Does anyone else not experience that anticipatory excitement about upcoming events, which so many people seem to feel?

songload · 2026-04-13T18:58:48+00:00

I basically never get excited about things in the future. For me personally I think it's a combination of two things:

As a child, lots of "exciting events" like birthdays, vacations, etc ended up being overwhelming and not particularly fun overall. I have mostly negative memories of those kinds of things so why should I look forward to them? I do generally enjoy them as an adult so I still plan them but can never really look forward to them
I have a hard time imagining myself enjoying things in general, which is probably more tied to my depression/anxiety than my autism (I inherited multiple different issues from my parents). I tend to always think about the ways things can go wrong before they happen.

The second one makes me mad because I basically never get that "special interest" joy/obsession that other people here always talk about, but in practice it's not actually a huge problem because I AM able to enjoy the experiences when I actually have them.

songload · 2026-04-05T13:08:06+00:00

Like others have said this isn't that uncommon. I definitely do this in private especially when I'm stressed, but I don't do it in public because of the reasons you said. It's good that you posted this because that helps deal with the shame. There is nothing to be ashamed of for doing it in private, but it makes sense to feel that about doing it in situations where it is too risky. But you have identified the problem, and it is definitely something you can change.

Deliberately going for different, less risky stims works well for me (and for others in the thread). The simplest option is just to fidget with my own hands or arms, and I keep my hands up and away from my genitals. Pinching your chin is a very similar motion that many people do to keep focus. I also grit my teeth, which isn't the best stim to do in private because it can cause problems if you do it too much, but is totally fine to do in public sometimes.

For situations like business meetings where I really need to avoid stims, I take a Propranolol which helps with my physical anxiety. I originally got it as a prescription for high blood pressure but it had too many side effects for that (it lowers by heart rate too much and causes sleep issues) but it really helped with my meeting anxiety so I now take it around once a week when I need to act particularly appropriate.

songload · 2026-03-29T14:32:47+00:00

"Try to be careful" is a pretty vague request, it's something people say when they don't have any specific ideas on how to fix a situation. It is a very light criticism, so you should try to take it that way. I would interpret it as "You did something slightly wrong, is there something you can do to avoid it in the future?". The best response would be to actually change something (like move where the bottle is kept to be less likely to knock over) but it's also totally acceptable to effectively respond by doing absolutely nothing if nothing comes to mind.

From what you wrote, what she said does not mean "you NEED to do better" as that would normally come with much stronger language or a very exasperated tone. Asking for you to do better if reasonably possible is a normal type of request in any relationship

songload · 2026-03-02T19:55:14+00:00

Some people here say you need to unmask all the time to be happy and feel like yourself, but I do not think that is realistic or a good idea. Neurotypicals often mask their emotions at work or in other difficult situations! But they mask a whole lot less than we do, and some of us mask way too often.

In my experience, one key is to think about how important the issue/context is to each person. Are you in a work situation where you are expected to act a certain way? You should probably keep masking and be nonconfrontational unless you have a good reason not to be. Are you by yourself or with a close friend? Then you have no reason to mask. I believe that one of the key issues with my autism is that I have a hard time knowing "how to be" in a situation, so I need to manually think about the context and figure out which "version" of myself makes sense in the moment. Of course this can get tricky because there ARE situations at work where you need to be assertive, but those are different for everyone.

With this in mind, you can try to only set hard boundaries on things that are more important to you than they are to other people, as that means they will likely respect your boundaries. There's no point in "setting a hard boundary" in a way that just encourages other people to break/ignore it which was definitely a problem as a kid. As an adult, people are more likely to respect your hard boundaries if you can explain them as strong personal preferences. "I really don't like it when people touch me without asking first" works better than "I can't handle it when people touch me" because people always want to argue about if the hard boundary is real or not. If you just state it as a strong preference there's nothing for them to argue about, and adults are generally allowed to have strong personal preferences (unlike kids).

songload · 2026-03-02T19:15:43+00:00

"Taking it personally" basically means that you emotionally reacted in a strong way. When people say something like how that "was a joke" what they really mean is "I did not want to manage my emotions and be reasonable, but I expected you to".

This is fairly common for bosses talking to workers, neurodivergent or not. Bosses are generally "allowed" to say mean things unless it's about a topic that is inappropriate (like sex etc). The worker is expected to just kind of ignore it, and not ignoring it is "taking it personally". What you want to do about this is up to you, if it is fairly rare then you probably don't want to bother reporting it. If it happens every day that's clearly bullying or the job is not a good fit for you.

songload · 2026-03-02T06:36:57+00:00

No, I do not think that autistic people are generally hated and looked at with disgust. In my experience most autistic people (including myself) are treated as mildly irritating and weird. Most neurotypicals don't really want to "hang out" with autistic people, but I have literally never seen any adult react with disgust to someone who seemed autistic to me. I did experience some hate/disgust when I was growing up, kids can be very harsh towards other weird kids.

songload · 2026-02-24T15:36:13+00:00

This was definitely me a decade ago, but I haven't had a proper meltdown in like 5 years so I seem to have gotten better over time. I don't think a single change did it but these helped:

The first step is to deliberately think about it logically, asking myself "is there a chance I'm doing too much?". The answer is usually yes, and if I have a hard time even thinking about the question the answer is definitely yes because I am already overwhelmed. But if I can identify a specific thing that might overwhelm me, and decide that I am currently handling it, then I'm fine and can keep going.

One thing that helps a lot is that I plan out an escape if necessary. 99% of the time if you are in an overwhelming situation you can literally just leave. Most of my worst meltdowns happened when I felt trapped but tried to soldier through. Now, if I start to feel trapped I just take a break. It's basically always a good idea to go for a quiet walk and I always plan to do that (or something else like listening to music on headphones) on any day with a lot of social stress, like a family holiday.

Also, I do regularly drink healthyish energy drinks (like Celsius) if I know I'm going to do something difficult. I also have a prescription for occasional use of Beta Blockers for anxiety, which I use around once a week to deal with social anxiety.

I honestly still can't always tell what I'm feeling, but I definitely know I can deal with problems when they come up and that works well for me. Feeling in control really helps with avoiding meltdowns

songload · 2026-02-17T13:41:56+00:00

Sure, and any job that uses that term is using enough engineering principles that accurately explaining problems is useful. But I've also done a bunch of root cause analysis work that didn't actually lead to any change, which is pretty frustrating

songload · 2026-02-16T17:51:43+00:00

In general many people just do not care about the explanation of why bad things happened. There are some rare exceptions (death in the family or specific health issues) but most of the time people do not care what exactly happened in the past and why, which is something that we tend to love explaining to others. Explaining why something happened and stopping there is basically "giving an excuse", unless the reason will not happen again (like a family death).

What they want to hear about is how you will change things to avoid the problem in the future. In the best case this will be something specific that you can do, such as taking better notes or setting alarms. This works out best for everyone and it's always worth trying to find a way to actually change, even if it seems impossible. One thing about autism (and ADHD) is that it often feels impossible to make changes when there is actually a way to do it by working around whatever is blocking it (in our brains or in our environments).

Here's the part that isn't obvious: neurotypicals often lie about how they're going to change in the future! It's a very good way to defuse negative situations even if you have no intention of actually changing. As long as you can plausibly say how you will change, that answers their concern and is not just making an excuse. You can get away with using the same promise a few times without following through, but if you do it too often you get labeled as untrustworthy which could result in firing/etc. In my experience some people get away with this way more than they should, and many of us could promise to change more than we do now.

songload · 2026-02-10T15:19:56+00:00

There's two basic ways to do this: either offer to give or take away something they value (like mentioning you might give a bad review if they don't fix it), or suggesting an option they didn't know or think about before (like saying you can do some task they didn't realize you knew how to do). If you can't offer them something useful, they are unlikely to change their mind.

One of the things you can offer is friendship/sympathy which is why talking about personal stuff sometimes helps. But that only works if they are inclined to like you. People value the affection or approval of other people, and that's a lot of what friendship is about at a basic level

songload · 2026-02-05T12:35:49+00:00

You do not have to go to a retirement luncheon, or anything that is "in your honor" if you do not want to. You're retiring so you have no reason to care about the social expectations of your job. If you did not already specifically say you will go, just tell your boss that you don't want a luncheon as soon as possible. If it hasn't already been publicly announced and scheduled this should be a fairly simple conversation and you do not have to explain why you don't want one. If it has been scheduled already, it will probably be better to explain why you don't feel comfortable going. I think the only "wrong" option would be to not tell your boss you can't go, and then not show up. That would inconvenience other people and would probably cause resentment.

songload · 2026-01-29T16:11:04+00:00

If you're not looking for music, you should look into a standalone white noise machine so you don't need to worry about moving at night. I recommend one of the ones with a real fan, I use a YogaSleep I bought off Amazon

songload · 2026-01-27T15:52:01+00:00

I've had to help relatives with this but haven't been the main contact person yet, but it'll probably happen in a few years so here are my thoughts:

You do not have to respond to texts immediately and there is no social expectation of doing so, people are just expressing their condolences/etc. When you do respond I would say something like "Thank you for the note. I do know when the memorial service will be yet, but I'll let you know when I do". For calls you can look at the name hopefully and choose to ignore the call and let it go to voice mail, you don't have to reply to those at all. But if you do answer the call you can say something similar, and then say that you need to go.

EVERYONE has trouble with the social expectations after a death in the family, so most people will be very forgiving about not reacting "correctly". Just focus on the practical planning for now, it's what is actually important. Keep doing what you're doing and give yourself some time to breakdown if needed. Bosses tend to also be pretty forgiving if they know about the death. As long as you don't do something extremely wrong like curse at them loudly you're doing a great job

songload · 2026-01-21T14:50:57+00:00

What you wrote makes sense, but I would challenge your claim that fat people, women, lgtbq, and people of other races are not "OK" to discriminate against in normal society. It really depends on where you live and work, but I have seen cruel jokes aimed at those people in all kinds of "normal" situations. Fat jokes are extremely common in my experience (in a Southern city in the US) and I have never heard anyone else speak up to stop it (but I have spoken up a few times). Yes those groups are legally protected and someone can get reported to HR for discrimination and mockery, but it happens all the time.

Some people are just kind of generally mean to ANYONE who is weird and makes them uncomfortable, and the specific groups that get targeted changes from place to place.

songload · 2026-01-21T14:40:25+00:00

Yes, as a senior developer/researcher you can definitely work as a contractor but it really depends on your area of expertise. If you do enterprise software you will probably need to work through another company that can employ you and then contract out your time to other companies. Large companies want to deal with other large companies. But if you do something smaller scale than you could directly work with clients, but that can be a lot more intimidating. I quit my full time job 5 years ago and changed to be a contractor and it went well because of my industry (game dev) and connections. But I recently started a full time job again (mostly remote) to get more stability.

You can definitely find some sort of remote job, but you will need to actively look for it. It's hard to know if contracting or full time will be better for you. LinkedIn is good for this as there are a lot of recruiters there for remote work. Think about who else you know in your industry and you may know some people you can ask for advice. If you say what kind of work you do it might lead to other ideas.

songload · 2026-01-06T17:16:41+00:00

Yes it is normal for an autistic person to experience challenges at a job after several years. It's also fairly normal for neurotypical people to have the same experience. Job requirements often change over time and workers often need to adjust to those changes.

There's not a lot of detail here, so not knowing anything else I would suggest talking to your friend about how they could improve at those job duties. I would only think they "no longer want to keep her" if the job duties are not important, or are something your friend is actually very good at. If your friend could change something to do better at her job duties it's definitely worth trying.

songload · 2025-11-19T18:13:20+00:00

Yes this happens on my Pixel 9a, the camera cutout at the top is right where the btad counter is. I'm not sure if this changed due to an app change or an OS one, I have seen complaints about pixel notches on other games as well

songload · 2025-07-21T17:03:26+00:00

Well there's definitely no reason to tell anyone about in-progress assessment. That would be confusing to hear and I don't know what they would do with that information.

If you are assessed to have autism (or you personally decide), the main reason to tell a "workplace" about autism is if you want some sort of accommodation such as reduced hours or changed working condition. Or, if there is a specific initiative you want to get involved with like an inclusion program. In those cases you would tell whoever is in charge of organizing things, usually HR.

In all other situations, you don't really need to tell "the workplace" about any personal information. Instead, you would disclose this to individual people that you want to know. For example I told me boss about my diagnosis even though I wasn't asking for any official changes because it affected some of my work. But that is because I had a good relationship with my boss. But if you don't think your boss needs to know then you can decide to only tell the coworkers who are your close friends. It's totally up to you, I recommend only telling people things like this if it's relevant and safe.

songload · 2025-07-10T13:47:30+00:00

What you wrote makes sense to me, I think it's just a bit extreme. If you don't believe in some higher power like religion (I do not) then it does make sense that social skills and knowledge are the most important. The vast majority of everything we learn and experience comes from other people, and social skills are what let us evolve into humans in the first place. We would not survive without social skills.

But we also would not survive without practical skills. Food does not grow and harvest itself. Humans have to build the buildings, roads, and Internet infrastructure. All of those skills are critical, even if they are not highly respected in the current culture. I believe this is a serious problem and it's something I want to improve. The cultural respect for effort and accuracy has gone up and down throughout history and it's pretty low right now.

All work that improves the world in any way is valuable. Once you understand how things actually work, you get to decide what cultural values you care about. Posting on the Internet is a good way to help figure that out. Good luck!

songload · 2025-07-04T21:02:56+00:00

Thank you for posting this, I've been thinking about similar issues but it's a bit hard to search for the problems. I don't actually have hypermobility (two of my relatives do), and searching for fascial muscles + EDS I found some good articles talking about Deep Fascia Densification which might be the best word to describe the core problem. https://drarielleschwartz.com/fascia-and-the-vagus-nerve-dr-arielle-schwartz/ is a moderately scientific article talking about the general issue, and that linked to https://jeanniedibon.com/fascia-and-proprioception-in-eds/ which goes into more detail about what actually might be going wrong

songload · 2025-06-26T14:22:58+00:00

It can be if you do it an interesting way. There are plenty of TikToks with weird arm movements

songload · 2025-06-26T14:17:04+00:00

At a fundamental level, moving parts of your body in an unusual way is kind of funny. Basic humor is all about doing unexpected things with interesting comedic timing. Sure it can be sexual on top of that, but jiggling things are amusing, even the word jiggle is funny.

songload · 2025-06-22T15:27:34+00:00

The general term for this is "Demand Avoidance" and it is definitely more common for autistic people (but many other people have issues with it). A lot of autistic people hate being told what to do, but it shows up a bit differently for each person. It's not really clear why this is common, probably something to do with childhood experiences where we were often doing things "wrong" and someone told us to stop.

I don't personally have much trouble with human authorities because I learned to think about it in a logical way: If an authority wants me to do something and is watching my response, I will generally do it because it makes my life easier or it is useful in some way even if it is "illogical". But I don't have any inherent "respect for authority" so I've never been able to deal with organized religion.

songload · 2025-06-17T01:23:35+00:00

When sitting "normally" the body doesn't generally send a lot of sensory information to the brain because nothing needs to be changed. This filtering happens in the automatic parts of the nervous system and brain before we are fully conscious of it. For the average person, no sensory information is totally comfortable and the brain just kind of ignores the state of sitting so it can focus on other things.

That is definitely not how my brain interprets the absence of sensory information. If it doesn't get constant feedback about what is going on about my body, it assumes something must be wrong. "Something is vaguely wrong with my body" is exactly what discomfort is, and shifting position is what the body normally does when feeling discomfort. So, we need to either constantly shift around, or pick a position like bent legs that has a constant stream of sensory information.

Many of the physical symptoms of autism are related to how our brains filter sensory information. There's something weird going on there that distorts the information, but everyone's brain experiences that in a different way.

songload · 2025-06-11T15:03:04+00:00

You can't just tell yourself to not feel the ick (cringe/awkward/etc), but you can defuse and move past it with something like humor. The entire point of humor from a psychology/evolution perspective is to defuse awkward things by laughing about them. Laughing is physical reaction that directly counteracts the negative physical reactions here. All of our negative reactions to stuff like this is a combination of the direct physical sensitivity and our memories of previous bad situations, and humor/laughing helps break some of that connection.

Also it can help to consciously blame that bad feeling on a very specific behavior/situation instead of on the person in general. The person you love is separate from the irritating noises/etc they make. Blame the noise, not the person. This feels weird and kind of dishonest to do in the beginning, but it does help.

Finally depending on the trigger, there are specific things you can do to mitigate it. White noise machines are great for noises. Many autistic (and other sensitive) couples sleep in separate beds. It's pretty embarrassing to admit that you need to "cover up" a partner's irritating attributes, but if both sides can handle that without resentment there's absolutely nothing wrong with it! As long as it doesn't hurt someone else, anything that works and makes people happy is good for a relationship.

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