I‘m having a rough time this morning. Having to discuss psychological/emotional abuse with someone who allegedly suffers from npd. I dont know how to handle that and the situation is overwhelming af. Any ideas? I‘m not trying to be mean to the person but I feel very unprepared.
I’m at #indieauthor conference this week. Someone laid out infinity pins with a nice unsigned note. Thank you!
Conferences can be difficult for me though I keep coming back to try. Every year I get a little better at it and a lot more comfortable with the environment (though I’ll admit to retracting back into my room between many panels). I’ve support and made a few good friends over the last few years around a mutual passion. @audhd@actuallyautistic#autistic#audhd#adhd
If you have not yet read Fern Brady's memoir "Strong Female Character," do so. it will be a hard emotional read -- Fern shares her experiences as an #autistic woman -- but it's also good and honest and no bullshit from a very very smart comedian. Cannot recommend enough.
Stability in recovery requires more than abstinence. It requires support in all domains of life.
Autistic people, in particular, are more likely to struggle with social deprivation, and for us to achieve recovery and/or sobriety, we need support that takes account of the unique challenges that we face.
I am thinking about autism this morning. Every self-assessment I’ve taken since I was a teenager scores ‘yep, that’s you’. (I have taken a LOT of self-assessments. Every few years I’ll go through a whole bunch, just to confirm.) But I don’t have a formal diagnosis. And even though I would never require a formal diagnosis from anyone else, I have still, for decades, struggled to know whether I’m ‘allowed’ to understand myself in this way or speak about myself as #autistic.
#AskingAutistics Does telling an allistic person you're #autisticever help improve communication? Over and over, I let people know I'm autistic in hopes it will help, but it never makes things better. It seems like no one wants to do the reading, or to make an effort to even meet me halfway. The main reactions I get when I disclose fall into these categories:
Ignore it entirely and just keep on like I'm not autistic.
Say I'm nothing like their 10 year old nephew who has #autism.
Assume that since we're friends it doesn't matter, because friendship is magic and will enable me to "overcome my autism" with them if I am just motivated enough, and if they aren't special enough for me to do that then I don't really value them as a friend.
Give advice on how I can mask better for their comfort and convenience, like I haven't spent my whole life becoming expert on that.
Try to be accommodating without taking the time to learn what is helpful and what is just going to make things worse.
Infantilize me and treat me like a child or an intellectually disabled person.
Give up on me because autistic people are too hard to deal with.
No reaction, because most people don't know anything about autism. They don't even understand that I'm doing all the work to bridge the communication gap, or that they could do anything to help, or even cut me some slack when I fail.
I do have a couple allistic friends who accommodate me enough to maintain a decent relationship, but they are rare and special. And we had somehow worked that out before I knew I was #ActuallyAutistic even, so telling them still didn't change much.
Has anyone had communication improve by telling someone you're autistic? Or is that just a fantasy?
@joshsusser No, I haven’t found telling people I’m #autistic improves communication due to a poor general public understanding of #autism —or the breadth of what the term encompasses. Instead, if I need to have this conversation, I will focus it around my specific communication needs or traits. #AuDHD @actuallyautistic#actuallyautistic
I voted earlier today. We have two, one for Barangay (Town) and one for Sanguniang Kabataan (SK or Youth Council).
The election rep handling the ballots asked for my ID because he had to confirm my age.
SK (Youth Council) is open for 15 to 30 years old voters.
I look like I'm in my late 20s.
While he did not ask me for my age, better to confirm it with an ID to avoid election fraud, when people ask me, I used to say, "I stopped counting at 30" (now it's 28). It's half-joke, the other half is the truth, people do mistake me to be in my late 20s.
Many #ActuallyAutistics, for some reason, look half their actual age once we enter adulthood. I'm not aware of any scientific explanation regarding this, but it has been observed.
For me, this was not the first time. I was always mistaken to be underage (under 18) until I hit 25-27. It was always funny whenever I was with friends or colleagues because they all reacted. 🤣
It was a 5–10-year gap. Now it's a 20+ year gap. Maybe one day, there will be a 30-year gap with my actual age.
In this really interesting analytic video youtuber Meeka le Fay discussing the probability of that relying on some pretty hefty evidence in favor of this version.
My dude told me he had a meltdown in McDonalds this morning. The store was understaffed and didn't have a person working register, and they were only taking kiosk orders inside.
He gets told this after waiting at the counter for twenty minutes. No offer to help, just told to use the kiosk.
Except, there's a problem with this.... He doesn't know how to use the kiosks. He finds them overwhelming, panic inducing and he's extremely afraid something will go wrong in the process of using one. So, he doesn't ever use them and finds the mere suggestion upsetting.
So, he started to have a meltdown about being required to use the kiosk, got very short with the employee who told him he had to use it, and went to leave without buying anything because he didn't want to be having a meltdown in public, when another employee intervened offering to help.
He didn't really want the help at that point because he was melting down and having trouble talking and just wanted to leave, but he did want food so he let her help and they got through the transaction the old fashioned way in person at the counter.
But not without him feeling deeply ashamed and embarrassed because he isn't able to use a McDonalds kiosk on his own or ask for help without being visibly upset about being asked to use the kiosk in the first place.
It's a story I share because I feel like it's the sort of thing that's an underrepresented experience within online conversations about autism and the autistic experience because I feel like the more common sentiment I see is how the kiosk ordering is great because you don't have to talk to a person.
I think an area of accessibility where many of us have a huge ableist blindspot around is how difficult an allegedly "easy" form of technology can be for some autistic people who don't have a lot of familiarity or comfort around tech.
@CynAq Yeah, it's definitely been a very eye opening experience, especially since my own is very different. I'm much more on the tech literate side and was a front end web dev for years. Something like ordering food off a screen seems pretty basic boring thing to me, so when I learned trying to accomplish tasks like that were a big struggle for him.... it was both a point of frustration and curiosity for me.
More than 20 #ActuallyAutistic comrades have dropped out of my groups, both paid & free over the past 2 days for the express reason that I speak out agaisnt antisemitism, denounce murder. and want peace for Palestinians and Israelis.
Some for the express reason that I’m a “killer” and “white supremacist”
Many of you follow me for a long time and have met me and worked with me.
I often speak about antisemitism in our community. No, opposing the Israeli occupation isn’t antisemitism. I oppose it. Daily and my entire life.
This isn’t the question. This is about using antisemitic tropes and illogical standards. This is about bigotry towards Jewish people and Israelis as humans.
I won’t shut up. If you think my words are sullied and dirty and immoral because I am a JEW and an ISRAELI, if you think because of that I am not a valuable human, and if you haven’t unfollowed or dropped out yet, GO AHEAD NOW and drop out. I don’t need bigots in my spaces or world.
I'm so sorry you having to deal with this but deeply appreciate you speaking out for #Peace.
I normally am proud of the #Autistic community on mastodon but what you've experienced from these folks is wrong.
P.S. For any Autistic antisemitic bigots out there --- please know that there are a lot of autistic Jews in the world. Your attacks on people for being Jewish are attacks on fellow autistic people. I'm one of them.
Reflecting this morning on the specific ways growing up undiagnosed autistic can lead to distrust of other humans. It's incredibly confusing to have so many demands/expectations of both your peers and people you're supposed to look up to lead to pain and discomfort, and even more alienating when you can't communicate about it in a way that those people would be able to understand because they don't experience life in the same way.
If this resonates with you, my inner child would like to offer your inner child a hug - no pressure or expectations. ❤️🩹
Hey #autistic pals, this looks interesting! Online summit (not sure what that means!) on #neurodiversity, grooming & coercive control. 27.11 to 1.12. Free.
We have to stop holding Autistic children 100% responsible for a world that bombardment them with hostility, and professionals that not only don't know how to support them, but don't care that they don't know.
I'm autistic, so I guess it's natural that I will never, ever be able to understand exactly when is the correct time to add my point to a group conversation.
Watching the conversation move onto a totally different topic, while a really good point is left unsaid, is a very specific autistic sadness.
I want to write a bit more about the issue of "tech" being used as a catch all term for the computer and software industries and their specific products from my own point of view as an #ActuallyAutistic person.
I won't talk here for very autistic person but only through my own experience, so anyone with a different experience which mine doesn't seem to articulate, please chime in and give us your perspective if you can.
My autistic brain works in a near 100% conscious mode. I engage with things intellectually and with vivid awareness, or I can't engage at all.
This means that if I hear or read a term, everything I know about that term (or more precisely all of the neural structure of my brain referring to that term) starts firing in some kind of a "ready" mode. When I hear the word "tech", since its a very broad term, my brain starts recalling every possible connotation of that word that I know of, until the context it's used in becomes clear so it can disregard the unused portion of the entirety of possible paths from "tech".
This uses an enormous amount of energy, both to load and to unload, and I kind of feel it happen. My blood pressure changes, sugar levels fluctuate, stress hormones and their inhibitors get released.
And all of the effects of these physiological processes create their own vivid emotions and feelings.
When someone is talking about pieces of software, within the actual context of software, using the term software, this isn't jarring to me as the amount of activity triggered in my brain perfectly coincides with the actual usage I get out of it. There's still an enormous amount of information potentially useless for that specific conversation, but there's time, and the extras are still close to the useful context so thinking out of the box solutions and new ideas become easy, which is at least satisfactory, if exhausting.
When someone says "tech" but talks about specific programming languages, my brain first gets ready to talk about any possible piece about the anthropological phenomenon of technology, then immediately is forced to switch to the "programming languages" category, which also triggers the software category because in order for my brain to do the conscious translation from "technology" to "programming language" it has to go through the "software technologies" category which sits between "tech" and "programming languages".
As I said earlier, this is jarring, exhausting and very uncomfortable.
This is what NT psychologists mean when they say "autistic people take things literally."
What that remark doesn't reveal is the mechanism that manifests this result.
I don't "take" things literally. I just consciously engage with every possible literal or non-literal connotation of a word until the context is apparent and my brain can settle itself into the needed part and filter out the rest.