Tootfinder

Americans with disabilities are at a breaking point. Are politicians listening? #ActuallyAutistic #disability @…

Personal, work search
In the end, I've managed to send a single CV yesterday. For a shitty job that's both below my qualifications and that's underpaid. I really do hope they don't reply, because if they wanted me, I'd probably agree just to have *any* job. Then I'd hate it, but I'd keep working until my health goes so bad that I wouldn't be able to work at all. Again.
#ActuallyAutistic

Achtung ‼️
Sechsjähriger autistischer Junge in Niedersachsen vermisst.
-> #actuallyautistic #help #boost 🔁

One reason I order on-line: Retail music. Feh! #ActuallyAutistic

I’m having the best day ever because my #actuallyAutistic self downloaded Google Earth on my iPad
MAAAAAAPS :blobfoxaww:

Do ~NOT~ take the #ActuallyAutistic’s Better Breeze Laundry & debit cards into your own hands to show them How It Is Done, fellow customer, even if the clerk is glued to her phone. 😵‍💫

Autism spectrum condition, attachment to objects, "minimalism"
I could say that I'm a minimalist. Much like many other of my characteristics, this one stems from the autism spectrum.
Many people in the spectrum show emotional attachment to objects. Sometimes you could think of it as "hoarding", but for me it's mostly about strong negative feelings when something breaks, when I need to throw it away (interesting enough, I don't really mind giving it away, so others could use it, just trashing).
The simplest way to limit these negative feelings… is to have very little stuff. Don't buy, nor take, stuff that you don't need. Limit yourself to things that are really important, and ideally wait some more, look around, maybe it will turn out you didn't need it after all.
I don't have any plushies (anymore). Most of my old hardware were given "into good hands". Some is still waiting for a good way how to revive it. There are no ornaments over my walls, just an old clock that belonged to my grandmother, one from the "сделано в СССР" era. Its scary how outdated my smartphone firmware is.
I suppose some people will think it's an unhappy life. I don't really know. I don't think I've ever enjoyed mindless consumption. Perhaps as a child — but the excitation of novelty usually quickly gave way to disappointment.
And gifts, gifts are something I truly hate. But it's a separate topic, another kind of trauma.
#ActuallyAutistic #minimalism

This short video is brilliant for revealing stigma
"This is what stigma around autism sounds like to an autistic person"
#ActuallyAutistic #audhd
https://youtu.be/cZiR4o6j4HY

When you begin to see all aspects of your life through the 'oh, I'm #actuallyautistic, that's why I'm having difficulties with this thing' it's such a fascinating eye-opener.
I've suspected for a while and been sure for about a year that I'm autistic and I'm still having firsts. There are still bloopers but mainly it's such a relief to unders…

Sleepily put the #Galaxy6 on its charger. Given the change in weather (which always knocks me out), the emotional labor, and #ActuallyAutistic... well, I wouldn't call it burn-out. More like worn thin... I SLEPT OODLES

Hypothesis: The #ActuallyAutistic, whether religious or not, for the most part do not fear death.

This short video is brilliant for revealing stigma
"This is what stigma around autism sounds like to an autistic person"
#ActuallyAutistic #audhd
https://youtu.be/cZiR4o6j4HY

Autism spectrum, feelings and (against all odds) a Witcher quote
"""
[…] Because you're a witcher and you can't feel any emotion. You don't want to fulfill my request, because you think that you care about her, you think that… Geralt, you are with her only because she wants that, and you'll be with her for as long as she wants to. What you're feeling is a projection of her emotion, her interest in you. To all demons of the Pit, Geralt, you're not a child, you know who you are. You're a mutant. Don't misunderstand me, I'm not saying this to offend or disdain you. I'm just stating a fact. You're a mutant, and one of the basic features of your mutation is your full immunity to emotion. You've been made like this so that you could do your job. Do you understand? You can't feel anything. What you're taking as emotion is actually cell memory, somatic memory, if you know what that means.
"""
(Andrzej Sapkowski, Miecz przeznaczenia, Okruch lodu, Istredd's words, my own translation)
However the context is different, it made me think of my own problems with emotions.
Am I capable of love? Or perhaps I can merely project somebody else's feelings, return them at the best. Or perhaps just intellectually be aware of what I am supposed to feel.
Was perhaps that, what I used to take for "love", actually gratitude that somebody was nice to me, or that she showed interest?
Or perhaps was it that she fitted into an unrealistic model that I've engraved into my personality as a child?
Or just an attachment, a feeling of safety, stemming from a large data set. A conviction that unpleasant surprise is no longer that likely.
Or just desperation, a need that's been forced into me since I was a child and that now I'm trying to attain based on what the media, books and personal stories tell me about it.
Or even something resembling a Stockholm syndrome. "At least she's paying attention to me. I know the worst she could do to me."
#ActuallyAutistic

The iTouch4 not being up to the snuff (several hours of sleep is not 1:45 of sleep) I did some research and bought a #GalaxyWatch6 to track my #ActuallyAutistic #sleep cycle. And lo…

Das kommt mir so bekannt vor
#actuallyautistic #HSP

The humming of the AC is quite soothing. I’ve a predilection for feedback loops too.
#ActuallyAutistic

As with many of the #ActuallyAutistic I've an idiosyncratic #sleep cycle, but surely I get more than 2.5 hours of sleep per night! I suspect the algorithms. Decided to just keep the smartwatch on 24/7 to catch the siesta, naps, etc.

I'm a coauthor on this paper about #autism and #flow states, which I think could be a really useful contribution to how autism is understood.
Led by Brett Heasman, with Gemma Williams, Divine Charura, Lorna G. Hamilton, Damian Milton and me.
#monotropism #actuallyAutistic
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jtsb.12427

"""
Predictive processing also sheds considerable light on a wide range of typical and atypical forms of human experience. A good starting point is to notice that there are two very broad ways for such processing to go wrong. The first is for the brain to underweight predictions and expectations. This will make it hard to detect faint but predictable patterns in a noisy or ambiguous environment. But the second general way to go wrong is for the brain to overweight expectations. In extreme cases, overweighting results in hallucinations. You seem to see and hear things that aren't there, just because […] they are at some level strongly expected.
Autism spectrum condition was initially thought to reflect a specific imbalance of the first kind — a systematic underweighting of prior expectations. […] Underweighting prior knowledge would make weak or elusive patterns hard to detect, and hard to learn too. Such patterns would include things like facial expressions, intonation, or body language, things that delicately hint, in context, at other people's mental states and attitudes. An imbalance of that kind would also make it very hard to learn these patterns in the first place, and even harder to recognize them in situations that are complicated or ambiguous. Recent evidence casts subtle doubt, however, on this bald initial hypothesis. Rather than weakened predictions, intriguing evidence is emerging that suggests that the core issue involves (not underweighting knowledge-based predictions but) actively overweighting the incoming sensory evidence.
[…]
She doesn't just feel "hunger," instead the more fine-grained specifics of the bodily signals dominate. You are feeling a whole lot of something — but what is it? According to the overweighted sensory information theory, autism spectrum condition individuals constantly encounter an excess of highly detailed and apparently very salient sensory information of this kind, coming from both inside their own body and the outside world. This sensory excess impedes the moment-by-moment identification of the broader context or scenario (in this case, hunger). In other words, the emphasis on every aspect of sensory detail effectively makes it impossible to spot the larger forest for the trees.
"""
(Andy Clark, The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality)
#ActuallyAutistic

Pastor asked me in Fellowship Hall if I was doing OK. “Yes, why wouldn’t I be?”, puzzled, thinking her question pertained to my not being a father. “Missing your father”.¢ drops. “My brother has more difficulty, I think”. She nodded in understanding and moved onward.
#FathersDay
#ActuallyAutistic

A bit personal, living in right-wing world and not managing to put your life in order
In a right-wing society, a man's life is expected to follow two main axes (women have it even worse, but I'm going to talk of the gender that I experience first hand):
1. Education − finding a job − gaining experience and promotions − managing to retire.
2. Finding a girlfriend − marriage − having children − rearing children.
Of course, there are other expectations too: buying a car and house, but they can generally be derived from these two axes.
While, technically, the individual elements aren't limited to a specific age, usually you have to deal with them early enough. I suppose many people can confirm that — those who tried to learn a new language, supplement their education, find a better job late in life. But things can get worse.
You could lose your job and discover that our specific experience isn't worth uch. You end up competing for junior positions, with people who are young, healthy and ambitious; with people who don't have all your negative experiences and who can accept a smaller living wage.
You could notice that all your friends have already started their own families, and you didn't have anything even remotely resembling a relationship for over 10 years now; that you find it harder and harder to connect with anyone.
I think that's precisely what being #MADAO is: discovering that you're already (relatively) old and you didn't put your life in order, in time. Add being neuroatypical to that. The awareness that you no longer have the momentum that made it possible for us to overcome difficulties, even if we were only moving through the path of least resistance. Now not only this path is no longer available to us, but also we're being burdened with emotional baggage that makes it almost impossible to move.
And the right-wing society doesn't include a place for people who aren't moving across the only legitimate axis.
#ActuallyAutistic

Well, hey...!
#ActuallyAutistic

Als ein betroffener kann ich diese Ausführungen nur bestätigen. Zum Thema Integration und Unterstützung muss hier noch sehr viel geschehen.
#actuallyautistic #Autismustag #ASS

I've been struggling to sum up this article in a social-media-friendly way, but it's something like this: magic and weirdness are about things that are *not supposed to happen*.
When you are, essentially, one of those things yourself... it's not surprising if magical narratives appeal, and if people sometimes view you through that sort of lens.
#magic #WeirdPride #neurodiversity #ActuallyAutistic
https://weirdpride.day/magic/

Phantom der Oper für Menschen mit Autismus, eine empfehlenswerte Veranstaltung der Vereinigten Bühnen Wien am 14. Juli 2024
#actuallyautistic
https://tvthek.orf.at/profile/Aktuell-nach-fuenf/13887571/Aktuell-nach-fuenf-vom-27-04-2024/14223882/Phantom-der-Oper-fuer-Menschen-mit-Autismus/15627733