OMG that sock thing! Its like its designed to just hit the cuticle of my toenail bed! WHY! Why would they do that!!
You don’t know sock torture until you’ve had your fishnet stockings stretch so that the netting GOES BETWEEN YOUR TOES! [I feel like @Melizmatic would get this one ;)] - if you’re ever at a goth bar and you see someone ripping their shoes off, this is why. Fishnets between the toes man, terrible terrible pain.
My Nana taught me how to sew when I a kid, didn’t stick, but I did learn how to un-pick a seam and close it again so i could remove tags and it wouldn’t be noticeable.
Oh man I still get that way with some tags. I have noticed they have quit putting them on the neckline or just print it on the cloth which I find awesome!
That sounds like the description of every kid in my elementary school gifted and talented classes, actually. I hope that he doesn’t have too many mediocre teachers, because that can be soul-crushing for a bright + sensitive kid.
I really think these things should be taken seriously and people should be diagnosed where necessary, but I honestly think that the knowledge itself is the main value - for the children, parents and teachers. I don’t see myself as broken for having any of these issues and I am able to live a fairly normal life, but I echo quite a few people with late diagnoses who say that it’s helped them to deal with a lot of self hatred and problems functioning in society and relationships just to know that they are not broken and that they can be proud of how their brain works - and understand it.
Our son is autistic too - knowing some of the issues means that we’re able to discuss them with him and understand his mind better. We don’t give him any medicine at this point. We know how to act when he has a meltdown, and why he’s doing it. They’re minor inconveniences and he doesn’t seem to be too badly affected by them. In any case, they don’t happen that often because we know how to avoid them a lot of the time. We know what problems he may have socialising and studying, and are able to develop strategies to deal with that. He also has problems understanding his emotions and those of others, so we talk about things using the movie Inside Out. I hope that his early diagnosis will mean that he will function better than I did, but it certainly doesn’t mean that we’ll be pressuring him to conform, treating him as “special” or giving him medication if we can avoid it (doctors here are quite reluctant to prescribe medication if it’s not strictly necessary).
I hadn’t even thought of the sock thing until @LDoBe brought up shirt tags; I thought I was the only weird kid who was driven nuts by his sock seams! I feel so… normal
I disagree strongly. I had loads of fun with strobos at eye-level, only supported by caffeinated water and beer.
Pro-tip for connoisseurs of eye and brain-melting light shows: The hands-down craziest lighting operator presents his mastery on the last day of the festival Das Fest at the Feldbühne stage.
The final two acts this year are FùGù Mango and Kofelgschroa, both totally unknown to me.
See you in Karlsruhe : )
More on topic - I clicked through a few of the tests and
learnt that I really really dislike to choose extreme answers - the yes/a little/no format was especially stupid. Does the DSM has a code for my inability to see something as black or white without restrictions?
the results are inconclusive, I have neurodiverse and -typical traits. So a long-standing suspicion of mine seems to be true: I simply dont like my fellow humans that much : D
The degree to which modern psychiatry has pathologized atypical human behavior is ridiculous. That ‘D’ at the end of DSM diagnoses is critical. If there’s no problem, there’s no disorder.
There are a number of atypical behaviours that will create problems for a person or people around them. It doesn’t help to ignore, stigmatise or overmedicate them, but acceptance and targeted support can help, if the diagnosis is in the interests of the person themselves rather than pharma companies. This is the same for any issue.
Your neurodiverse (Aspie) score: 114 of 200
Your neurotypical (non-autistic) score: 106 of 200
You seem to have both neurodiverse and neurotypical traits
Finding a good counselor for oneself is frustrating enough. I can’t imagine the level of frustration that your friend, a parent, might have to go through before finding one.
A good counselor understands the concept of adaptability when addressing concerns (the parent’s or the child’s) regarding thought or behavior and considers this concept one of the cornerstones of their practice. Adaptability emphasizes interventions that focus on resolving incongruences between the functioning of the client and their environment, rather than the client themselves.
Framed this way, the immediate focus becomes clear: determine those environmental factors that can be adapted to the client’s needs, then turn attention to helping the client adapt to environmental factors beyond their control.
Medication may be required to scaffold this process. A good counselor will be able to determine if medication is required to maintain this process as well.
Not the best example (it was more pronounced for e.g. Reptile Youth or GODS), but gives an impression of the perverse delight to irritate the audience. Crazyness is not measured in the amount of moving heads and lasers.
Your neurodiverse (Aspie) score: 123 of 200
Your neurotypical (non-autistic) score: 89 of 200
You seem to have both neurodiverse and neurotypical traits
My therapist thought I was autistic for the first couple of weeks, and in a lot of ways I seem to behave very much as a stereotypical aspie except that I’m extremely good at reading other people’s emotions - which seems to be pretty defining, but I’m not sure. To me, the most natural way to engage with other people would be to directly engage with whatever emotion they are experiencing or to have totally unemotional conversations. But it turns out that most social interaction involves obfuscating emotions.
So while a good aspie friend of mine would find themself in situations where they didn’t know what emotions other people were feeling, I instead find myself in situations where I know what emotion someone else is feeling and I struggle to figure out how I ought to act to engage with the emotions and ideas they are comfortable presenting instead of cutting through that. The result is similar, though. I do the high-functioning thing of coming up with scripts and modes of behaviour that seem normal to other people. But it’s all extremely intellectualized. I mostly don’t know how I feel about what I am doing (or at all), I just run through the script to make things work on a superficial level. If I genuinely like someone I have a horrible time trying to express that, because my scripts are all about getting along, not about being genuine.
It’s funny, I can only imagine that saying I enjoyed traditional dating on that quiz pegged me as more typical than atypical, but what I liked about traditional dating was that it let me apply scripts to romantic situations. If I met a friend of a friend who I was interested in, I had no idea what to do. If I met someone on the internet and we met with the explicit understanding that this was to see if we were romantically interested in one another, then I had a script for expressing interest - ask them out on a second date. The thing I liked most about it was that if we didn’t like each other we got to walk away and never talk again and that wasn’t a problem.
Anyway, my understanding is that this might be what Asperger’s is all about. I remember reading that for a long time people thought that people with autism were hyposensitive to pain because of the way they reacted to things like needles. But when they used physiological measurements instead of behavioural indicators, it seemed like those with autism were more sensitive to pain, they just didn’t show it. If you find other people’s feeling traumatic, you are going to either block them out or frantically try to control them. So I wonder whether I have a similar underlying way of receiving the world as people with autism, but a very different mechanism for handling that.
The thing about most people that allows them to deal so well with multiple inputs is that they don’t actually pay attention. I think a lot of people do things like that because they don’t like silence. They don’t put on two TV shows, one on each monitor, because they want to watch both shows.
Totally agree. It’s the ‘I never knew I had [insert psychiatric disorder here], my life seems to have been going alright’ stories in which these people subsequently seek counseling for a disorder they don’t have and end up on medications they don’t need all because our culture has internalized the DSM as a lingua franca for any state of mind other than euthymia—a mindset that way too many psychiatrists and psychologists seem to unwittingly encourage.
I want to be absolutely clear: I am 100% pro-psychiatry. Medication (if nothing else is working sufficiently) can be a godsend. What concerns me is the increasing number of people who are convinced, despite evidence to the contrary, that they need both.
I usually had to spend a few minutes fidgeting with the seams until they were adjusted just right.
That and this:
The little figure there, brushing the nipple… drove. me. crazy.
I avoided polo’s for years.
I consider myself to be pretty well adjusted so even when I don’t feel like I “fit in” as much as I should it usually doesn’t bother me much. Took the quiz anyway:
Honestly, I’m having a hard time interpreting this. Oh well.
And aren’t these the problem of culture and medical care anyway? I haven’t personally seen any downsides, been pressured to take medication or stigmatised. I just had some interviews for the diagnosis and was directed to resources like literature or support groups. I found it easier to explain to friends that while I was very pleased to see them, there are occasions when I need to retreat. It’s easier to plan my life. I’m aware of issues that can cause big problems in relationships and harm people I love. Here’s a Quora answer that highlights some of the problems that can happen in America though:
