years old.

Enjoyment and passion were the only forms of motivation I knew, and if I couldn't make myself either love doing boring math homework as much as I loved my hobbies, or force myself to push through things I hated with sheer willpower alone because I want to succeed so bad, then clearly I was simply not as good as all the other kids, who could do that. And that attitude carried onto adulthood. Every time I struggled to muster genuine love and passion into something, I thought that I just don't want it badly enough. Not to enough to love it, or to suffer through it.

Being medicated for the first time was a game changer. Like holy shit, so this is your brain on dopamine. And suddenly I wanted to do things, turned my life around, took up the passion career I had never dared to try. And when the first "honeymoon phase" of the meds wore down, the same fear came back - I don't like this anymore, do I not want it bad enough? What else could I possibly want?

And I shit you not I was literally 30 years old when I understood that life isn't just either loving every minute of pursuing a passion that you love, or joylessly dragging yourself through things that you don't even want to do. I can just tell myself "just because I don't like doing this doesn't mean I don't want to be doing it." It's not a mark of failure, weakness or lack of motivation, if sometimes the career you want to be doing just feels like having a job.

beetlejuice (1988) dir. tim burton

Well, I’ve read through that handbook for the recently deceased. It says: ’live people ignore the strange and unusual“. I myself am strange and unusual.