Writing What You Don't Know: The Assistants

i'm not entirely sure what i can contribute, but i have adhd and anxiety, and i am autistic and queer and nonbinary afab. and i live in canada. so yeah, i think i'll just look to see what people ask and if i can contribute anything to it.

 

Experienced with:

Being afab

Weird undiagnosable health issues and related stuff (MRIs, ultrasounds, other scans, going to a children's hospital, surgery)

Biology stuff, especially genetics

Housekeeping and a bit about behind-the-scenes in hotels

Grad school/applying/being a TA/some research junk

Living on an island (specifically a PNW island)

 

Gonna do a proper one of these!

Experience with:

• Adoption
• Being afab and genderfluid
• Unknown/unconfirmed brainweird
• Living in Hawaii
• College in Boston I guess?
• a couple of Travel Spots
• Some Business Topics
• HOW SHITTY SOME BUSINESS SCHOOLS CAN BE
• running a small business!! a retail business. sobs.
  
• probably other things but I can't think of them off the top of my head @_@

 

Thinking more about this

• Amab, cis-by-default until genderwhut
• Long slow acceptance of bisexuality
• Growing up in an unusually functional family
• Raised atheist
• Gifted child, but frustrated
• Snake phobia
• Grew up in upstate NY, then yuppie hell, CT, college outside Boston at a former women's school that went co-ed
• Weird experiences re: apparently supernatural whatnots, including psychic and magic and wtf
• Burst two eardrums
• Hallucinations and hospital trips brought on by sleep deprivation
• Seizures that a neurologist attributed to psychology
• Depression
• Currently living in PNW
• Hit by a car, very lucky in injuries, but with ptsd as a souvenir
• Amicable divorce
• Five+ years of sharehousing, including the epic battle to keep the house from being taken over by drugs, culminating in an all-night armed vigil
• Chronic pain condition (plantar fasciitis)
• Prediabetic
• Prone to pleurisy (lung inflammation)
• Quite a bit of pot use over the years, if you want to write that sort of thing and not rely on Hollywood

All I can think of rn

 

I edited my first thing to add other things that may be of interest to writers.

 

And it looks like we have a really cool cast of characters for a story here :D

 

I suppose I should offer my own experiences first:

• Divorced parents
• Living with active and recovering alcoholics
• Gifted student
• Bullying victim
• Benign hand tremors
• Depressed since young childhood
• College & grad school in physics
• Area knowledge: non-yuppie-hell CT, Baltimore, yuppie-hell MD, suburban and urban north Jersey
• Gay cis guy
• Schoolteacher and tutor
• Autistiiiiic? Or maybe just SPD and ADD.
• Anime and sci-fi conventions/clubs

But also, I'm interested in what it's like to be mostly or completely nonverbal. (For long periods of time; I've had times where I Was Not Talking but only for like an hour or two.) What's it like, how do people react? Do you think in words? Is it easier or harder to communicate in certain situations or with certain people?

ETA: The interest is because of relevance to a story I'm thinking of writing, per the thread purpose.

 

lists! ::D

• afab genderweird
• asexual who was completely and utterly confused by all the sexual things around them
• adhd + sensory processing disorder
  
• growing up with an emotionally neglectful mother with FLEAs
• growing up with a narc grandma
• being GC for n-gran and SG and GC in turn for FLEA-mom
• growing up kinda odd but under the phrase "You are Normal. everyone else is weird" and how that made everything worse
• life in germany, espc details about the rhine-neckar-triangle and berlin
• writing sütterlin script
• some stuff about transylvanian saxons, bc dad's family is from there
• german pen&paper/tabletop rpg conventions
• possibly more stuff that's so incredibly normal for me that i don't know it's unusual, because hey, I am Normal. Thanks mom. ==_=="

 

• Growing up in germany, another perspective
• Being raised by non conventional people
• Growing up bilingual
• Growing upwith one parent from another country (Yes both my parents are white. Yes I was actually treated badly for being mixed sometimes.)
  
• Speaking of, euro-picking.
  
• Being raised by non christians (Wiccan for a part of the time, then a homebrew religion on one side and sliding towards atheism on the other)
• Going to a christian school while not christian.
  
• Going to a type of private school while significantly poorer than most of the students.
  
• Going to a Waldorf school.
• What it´s like to have a burn out in highschool
• Living with undiagnosed and treated mental illness
• Medical phobia/fear of therapists aka "This is why I do not therapy, no it is not because I want to be like this or am to lazy to try and fix it"
• Growing up reading at a much higher level than considered appropriate.
• Goth stuff
• Some metal (the music and subculture) stuff, as in I can ask my mom for you.
• Emilie Autumns music and writing.
• Black Jewels series lore.

I´ll stop now. But yeah. Things.

 

• AFAB
• The journey from "Bisexuals are Greedy Sluts" to "Everyone is Hot and That's Awesome"
• Being raised Agnostic then having your family become Born Again Christians
• Divorced Parents
  • B-B-BONUS ROUND: Parental Estrangement Syndrome and How to Make Your Kid Hate The Other Guy When You Are The Abusive One
• (Almost) Marrying someone out of obligation
• Military Spouse 101
  • Info by proxy: the surprisingly unglamorous life of a nuclear reactor operator, how to teach martial arts
• Hypothyroidism
• Seasonal Affective Disorder
• Anxiety/anxiety attacks
• The kind of depression where you don't get sad, you get pissed off at everything
• Girl Scouts!
• Living in California, Arizona and South Carolina: Dry Heat Is A Thing
• Driving across country in 3days or less.
• Weird medication side effects
• Resident Marine Biology Supernerd
  • Field work: Simultaneously less and more fun than you'd think

ETA:

• How to feed a dog/cat/ferret on unprocessed animal carcasses/organs
• How long to store game in a freezer until it's safe to eat
• Butchering most animals and people
  • How long it would take to dispose of a body by feeding it to a single large dog
• Fresh or saltwater fishing
• Free diving to 50ft, SCUBA diving on air or Nitrox to 120ft, including effects of nitrogen and/or oxygen poisoning.
• IUD birth control, adverse reactions to arm-implant birth control

 

Let's see... a lot of my memories are pretty foggy and some of them consist more of impressions than actual memories, but I might be able to be of some use. ... These are pretty depressing, so I'm putting them under a spoiler 'cause I don't want to bum anyone out.

Spoiler

• being in the middle of a police raid as a small child
• having a drug addict parent as a small child (under 10), who was not neglectful but still had the problems related to being a addicted to hard drugs (cocaine, some injectables)
• packing all your things and leaving secretly in the middle of the day
• having weird and undiagnosable digestive health problems as a small child that require unpleasant outpatient treatments
• growing up with someone with untreated bipolar II (like bipolar I, but with ragefits instead of mania)
• growing up in a small, rural town with a sharp class divide (isolation! rampant drug addiction!)
• the atmosphere of AA and NA meetings
• living in a miniscule town in the middle of a dusty, high deserty nowhere in a terrible, rickety house
• being raised by a single parent
• growing up working poor
• being a 'gifted child' who due to undiagnosed autism and being poor didn't know a lot of things I was expected to know
• getting afab secondary sexual characteristics at the age of 10, before any other child in the school
• going camping in the mountains of a high desert area in the summer
• going to an evangelical christian camp as an 11 yr old with brainweird (with bonus best friend drama)
• having an abortion (may be rather out of date)

The less depressing ones:

• growing up surrounded by mountains (no, seriously, it has a particular feeling)
  
• growing up afab and genderweird and not knowing what the genderweird even was
• having bipolar II - what it's like as it develops going into adulthood, how it develops untreated, the difference in how it feels between properly treated and untreated
• living at 60' N latitude and having seasonal affective disorder when there's only 4 hours of real daylight in the winter
• having only 2 hours of real darkness in the summer
• making the decision to move your entire life overseas and then doing so
• learning to live in a country where the only thing the language has in common with your native tongue is the alphabet

And I might be able to assist with information about urban Finland and Finnish history, but that's my husband's deal and I don't want to volunteer him, so I'd need to clear it with him first.

 

My experience includes:

• Being AFAB
• Nonbinary but not trans
• Divorced parents (very hostile)
• being part of a blended family
• being part of a large family (oldest of seven sisters here)
• being much older than my youngest sibling
• Living in the US South
• living on the lake including a few water sports and how to drive a boat
• working in the beauty industry
• being cheated on and forgiving the person (the relationship imploded for other reasons)
• ADHD
• gifted kid
• voluntary stay in a under 18 psych ward
• parents with mental illness
• addict parent*
• drug deals*
• what rich people are actually like
• dating someone in the military
• having a family member deployed
• American metal music and culture
• Owning a gun/learning to shoot
• Having to take plan B

That's a huge list but I didn't know what would be relevant so I just threw it all in there.

Edited for formatting and cause I remembered more stuff

Spoiler: *

feel free to ask me about this, but it may take a while to answer, because it takes some time to process my feelings about it.

 

I can contribute:

• Growing up and living in Berlin, Germany
• afab genderweird stuff in European contexts
• I can translate to and from German and explain grammar stuff?? I like doing that a lot actually, hit me up
• I do fantasy LARP, German scene obv.
• I can explain how playing in a school orchestra, being in a school choir, school theater productions and school musical productions work? (This might be a nonstandard experience due to being in a school with apparently slightly skewed expectations(tm) (patent pending), so ymmv)
• I play the flute and the recorder and the ocarina and am generally knowledgeable in music things and have held and attempted to play a lot of different instruments, as well as had singing lessons. And I swear I will try not to rip your throat out in nerd rage if you mix up lutes and mandolins o3o
• I know a lot of things about natural remedies and the more reputable parts of homeopathy
• I have worked in a major tutoring institution
• Living with chronic pain and minor disability (Psoriasis Arthritis probably) from a relatively young age on
• mmmmmmmmaybe more? idk rn

 

I can help with:

• The Netherlands
• The Dutch school system/university system
• The Dutch medical system
• Life in a hospital from the doctor's perspective (including the psych ward)
• Living in supportive housing with 5 other autistic people and a counsellor (not a psych ward)
• The Dutch language

Not sure what else really...

 

I can't help picturing, like, some sort of DARE PSA with little cartoon drugs trying to invade the house with, like, swords.

 

[removed content]

 

What should be the appropriate way to ping someone for info? I figure that rather than digging through everybody's lists, a writer would probably want to just post the topic they need help with? I'm thinking responses here will add to the general info available for those who have the spoons to dig or the skill to use search functions effectively, and more focused Q&A can maybe drift into private conversation if participants feel comfortable and it's starting to either take up a lot of posts or its getting away from general helpfulness into really specific territory.

Does that sound like a good guideline for folks to get use out of this thread?

 

i'm a bit torn, private conversations lead to less thread clutter, but also repetition and that we can't just look it up, but with haphazard posting we'll have trouble finding things in the clutter.
maybe linking relevant answered posts in your initial post? as some attempt at indexing...

 

Yeah, and it's not like everyone can list every experience they've ever had that might maybe be relevant. I'd say it's probably easiest if people just post a thing they're interested in help with.