Am I Getting Creepy? How Would I Know?? I Care About Them Too Much To Scare Them Accidentally Away! They

my mythology pet peeve is when someone describes a scenario in which they keep nearly getting something and then having it snatched away, and everyone's like "one must imagine sisyphus" no!!! one must imagine TANTALUS!!! sisyphus = being made to perform a pointless, aggravating task over and over without ever making any progress. tantalus = being offered a glorious reward only for it to vanish as soon as you reach for it. they are NOT the same

Yes I can accept this

silly echoes of the eye theory

so the hearthians have rock/mineral names, nomai have plant names...

maybe to complete that, the owlks would have had animal names like canidae or ursidae

My self-enrichment program:

Always be massively self aware

Simplify myself until I can no longer over few months

Explode for few years until I almost no longer understand myself

Repeat

Support the ones with special interests that are praised, sought for or impressive; the ones whose special interests are mundane and everyday things, or even frowned upon and support Autistics who can't explain their special interest. Support Autistics with no special interest, too.

I'm not the first to say this. I won't be the last to say this.

But if you support Autistics, you need to support all Autistics.

Support the ones with moderate needs, the ones with high needs. The ones that are loud. The ones that haven't learnt any social skills and are seen as embarrassing by allistics.

Support the ones who are hyperverbal and talk way too much about their special interest.

Support the ones who are nonverbal and communicate with AAC and struggle to be heard.

Support the ones with stereotypical behaviours and then ones who mask so hard they deny they're autistic at all.

Support the Autistic parents who are exhausted all the time and the Autistics who still live with their parents.

Support Autistics all the time. Not just when they make you feel good.

Anyone else think so fast you don’t use words? The concept just clicks and your brain moves on, and trying to go back to slow it down and turn it into words for someone else is torture?

In my opinion, the hardest part of ADHD is the constant vigilance. Like, if I'm not aware of what I'm doing every single second, my brain will switch to autopilot and I'll end up hyperfixating on art for three hours or feeding the cats twice or brushing my teeth in the middle of a meal or something

I think the reason why some cis people are so offended by being called "cis" is because they're entirely unfamiliar with the idea that they might be things that they didn't deliberately choose to be, or that the way they inherently are and hadn't considered as a distinct thing may be a concept that's been named, observed and defined. They don't like to learn that there are names for them that they had not been aware of.

When you've lived all your life with a vague and lingering dread that you are somehow different from everyone around you, it's a relief to learn that there are words for what you've got going on, that there are names for people like you. That you're not somehow uniquely wrong in some way in which everyone else is right, you're just type B when the vast majority of people are type A. There are others like you, whose patterns are like yours, you are not a deviant for deviating from the "norm".

Default Settings People get strangely insulted by the mere idea that they, too, have a slot in the classification system. They'll protest this, being the biggest, most typical, and statistically most likely category isn't enough, they want to be outside of this system completely. Arguing "I'm not some type, I am normal", like being sorted into a type at all is dehumanising and insulting. They want there to only be One Type, and that everyone falling outside of it is a Miscellaneous Deviant. Being "typical" in contrast to "atypical" isn't enough, they want to be normal in contrast to abnormal.

In unrelated news, the ADHD subreddit on reddit has banned the word "neurotypical". That kind of language has been deemed as 'political', meaning that it hurts the feelings of neurotypicals and therefore should not exist.

Yes, that was on my mind as well!

Ok I made this reference talking about my job in my crash day post, but I wanna tangent on it a bit because this clip, weirdly enough, describes an ADHD thing perfectly 😛 it's a clip from the episode of My Little Pony called Testing, Testing, 1, 2, 3.

In it, Dash demonstrates an "ability" that just kind of comes standard with ADHD sometimes, and can actually cause a lot of frustration for us when we don't know how to explain it to others. See, most people have natural floodgates that let in sensory data that matters and disregards the rest. Neurotypical people can just... Focus on only one thing. Because that's the task at hand. They have no problems paying attention to their teacher in school because the sensory data of listening to their words, reading the board and textbook, and physically writing notes are the only data that matter in that moment. For ME though, those floodgates are busted, and have been blown fully open pretty much since I was born. My brain doesn't have the ability to filter things out— the bright colors of the tree leaves out the window and the sound of the kid next to me tapping their pencil are the same level of priority as what the teacher is saying and the words in the book, so I get kind of force fed or water cured every bit of sensory data I can perceive at the same time. This overflow of data is part of what leads to memory based issues like "inattention" and inability to form habits or memorize things. Everything is coming in all at once, and I subconsciously have no way to sort out the important bits fast enough, so my brain just ends up letting it all kind of run through. As a result, when people ask me "how would you describe your learning style? Are you more of a reading, listening, or watching person?" I have to give the very unhelpful, vague answer of "it depends on what I'm learning and doing? I kind of just absorb information without thinking."

There IS a way to game this glitch and turn it into a feature, though, as demonstrated by Rainbow dash. The trick to paying attention and effectively learning things for us is..... To try to not pay attention 😆 by adding a non-invasive, repetitive, automatic task in the foreground and putting the stuff we're trying to absorb in the background, we can kick our brains into that hyperalertness and soak in info by accident. The foreground task has to be something that doesn't require complex thought, a half-task that's too boring to sustain on its own— examples include jigsaw puzzles, coloring books, knitting, listening to instrumental music that fits what we're doing. Personally, it's one of the reasons I've been enjoying learning to cross stitch lately; it's repetitive and can be as abstract as I want it to be, so it forces me to focus on my surroundings in a meditative way. I can listen to the birds and trees on the porch and relax, or I can pay better attention to the security camera feed and patrol schedule at my new job. I become more conscious of having to flick my eyes through 2 screens, the lobby and windows around me, and back to my hoop, and my brain activates better with the added challenge of speed analyzing at a glance. If I tried to only focus on the feed and lobby and not do my little project, I'd eventually space out and not actually NOTICE any of the things I can SEE. Basically, this new job works for me, because I work like Rainbow Dash— while doing the repetitive background task of flying, she's able to speed analyze her surroundings and actually process her environment better. Us ADHD folks ARE actually paying attention to everything, all the time, we just require that hyperaware, high speed anylization to be activated in order to UNDERSTAND it all.

Hi everyone,

I found some more information about autistic burnout. According to this article:

“Autistic Burnout is usually a consequence of camouflaging or masking for either an extended period or over a period of time without a break, as it takes a huge amount of effort. It can also be a result of sensory overload, executive functioning demands (juggling too many tasks at once), or stress associated with unexpected change(s).

Over time, burnout can affect a person's overall health as the body's resources are being used, and not being replaced, which also leaves nothing spare for any recovery.”

I’ll leave the link here in case you’d like to read the entire article.

I hope many of you find this helpful.

Autistic Burnout