ah, I’ve thought of a way. It’s like trying to keep your hand in a fire. A few sparks are startling, although harmless – a very minor trigger.
A small candle-flame hurts, but you can recover from it later. A minute would be painful and damaging, but you could be OK. that’s a medium trigger.
And a major trigger? Yeah, when you* tell me to “get over it” how about first you try holding your hand in a bonfire for a little while. Your body will almost certainly force you to withdraw, whether with pain, nausea, fear, or plain passing out. Sensory triggers can be that strong. The best way of “coping” with these is often to avoid them entirely.
*not you but our theoretical strawman
Fortunately my ADHD doesn’t have any of the last kind of trigger. My PTSD does though! Yay :(
Another who was reading well before speaking (at around 2.5 y o), etc. here, revisiting this thread. I was “tested” for autism at 6 (?) by a teacher who apparently saw something, and was told so at the time (a silly thing for a parent to have done, but I digress. :-) This resulted in both a favor and a curse - autism no (I’ve come to suspect the correct answer would have been “yes”); got “high IQ”/bored (highly questionnable concept and measure I know). This was a huge piece of luck in that it lead scholarships to private HS and a college that I would never have been able to afford and I likely wouldn’t have attended college at all (I don’t come from college-educated people). But while it kept me from falling through the cracks, it also heaped mammoth expectations on a very young person living in an unsupportive environment, while denying me whatever services that an autism diagnosis could have provided. I’m older than many of you posting recently, I think - and it’s amazing in retrospect that a teacher went down this route at all given my socio-economic background and that autism really was not something even considered, I don’t think, for girls who paid no attention in class because they were busy drawing elaborate maps of places that don’t exist, or who went into excruciating detail on the distinction between “bronzed” and “purple” grackles to people who had zero interest in the topic.
Well, then. This is certainly something I’ve spent some time on, especially lately - not “extensive” as I’ve had to spend much of my life focusing on someone else’s (worse) issues, which also made me assume I was mostly a vicitm of trauma - but, yes.
Agree that that language, and the very concept, is problematic. I masked too well, I think; I continue to do so, and it’s probably more exhausting than I’ll ever know. I’m not sure whether having had such a diagnosis would have changed things, but some clarity alone would feel helpful at this point.
On another note, I love using iNaturalist, have found my interactions to have been 99% positive (on no other social media platform is that even conceivable), and even find that it helps me in some facets of my work. (I’m maybe disproportionately devastated, today, that my app has been continually crashing, and worried that I’m about to lose quite a few un-uploaded observations. But that’s a new topic.)
ha! not sure if it got buried in the thread but… drawing maps of fictional places is a pretty big recurring ‘obsession’ i have if i’m in sensory distress or bored, see here for both old and recent ones. I was so shocked to learn that others do this too, pretty frequently, pretty much always autistic people. I am 42 and when i was little i went through a billion doctors and evaluations, my understanding is that at the time i was not given an autism diagnosis because i was hyperverbal and at the time a speech delay was part of the diagnosis (this was like 1985). But most of the medical records are lost because until my recent journey of discovery i just tried to torpedo any evidence of my past at all.
soooooo many autistic people have trauma, to the point that many if not most well known autistic traits are actually autistic trauma traits. It’s hard for us to process trauma i think, it really lingers.
anyway as with anyone, if you want autistic community resources let me know
Your maps are awesome.:-) It was the discussion of maps above that first got my attention here; I hadn’t known (or really thought about it) that other people did this. At the time I didn’t think I was being weird at all; the other kids seemed to think it was cool. My teacher didn’t.
Oh. Not the medical records part (never went down that path), but I understand quite a bit about this.
well, it was when i was a kid and i was scared of the doctors and wasn’t really enjoying it. But yeah. i’ve done the torpedoing thing more than once. It;s a masking thing i guess.
This thread is very long and overwhelming but also wonderful. I keep not replying to it because there’s too much to read and I feel like I’m supposed to read forum threads in their entirety before responding, but it expands faster than I can read it. And it’s pretty emotional content to read so I can’t read it very fast.
It’s emotional content because I have a “oh wow I’m not the only one who does this” reaction to a high percentage of the posts <3
I think for this thread it’s fine to toss in your thoughts or personal anecdotes withou reading the whole thing. If you want to. But yeah, feel free to ask me if you want more info on any of this, or resources.
Simple: because they were assumed to be naughtiness and misbehavior. That is the default grownup diagnosis of anything a child does that annoys or inconveniences them. I remember in the early grades of school, stimming most of the time (tapping out rhythms on my desk), and not only teachers but the other kids, too, assumed I was “doing it for attention.” I really do think that homeschooling saved me from disaster.
I have heard people speak of a certain “last resort” in child discipline; well, from my observations, considering the possibility that it might be a neurological disorder is the real “last resort,” after they have tried everything else.
I find it very difficult to interact with people in real life. Online it’s almost impossible. I just don’t understand a lot of what people say. In “real life” I can work around this, but online it’s really hard. Comments I make online go around and around and around and around in my head for days or months or years, especially if I feel I’ve said something wrong. But what can I do? I love nature and want to be part of a community. Even though I have no real understanding of how to relate to people I am trying. I will make mistakes and, trust me, I will remember and dwell on these mistake for years and years. But I love nature and always mean the best in everything I say.
the whole idea of “being normal” is kind of bullshit. every “normal” person* I’ve ever met has been boring, petty, and generally unpleasant to be around. I would much, much rather be around someone who is kind and thoughtful.
*as in, someone who goes out of their way to be seen as normal, average, and 100% quirk-free
Sometimes, and maybe quite often, there really are days when it is the other person who is wrong and rude and has problems relating online to other people.
To me that feels normal. Sometimes I have to go back to that comment and try to find a way forward. iNat says - be kind. And most of us are. You are, among friends here.
I try to be normal, I honestly do. But I think my use of words lets me down. I rarely address a person. I use words like “i”, “my”, “think”, profusely in my comments. I use these words to subtly (or not) suggest that my comments are my opinion and I’m not attacking a person but rather a concept. This works well in my real life interactions because we’re always arguing anyway and disagreements are the norm. Unfortunately I don’t think it comes across well on a social websites and I think that my use of these words come across as… unusual. I think the nuance is lost somehow and I sound weird or something.
awwwwww. i don’t want you to feel broken or like you should be ‘normal’. you are good how you are, but you’re trying to socially interact based on social rules and cues that don’t work with your brain type. If you haven’t yet i’d suggest trying interactions with the autistic community online. When you all know you’re autistic it makes the communication way easier, at least for me.
But we are all different. I mostly do great online unless i’m having emotional regulation issues. On person depends on the situation. Phone? can’t really do it at all. You can also message me but i sometimes dont get forum notifications because personal messages get mixed with all the moderation messages. I’m just ‘charlie’ on the main iant site too
I don’t see anything weird in how you use those words and how you write everything overall, only unusual thing is that you think that you talk in an unusual way! Don’t care too much about what others may think if they don’t say it to you, most likely what you think they think is not true as we can’t see from their perspective.
yes Craig you sound like a valuable person with worthwhile things to share, just you’ve become less confident based on other people’s misunderstanding of you and possibly misunderstanding of yourself.
