Tragically, antisemitism and other forms of racism seem to be the default setting among certain demographics in the UK -- especially older, less well-educated people. It's not ubiquitous, but it's very common.
I understand that David Baddiel is controversial here, but his 2022 documentary, "Jews Don't Count", is showing again on terrestrial TV this week. I'll be recording it.
@shinybat@theautisticcoach@actuallyautistic
Absolutely. I can pick chips out of a 200⁰C oven with my bare hands and eat them. But don't ask me to stay in the room if you're working with expanded polystyrene!
As a computer geek, I think of task-switching as flushing my cache and having to start the new task, slowly and laboriously, with a cold cache. Just as it takes more time, effort and energy for your computer to read a file it hasn't read recently, it takes me longer to work with information that isn't currently in my cache.
There's also the danger that, in flushing my cache, I'll forget something important -- an understanding I'd reached or a task that I'd meant to complete.
I remember a weird polemic I got into at kindergarten. This is late eighties.
I was already reading at a... I don't know what level. I never understood what "reading levels" were anyway, I mean, if I can read, I can read, right?
Well... Turns out none of the other kids apparently were able to read, at least not openly, and reading was actively discouraged by the staff there. There was a storybook hour where everyone picked a story book with illustrations and PRETENDED to read.
I found out when the teacher lady noticed I was actually reading the thing and pulled it away from me, telling me I wasn't supposed to actually read the book with, you know, words printed on it. The justification was "if you read now and get good at it, you'll have a terrible time being bored in first grade when all the other kids are still trying to learn."
Lady, I don't think you understand how reading works. I can't UNLEARN how to read once I learned it.
This is still within my top five unfathomable school experiences.
As an autist with a new self-diagnosis, I appreciate these daily thoughts and the discussions that they spark with other autists. They help me to understand what I have in common with other autists and, in some cases, how to deal more successfully with the difficulties that autism can present. Matthew, I appreciate the work that you do here. Thank you!
Autistic people are often attracted to one particular line in a song and will sing that one line aloud or in their brain for days, possibly in the singer’s accent. This may be considered a form of stimming, as well as a form of echolalia.
I'm asking a few folks questions once in a while? May I ask you?
On my mind may be minor... But well decisions are hard for me.
I can experiment with translating my posts into most other languages thru AI. But it costs... so I'd like to experiment with one.
My writing is pretty idiomatic to American English. If I were to try to reach an under-served non English population... do you have any ideas which language might be a good choice to try?
Hindi? French? Spanish? I'd like to reach a large population that could use material aimed at adult autistics, parents, educators, employers, folks wondering if they are Neurodivergent... overlapping a great deal with ADHD.
@johnnyprofane1@actuallyautistic@actuallyadhd@askingadhd Before spending too much time and money into this, I’d suggest looking at other media that have been machine-translated, and see if they’re something you’d want to read or listen to regularly. Machine translation is very impressive, but still makes frequent mistakes; it’s nothing like reading or listening to a native speaker. Remember, too, that some pairs of languages will be served better than others: so, even if English-to-French or English-to-Spanish provided acceptable quality, English-to-Hindi might not. Since you’d be paying for translation into a language you don’t speak fluently, it might be hard to get a feel for how well or poorly the translation was carried out.
I’m not suggesting you shouldn’t do this — just sounding a note of caution.
Once you realized you were autistic, did you encounter overwhelming and overloading situations that you remembered "dealing" with much better before you learned you were autistic? Like learning you were autistic somehow changed how you processed these kinds of situations?
I'd love to (and frankly, need to) hear your stories. Please share if you're comfortable 💚🙏
I only self-dxed a couple of months ago, but I've already found myself decompressing into the role. I don't mean that in a negative or disabling way: I mean that, when something is too much, unreasonably much, I no longer blame myself, and I take steps to avoid or change it. If I was already avoiding it then I stop beating myself up about it.
Some situations are abrasive damaging or distressing, and I've often tolerated them and internalised the damage in the past, blaming myself for being weak or inadequate. Without neglecting my obligations and my relationships, I intend to do much less of that from now on.
I'm not sure that's quite what you were asking, but it's as far as I've got in two months. I hope that something here is helpful.
A self-diagnosis of autism is a big thing to take in. It's a shock to the system. You deserve credit for making that diagnosis, facing the ramifications, and handling it as well as you have. It's going to cause some adjustments, some re-evaluations, some rethinking. Don't beat yourself up if you're not on an absolutely even keel at the moment. That's natural.
@theautisticcoach@actuallyautistic CBD helps, but the UK’s Food Standards Authority has just warned that taking more than 10mg/day over a long period of time can damage the liver or the thyroid:
I was taking 20mg per day, sometimes a little more, so I’ll regretfully cut down.
I drink, but I don’t routinely use alcohol for stress relief, because there’s addiction in my family.
Products containing THC aren’t legal here, and I’ve never tried them.
I’m not sure whether you’re really asking about excitement, deep concentration, or rumination. I deal with rumination (largely successfully) by spotting the subjects that I ruminate about and not letting myself go round and round the same topics over and over again. I find it’s easier to spot certain topics than to spot the pattern of rumination itself, but what works, works.
In normal times, I get a pretty repeatable 5½ hours a night. That's with every piece of sleep hygiene I can think of, plus CBD to take the edge off the day and help me relax into sleep.
It's not enough. I can't stay asleep. I get up every day exhausted.
My circadian rhythm is a bit syncopated. 🙂 I'm groggy in the mornings, sleepy in the early afternoon (unless I'm fasting), and only really alert from early evening onwards. By late evening, I'm raring to go -- and that's when I'm supposed to close my eyes and go to sleep.
My sleep is a train wreck.
When there's stress, as there has been recently, with a death in the family, I sleep even less well. I've been getting 4½ to 5 hours' sleep recently. I've been considering taking an afternoon nap, like the old man I am, but it doesn't really fit into the work schedule. I haven't succumbed yet. 🙂
Oh yeah, and fairly often, I sleep backwards. You know how your sleep is supposed to start deep and gradually get shallower throughout the night? Yeah. Often mine gets deeper and deeper until it's time to get up. No wonder I wake up groggy!
A big part of being autistic for me is being very intentional with my word choices in order to say what I mean and mean what I say.
To follow that up I then start having a bunch of people claim I said something I absolutely did not because they chose to add additional meanings they made up themselves.
Finding out that I have spent my life scripting things to say just to make other people happy and make social interactions go "smoothly" at the cost of my own mental health, personal integrity, and self-identity is an masked Autistic experience.
Hey @actuallyautistic how do you pace yourself at an office job? I've been contracting for years but as of this week I'm an employee. My style of work is all or nothing, but I sense that isn't going to be sustainable in this context, and I suspect the allistics aren't working like that either anyway. How do you reset or recharge throughout the workday? How do you know if you're doing "enough" versus overperforming? How do you take care of yourself in socially sanctioned ways?
@independentpen@actuallyautistic I agree that all-or-nothing isn’t sustainable in the long term. I’m prone to being over-committed to work, too, and in general very earnest about it. (Is earnestness an #ActuallyAutistic thing, or is that just me?)
Here are some secrets that I find it helpful to bear in mind:
Sometimes you’ll work your socks off, and the work will go to waste, either because the person who handed you the task didn’t think it through or because the situation has changed and the work is no longer needed. It’s a real gut-punch every time it happens. It hurts less if you did a decent day’s work but didn’t pour heart and soul into it.
Your employer is not as committed to you as it would like you to be to it. Employers can and do make redundancies. Work hard enough and well to reduce the likelihood of redundancy, but not so hard that you’ll be crushed if unavoidable redundancy comes your way. Sometimes, it’s just out of your hands. Judging how hard to work will involve comparing your work with your colleagues’.
If your job and your boss allow it, you can reduce distractions by wearing noise-cancelling headphones and playing familiar music at a moderate volume.
Despite that, being sociable is part of your job and will help you to stay employed. No employer will pay you to sit and chat all day but, equally, the entire team will do better work if you have a basic rapport with your colleagues. This will involve some masking (as per usual) and some hard work making polite conversation (which, I know as a fellow autist, is unlikely to be your favourite thing in the world).
Career advancement tends to be equated to a move up into management. You may well decide that that’s not for you. Don’t feel compelled to take a role that you don’t feel you’d do well or which would make it hard for you to stay on an even keel. I was talked into becoming a team leader once, before I knew I was autistic; I didn’t do the job as well as it deserved, and I’ve resisted it ever since.
You don’t have to tell anyone at work that you’re autistic. So far, I’ve chosen not to. There are autists here who’ve come out about it at work and found it a mixed blessing. Autism still carries a stigma, and you may find it preferable to say that you’re introverted or that you like to get your head down and concentrate, both of which are likely to be true. That’s precisely why I now use two Fedi accounts: one for discovery by friends and colleagues, where I never discuss autism, and this one, where I do.
How to recharge during the day? Perhaps your employer will let you take a walk at lunchtime. Perhaps you can escape to the toilet for a short while. It’s not ideal, but it’s better than nothing.
Some stims are more socially acceptable than others. For example, leg-bouncing, while mildly annoying, is usually associated with nerves rather than autism. If your chair swivels, you can move it from side to side; lots of people do that. I unconsciously grind my teeth — always have done — but try not to do that. I often sit and, again unconsciously, move my kness apart and together again, apart and together — but that stim might be less acceptable for a woman. Maybe you can clasp your hands together and then make patterns of pressure with your fingers, as if you were playing the piano. Maybe you can find other stims that don’t annoy people or attract odd looks. Again, it’s not perfect, but it’s better than nothing.
Ugh — I’ve given you an autistic info-dump. Sorry. But do come back with questions if you think I can help.
