I lose more followers for saying “stalking, and normalising hyperfixations on other people is bad actually” than I do for having twitter breakdowns or making sweeping generalisations about British people.

So anyway here is something stalking related I want to touch on:

We know based on current research that autistics, and possibly other ND people are more likely to be victims of crimes than *do* crimes.

I can understand the impulse to normalise and destigmatise something like hyperfixating on people if you feel that’s out of your control,

And you feel that it’s completely innocent.

Apart from the fact that it isn’t, and you, as the person who experiences interpersonal fixation are not in a good position to determine this; the people who seek pick autistics out in order to harm us do something identical.

By normalising, or framing as just another ND feature, an internal state of hyperfixating on other people, you set autistics and anyone else experiencing this up to not recognise when *we* are the subject of *someone else’s* unhealthy fixation.

And this is bad.

Because the default explanation in these cases will be “oh they’re like me” when they are not and they are meaning us harm, it will end in harm. Always.

We can’t simultaneously pay lip service to the number of times we are taken advantage of whilst setting ourselves up for more.

There are so many other problems with the way this conversation happens here on twitter especially.

And I’ll happily out myself as a bad listener on the subject because I have trauma, but also because no thought is ever given to people in my situation by those normalising it.

The dominant social dialogue is that stalking victims are paranoid, making it up, and/or asking for it.

So on the point of hyperfixating on other people just being some harmless thing ND people do, society actually has your back.

No one has your back as a stalking survivor.