Warning: r slurs in the follow ups in the thread.

https://twitter.com/puella_meiberu/status/1708621428327657816

my reactions are as follows: Even if thats true, which it isnt for every autistic person, the reality is right now is that jobs dont have accomodations for neurdivergent thinking so its irrelevant to say that. Like we can push for and advocate for more inclusive workplaces, but its not the reality autsitic people are dealing with rn.

Especially since like, there are jobs that autistic people can do well but most of them are not "entry level" jobs that anyone can get without qualifications. Retail and food service jobs are near impossible for most autistic people and those are the jobs you can get easy. Manual labor jobs arent much better. I've worked at an after school program but I only lasted as long as I did because my original boss let me get away with not "running activities" the reality is that even if you're good with kids like me most jobs with kids have expectaitons that arent just "being good with kids" that arent good for autistic people. Idk about office stuff.

It reminds me of my ex-friend who claimed to be communist but had a lot of reactionairy attitudes. He always told me that if I ever called him on something and told him it was ableist he would take it seriously, and even called out others when they treated me abliestly. But one day when he posted on his Twitter shitting on Spoon Theory I texted him to call him on that and he started ranting all this shit about how you can "always push through" and talking about how his manual labor job cured his depression (and acting like that will be the case for everyone if they just push, and that manual labor is a cure all) and then started accusing me of wasting my life and making excuses and using my disability as a criticism shield. We no longer talk much lol.

Quite revelatory!

In case you're interested in taking them too:

• Autism Spectrum Quotient
• CAT-Q

Still kinda reeling from the information that it is not typical to practice facial expressions and body language 😂🤦 amongst other things, of course, but yeah. Wow.

There is so much of my experience of the world that I have genuinely spent 40+ years thinking was the same for everyone, I just dealt with it worse than they did.

I have no friends or partner, I’ve been very lonely.

When I go out to try to meet people, no one ever comes up to me and starts talking to me. But if I want to meet someone I have to do exactly that. But like, why should I have to be the one to initiate 100% of the time? Shouldn’t it be 50/50? (And I’m not really talking about societal expectations of the man initiating with the woman, I’d rather have a boyfriend anyway.)

I have such a hard time initiating conversations with people, to the point where I mostly just stress out and sit there alone. If someone initiated with me things might go better. But they just don’t.

The only reasonable explanation I can think of is that literally no one has any interest in me.

I was diagnosed autistic in recent months.

But I know I shouldn't take ABA therapy.

What should I take instead? Even the psychiatrist seems to think I should take it.

I suppose it makes sense. I have no close friends and I completely avoid social situations unless I have to be in them. It would explain why I always feel like the center of (negative) attention in any given room, or why I always feel like I'm annoying people or that I sound smug.

The doctor told me people with AVPD often have trouble understanding who they are as a person, and can't latch onto specific identities, but I haven't thought about that much. The pamphlet and stuff I'm reading online also seems to suggest AVPD has such overlap with social/general anxiety they're almost the same thing.

Anyone else have experience with this?

Just saying because nearly every person I know who has ADHD and/or Autism (including myself) seems to care less about people knowing they're into "childish" things.

Also the idea that this is a new phenomenon because Millenials and older gen Z are "soft" or stunted in some way.

I mean, boomers have model trains and and cars. So did their parents. My grandma used to knit herself plushies. This isn't new. You don't suddenly stop having your old likes because you reach a certain age.

I spent the past 8 days working at my office job with shitty office chairs and poor ergonomics at all the desks. I have been crying literally every day during that time, overwhelmed by noise and executive function running on overdrive and other kinds of sensory overload, and all the while this chronic pain just creeps up in the background and slowly ratchets up the baseline level of pain I'm experiencing. This leads to me not really perceiving the pain in detail, and it overloading my emotional/sensory processing, and my brain starts trying to assign meaning to pointless agony. It's time for anxiety! But it's always time for anxiety. :galaxy-brain: :astronaut-1:

Got some physical therapy today and the pain is much less and I can think. I can actually identify things. But still need to vent.

It overlaps with hunger and thirst, too, which I lose the ability to distinguish between as well as my stress level increases and compounds and compresses into a horrid little knot between my shoulders, and I feel the incalculable stress of masking for social interaction and suppressing all my obnoxious stims and finding ways to sublimate them into quieter, less disruptive ones, and the constant anxiety of not measuring up, overwhelming feelings of being a failure, all the intrusive thoughts that I can usually dodge and ignore and push aside when I'm not in crippling, excruciating pain. I really need to work on myself, I want to start creating art again without the thoughts pushing out any chance of concentrating on what I'm doing or choosing what to draw, which just might be the main actual thing getting in my way.

I've been working so hard on myself for the past year, seeing progress, stumbling, falling, getting up, pushing up against walls of pain and pushing my limits and trying to find the balance so I'm not outright hateful in my self-criticism, without giving myself a pass on things I know are bad for me or things I want to improve or stop doing. It doesn't help that everything is so damn expensive now, that everything fun to do is so far away and costs so much in gas I'm better off not doing it in the long run. I'm so goddamn lonely but I don't have any free time when there's actually something to do, and I have no confidence in myself whatsoever when it comes to dating or talking to women or even assessing myself for attractiveness. I'm torn between knowledge that I have good traits (powerful voice, I'm funny, I can cook, I'm working hard at self-improvement which I'm told is in and of itself attractive to people) and the crippling insecurity I experience throughout so much of my life. I need to speak to a therapist, I think, but I'm so fucking broke all the time, I'm terrible with numbers, looking at my finances stresses me out so much that the stress can overwhelm me and shut me down. I'm afraid to write for fear of what it will reveal about me, weaknesses people can use to hurt me (trust issues yeah), fear of being judged as a shitty writer with a frivolous mind and a pathetic, atrophied soul. Fear of being judged as childish for how much trouble I have just organizing my life.

And it all just blends together into a black sea of negativity that I can drown in if I'm not extremely careful in how I manage my thoughts and behavior. I need people in my life, and I've gone through social skills training to address the shit I didn't pick up when I was younger and nobody had the patience to teach me, but being pretty good at small talk and making witty banter is not enough for me, and I don't know how to seek deeper connections. I'm terrified that I'll be seen as creepy or pushy or weird (that last one happens no matter how much I try to hide it) or having my intentions misinterpreted because it's happened so many times before. I feel trapped by chains of my own making and powerless to do anything to improve my life. I'm painfully aware of how much my being poor constricts my agency, and my problems with organization and prioritization and memory and numbers keep fucking me on that and nothing I try seems to work.

Not sure what to do with this. Just needed to vent. And I needed people who understand, or maybe understand, to see it. Because I feel so alone. And like such a fucking weirdo nobody will ever like me for me.

Spent 5 hours on my phone lol

ADHD gang

I hate this shit so much.

I don't block people on Twitter, it's just not something I like to do, but I fucking had to with this shithead.

Screenshots later if I feel like it, but they aren't really needed. Here's the account, check the tweets and replies if you really wanna see it.

Oh and what was it in response to? Me suggesting Ukrainians shouldn't fucking kill themselves when given the opportunity to surrender.

Edit: and at some point in responding to that shithead, Twitter decided to lock some of my account's features. idk what they were but it said 12 hours but I don't see a difference.

I'm on concerta for ADHD and it works pretty good for me. It's no miracle cure but I feel a lot better compared to the time before I took them. I'm more focused, less tired, less depressed etc.

But there's one thing that bugs me. It has reduced my sex drive a lot. It's not that I had a ton of sex before, mental health, the logistics of being a family with children and medical issues got (and still gets) in the way. But at least I was horny.

Now? There's almost no horny left, and I miss it. And even when I do get horny it is a lot harder to get physically excited, sometimes impossible.

It sucks. I like the meds for making my life bearable and I hate the idea of having to ask for new meds, finding the right dose etc. Dexamphetamine and lisdexamphetamine are also several times more expensive.

Is this a problem other people have? How do you deal with it?

I don't want :volcel-judge: to win this one.

Capitalist society certainly exaggerates our symptoms, but doesn't cause them. Telling us we're methheads because of capitalism is not a good look.

"nt's see explanations as deflection, which like to a degree it is (because rejection hurts) but you or me would see it as communicating that we're not going to continue the harm further bringing up the point is seen by them as you "fighting" or "avoiding accountability" which they then feel a need to counter"

RSD fucking sucks because I literally CANNOT HELP the urge to explain its pathological and I don't think I can cope with this it involves controlling my instinctive behavior in ways I don't think I can manage to actually do. I am totally fucked this world will never have room for me in it I am so upset.

So, I have autism and also very bad social anxiety, so I don't have a massive amount of social interactions, so it is easy for me to remember pretty much all of them. This also means that I spend way too much time obsessing over any significant interactions I have, particularly negative ones, which then just make me feel more upset and anxious than I was at the time and sometimes leads to a breakdown. I am also completely unable to deal with conflict

For whatever reason this website, unlike the original subreddit is way more invested in dunking on each other imo. This site has a very hostile atmosphere where it feels like everyone is constantly at each others throats and it makes me just not want to come here at all.

I also want to take exception to some of the recent posts by @TransComrade69 about the Beyond Pink or Blue book, particularly the part in the original post about it only being like 170 pages, so you could read it in like 3 days, so if you don't, it is reactionary. No, one of the symptoms of autism is executive function issues, which I suffer from quite significantly. I could read that book, but it would require me using a lot of energy and necessetitate me neglecting other parts of my life. I struggle hard enough to read books necessary for classes, if I were to try and read that book, it would take months, if not over a year for me to complete it. So, while I understand why @TransComrade69 wants people to read the book and is pushing it, as I am sure there is lots of valuable information within it, I do not at all appreciate the tone that was taken in parts of the original post.

Anyway, I've deleted this account twice already, and I'm doing it for the 3rd and probably final time after this. Social media in general is bad for a lot of these things, but this site kind of takes it to another level.

I've always treasured the fact that I'm weird, and as such have lots of little fun memories that I think back to positively of times when I was a fun little weirdo, but those times are the exception not the rule of my childhood, I'm sure I'm not alone in that

I was diagnosed with ADHD and started on medication at 12, but not really told anything about what it meant for me or how to deal with it, and when I was 18 -literally when my parents dropped me off at college- was told I was autistic

Edit: don't forget to upvote posts here so they're more visible and people can find the community!

lying in bed quietly trying to fall asleep is terrible. My brain doesn't stop, it's like a pitching machine that's gone rouge and I'm the batter stuck in the cage.

Whenever I'm finally about to fall asleep, I notice myself falling asleep and become fully awake, because my brain goes "Yes! I'm falling asleep! Hurrah!"

Every time :angery:

For me, it's messing up/ doing something socially unacceptable or hurting someones feelings without noticing. In my life I've done this many times, and the times it happened the worst were when I was having a lot of fun, and had no idea I was doing something wrong. I'm the king of miscommunication.

I had a long history of this, especially as a kid, and because of it for a long time whenever I was having a lot of fun in a social situation I'd suddenly remember past times when I messed up, and then I'd go down in a self-doubt spiral and it'd kill my fun and start acting weird.