avalokitesha
Not officially diagnosed with ADD (on a waitlist though) but autistic, and I second that. I constantly feel like I’m too lazy and yet I got my current job through an internship. It was supposed to last three months and I got an of#er three weeks in, because they were so impressed with my willingness to perform.
I was very bewildered. I still have to remind myself of that when I feel like I’m not getting shit done because my mind refuses to cooperate. What I can convince myself of by now is that those moments are the productivity normal for most people and that even when I’m like that my productivity is high enough - especially because that is usually the moment when I look into things that are not the absolute core of my job.
I’m a test automation engineer, but people explicitly want me to not just automate, but also care for quality topics as a whole, so reading relevant blogs and security news and feeding that back into the team is part of my job.
Still often feel guilty about that, but my boss repeatedly told me I’m absolutely overachieving and fulfilling the job more than he hoped for.
For me, there’s two takeaways:
- you probably have higher standards for yourself that most people, and the moments where your brain cooperates you’re like a racecar compared to a truck, and
- find a niche that interests you is of utmost importance. I was once at an info event for SAP and they said that autistic people are intrinsically motivated and it’s almost impossible to get us motivated with things like more money. It’s definitely true for me, and for my few ADHD friends, though I’m not sure if that is in general true. Accepting this has allowed me to make peace with myself and to take a much healthier approach to jobs than before - “I can work any job, I don’t need my dream job” when I was desperate for a job was the most toxic thing I could do to myself.
The author acknowledges that if you know one autistic, you know one autistic - just like with neurotypical people - and then proceeds to call for us to become one bloc where everyone loves everyone else.
It’s not gonna happen, for the simple reason thät autistics are so diverse. We all know that. It’s the same as asking for all humans to hug and get along because we’re all humans.
It’s one thing to long to be accepted, but another to expect it to happen without a healthy pre-selection. Find the right people and they will accept you. Cast your net to wide and you will be disappointed.
The point I was trying to make is that no one considers neurodivergen people not human. They may sometimes treat us that way, but that’s a different story.
Cvsting two things as opposites doesn’t necessarily mean they are complete and total opposites. You can, and that is a common rhetorical device, pick only some relevant properties of something to make a point.
Humans and animals often get seen as opposing. But they all breathe, they all have vital organs, a lot of the time the same ones. Definitely not total opposites according to you. Our genome is more than 60% identical to a banana (source: https://www.pfizer.com/news/articles/how_genetically_related_are_we_to_bananas), so according to your logic, we cant even oppose human ratio to plants. Btw, chickens and humans have about the same ration of shared genome as bananas and humans.
Your interpretation is way too rigid to ever be able to use the concept of opposite, because you can always find something in common. This is why I think your answer was flawed.
Dude. Just look at the dictionary mening of the words. That’s the actual meaning. If you want to say A, use words that mean A literally. Don’t say A and B and expect us to know that you actually mean C.
You know exactly what you’re doing because you proceed to complain about us wanting to not have poetry and metaphor.
If you think about it as a dialect the only way to learn it is like any other language that doesnt have a textbook: exposure with the native speakers.
I think the point OP was trying to make is that most likely people who know this dialect (i. E. Are used to working with your bess) have an idea of how he wants things.
In this case, the dialect would have a very small subset of speakers (only the people used to working with your boss).
I can see the logic in this argument, but I don’t think such a small subset of speakers qualifies as a dialect and I think your boss is just being difficult. Also I’m pretty sure this would have been an issue for many neurotypicals too, since the info wasnt communicated properly.
I think this is more an example of power play - your boss is in power and how dare you not know? It’s the same treatment we get from NTs everywhere. They are “in power” in the sense that they can expect most people to pick up on their code and don’t have to change. Your boss on the other hand just doesn’t care if you had a chance to understand and that’s why I think he’s just power trippy.
Like liquorice, the really intense one (salmiak). i don’t think English has a word for it, since it was not recognized as a flavor before.
The thing is, I know the flavor but wouldn’t know how to describe it to someone who doesn’t. Asian (Korean and Chinese, to be precise) friends told me it tasted like medicine to them, because apparently it’s a common flavor in traditional medicine for them?
Edited for typos.
I don’t know you or anything about you but what you said, but holy shit. If I was in your care, I would end up more traumatized than before.
Boundaries are a thing. If people refuse to accept boundaries, as some therapist and especially nurses like very much to do, they are toxic. If someone tells you they don’t want to be interrupted sometimes, respect that. Don’t go all “I know what’s best for you”, unless yop’re talking to a literal child - and even then think about whether you’re just telling the child what to do because you don’t think it should be doing what it wants or because it’s really better for the kid.
Some people need alone time. It’s called introversion. An international trip with constant blabbering sounds like a nightmare. I’m imagining they had booked a double room with no option for OP to withdraw. I would melt down in two days.
Not everyone is maladapted and blaming others. Some people have good reason for what you deem unreasonable demands. I don’t know if your client are full-blown adults or have a handicap where their judgement is impaired somewhat, but I want to encourage you to stop and think whether what you’re teaching them actually helps them and fits their individual needs or whether you you think you figured out a blanket approach that you try to get everyone to follow, no matter their mental needs.
Edit: I, too, have a relationship, a great circle of friends and a well-paying full-time job, if you want to claim authorities in something here. And I do set healthy boundaries like OP does. There is no one-size-fits-all.
I’m kinda frowning at the thought that you requiring time to yourself and taking care of yourself is avoiding demands. If my therapist told me that I’d rip him a new one. Thankfully he doesn’t and actually encourages me to remove myself from unhealthy situations.
My social battery isn’t endless. My processing ability isn’t endless. I recharge both by spending time alone in my thoughts and hopefully getting into a flow state with whatever I’m doing.
I’m lucky enough that I have a job where that happens - I’m partially able to offset the social and mental cost of a job by simply working. But other than that I allow myself to not be productive.
My awesome therapist once prescribed me to get bored. Sit on the couch, stare out the window and try not to do anything. My brain needs that time to process everything happening during the day. Scrolling the web, comics, news that interest me? Also helping to process and get lost in a flow state.
Once I started allowing myself that, I fell asleep much better, because the input throughout the day gets processed througout the day and not at night. If you always keep busy, try to always be productive, the whole input waiting to be processed builds up like water behind a dam. Once you lay down, the dam breaks and you can’t stop. It’s not a bad habit to break. It’s just a necessity for your brain to do.
If you’re anything like me, the only thing you’re doing “wrong” is not creating little islands of boredom and flow. If people refuse to accept that, they are the problem. They are crossing boundaries without a second thought. They may think they are helpful but they are not. To me it sounds like you are having your best interest in mind and acting on it despite this weird feeling of “but they love me, I should be grateful”.
Love is about a lot of things, and respect is a big one. If boundaries are ignored, these people are acting toxic. I know this feels unhelpful, because you want human connection, but imho these people most likely took more out of you than they gave you. Maybe your friend has his own issues that make him not able to shut up, but it can’t be you who pays the price. Maybe that girl thought you need someone to take care of you and who knows better than you and guide you through life, and that’s why she nagged.
Long story short: no matter the intention, not everyone who cares about you will be actually helpful. Not everything is your fault. Keep doing you, identify your needs, communicate them (it sounds like you already did that, which is huge) and then enforce them.
From what you mentioned, I actually think you’re doing great. Took me years of therapy to get to that point.
I always thought it was just not possible to measure the state without changing it, so we have no way of even guessing. Schrödinger’s Cat is actually a terrible analogy imho, I always liked to think of it like christmas presents - you don’t know what the inside looks like until you open it. It could be anything!
But then again, once we open it we know it has always been that. Maybe a chameleon in a box and we can’t know what color it had at a given time, even if we open it later? :::