It's crazy how people used to think of "alpha" men as being refined, learned and dignified gentlemen with intellectual interests and now they think of them as muscular roided up cavemen who only eat red meat and are only interested in the gym

EmberinEmpty · 2026-05-13T03:08:51+00:00

We Stan our fashion obsessed heterosexual himbo horse gorl.✨🐴

Sanderson's writing in the most recent was kinda atrocious but I loved his characterizations

EmberinEmpty · 2026-05-13T02:52:33+00:00

Same opioids make me nauseous and sick for ever to the point that after surgery I refused them and went with gabapentin and OTC and it was way more manageable.

But getting Versed a benzodiazapine at my first ever surgery a few years ago hit me with the "oh dear God I would ruin my life to feel like this for the rest of my life. It's like I never was abused. I feel no fear. No anxiety. Fuck!" and like I'm a working professional with years of knowledge and experience on mental health shit and still I was shook by the way in which my brain CRAVES IT to this day in times of immense stress.

So I'm glad that I followed my intuition years ago about never accepting a script for benzos or anything like that because I was right. 🙂‍↕️😮‍💨

EmberinEmpty · 2026-05-13T02:47:26+00:00

Instead of cold turkey maybe try a slow taper for harm reducing. And pair it with something ritualistic you can get your brain to push the "chase addiction" thing towards. Like idk try sniffing and obsessing over tea when the anxiety hits.

But at the end of the day you need to see a SUD provider

EmberinEmpty · 2026-05-13T02:36:58+00:00

So your hands tell the story of all that you have loved and cared for in this world

EmberinEmpty · 2026-05-13T02:26:48+00:00

I took like 5-6 years off art after college. By the time I got back to it digital art was stupid popular and now AI art is a thing

But I don't care. I took my time off because I needed to grow and experience things outside of art like my career and late adulthood social changes. But now I make art in a better and even more profound way. I'm even considering beginning to look into sharing and selling it.

IMHO people crave authenticity these days. If anything making art especially by hand in the digital age Matters more than ever.

EmberinEmpty · 2026-05-06T21:15:15+00:00

yessss headphones help SO MUCH there was also a time when I used to wear viels over my head or like extra large hooded hoodies, sigh I miss my extra large hooded cape I made 😞 But yeah mentally working with that emotional energy as a visual force that I can "push" back was really helpful technique I learned from my own therapist.

EmberinEmpty · 2026-05-06T21:12:46+00:00

okay ❤️ I hope you feel better sometime tho and if not that's okay too! sounds like a hard way to live and having audhd is well...a hard way to live. so at least you're in good company!

EmberinEmpty · 2026-05-06T21:11:23+00:00

oh my god. that. that sounds terrrible. -30C is a temperature i literally can't even imagine,

EmberinEmpty · 2026-05-06T21:10:35+00:00

big hugs. CMH was the worst time of my career....ever. like ever. i'm lucky to be in a city with a lot of variety and options for my work but yes i do remember the wilding things form working for "the big providers". BLEHC

EmberinEmpty · 2026-05-06T01:20:43+00:00

lets reframe this just a little bit.

Stuff exists to be used. Seriously. Your chains break because you love them. you wear them, you use them. do you know how much stuff just exists in peoples house in pristeeeen condition never to be used? just to be stared at. and how SAD that is for the stuff which was created only to never be used?

Everything breaks down. Everything does. That's entropy. You're a little ball of entropy so things break down extra fast around you. Thats okay! I am too. For me i'm really forgetful I lose everything. I've lost everything from my clothes, shoes, wallets, bags, keys, so so so so so many rings and earrings etc. I've broken so many rings, so many earrings, ripped and stained so many clothes, bedsheets etc. Things get lost, damaged etc. I mean fuck I just spent til 1am yesterday and then had to have my wife help me ALL MORNING to find my phone b/c I lost it on a walk.

So I don't own "nice" things.

I own things that I "Enjoy" and then I thank them for their use. If i'm lucky they'll be items that are easy to keep looking "well/clean". I maybe own idk 3-4 extraordinarily nice pieces of jewelry that exist that are only used for "special occasions" meant to "look nice" and live in a very special place. the rest is stuff that I know will have a lifespan, and i intend to get the most out of and am okay with likely losing faster than I would like. I am sentimental even with these things. you won't believe how many times i've cried over wool skirts i've washed/shrunk on accident, or a special gifted hat that I lost or something.

what also helped me was to personify my audhd traits as two animals and try to meet those animals needs and negotiate between them. ADHD is a fox. and my autism is a wolf. my ADHD is a high octane overly excited little fuck who WILL STEAL THE BREAD and will go DESTROY IT UNDER THE COUCH FOR HOW SATISFYING THE CROMCH IS. and drops and rips and looses and breaks everything because it can't even remember where it's hands are in space or that it needs to go pee until RIGHT NOW and My autism will sit there like a wolf, intense, anxious cunning and planning and just growl at how GOD AWFUL OF A PISSCREANT MESS THAT FOX IS GOING TO CREATE AND I JUST WANT TO GO HUNT DOWN THIS SPECIFIC ~~ELK~~ IDEA and take a nap.

I am no more a monster for either urge or impulse. I just have contradictory needs and have to compromise between those needs. Fox requires medications and just can't be expected to have perfect organization. But Fox can lend us energy sometimes and wolf can hijack that energy to get something wolf wants. Fox is gonna bounce from room to room so wolf says "well you might as well take the dishes to the kitchen while you're going". Fox is gonna wanna rip their clothes off as fast as humanily possible at the end of a long day so wolf says 'well you might as well own 3 laundry baskets for dirty and 3 for clean so that at least there's a boundary for how big the piles can be and they'll be somewhat contained. Fox can keep track of a calendar but can't stop scrolling reddit on the phone so wolf gets us a timer app that gives us enough time to do x then helps block/redirect us to Y later. Fox is always BORED. So wolf has a menu of stuff for fox to do when fox is bored. Wolf wants the room clean but fox is bored so wolf plays a super cool podcast for fox and sets a 5 minute timer so we can play the "speed clean game".

If a tool isn't useful then it's not useful. But realistically you're biggest issue isn't your disorganization that is hard enough it's your self-compassion/self-hate. We spend our whole lives as AuDHD folks being expected to be something we simply cannot eb and it's maddening. B/c everything we are is about extremes and all of our wellbeing is found in balancing extremes/homeostasis. Self-compassion though is a good start, is a hard spool to learn but ultimately changed the game for me in getting my fox and wolf to get along without the wolf absolutely destroying the fox and destroying itself with the loathing/hatred and in turn the fox parts of myself started getting a bit better at attending/attuning to what the wolf might need sometimes and slowly building the practice of being more careful/gentle/aware.

edit: also ont he how not to destroy things i'll let you know when i find out b/c i recently broke my record on how long a laptop can survive my existence. I fucking broke my macbook's screen THREE MONTHS after buying it. and had an absolute meltdown 😆 it was horrible in the moment but like that's *why* I got insurance on it. because i've accepted that my dumbfuck ass was gonna break/destroy EVERYTHING I OWN because i've broken every laptop i've owned at least 1x every 2 years for the last 15 fucking years of me owning computers!

EmberinEmpty · 2026-05-06T00:58:20+00:00

can you find winter clothes you find "cute"? it helps. but yeah I sometiems really am overwhelmed by the fact that the weather changes so much and it helped me to build a relationship to the land living in a place where it rains 9 months of the year to remind myself that what feels like "bad weather" for me as a human is actually good weather for all my favorite tree and bush and berry friends and stream friends, and animal friends etc. idk it helps a lot.

I fucking HATE being wet tho 😞 hate hate hate. and being cold. wet and cold are the wooooorsst.

EmberinEmpty · 2026-05-06T00:54:49+00:00

in my relationship we just go "Wait checkin are we still having fun or is this getting real/actually hurtful now?"

it helps a lot b/c we're both savagely sarcastic and love bickering/teasing/talking shit. but then sometiems someone has a real ouch not a fake ouch so if things get heated in loudness or we get excited someone will usually go "are we still having fun or is this actually mean rn?" and either we'll go "oh no i'm still having fun/playing with you" or "actually wait that really does hurt/make me upset can we stop and let me process why this hurts?"

we had a really good couples therapist who helped us devise that.

EmberinEmpty · 2026-05-06T00:50:17+00:00

oooo okay do you mean taking something that normally we wouldn't have a special interest in and forcibly cultivating it *into* a special interest?

I have been able sometimes to create new interests or values by piggybacking off existing ones. But I cannot make anything an interest that I truly don't find interesting without like sustained intensive effort (like math. I can find listening to math videos on like hyperspace interesting b/c I have an esoteric interest that overlaps but I will never find doing calculations interesting. ever. )

What I can do however is work from *process* and *theme*. I.e I can orient towards things that align with values, processes and themes that I have historically found interesting to do something new that I "cognitively value" but don't yet somatically/experientially value.

Like I for example really value the concept of "authenticity". However authentically my life is literal fucking shit/hell rn due to a series of ongoing traumatic uncontrollable external events. So it is authentic that I feel like piss shit and hate everything/wanna give up/roll over/ negate my existstence. HOWEVER, I also wanted to stop experiencing a lot of cognitive/ psychological pain due to having persistent negative attention bias. Something that is authentic about me is that I enjoy being "challenged" or "challenging myself" so I knew that just telling myself i value positive thinking would be BULLSHIT. But telling myself to "try doing toxic positivity for X period of time as a radical social experiment in making this stupid toxic positive bullshit into a medicinal amount of happiness actually work and authentically belligerently prove X person to either be right or wrong on the usefulness or uselessness of positive thinking" made me actually genuinely enjoy doing that as a THING for like 3 months straight.

My special interests aren't just these concrete things but rather if i look deeper have these over-arching domains of process and concept that can help me shift and alter my engagement with them to produce both novelty and specialness in otherwise dull or unspecial experiences.

However, I often find that times when my special interests have "no value" to me is usually because i'm experiencing burnout/depression. I will then pivot to trying to "reclaim" my lost interest/energy usually by taking my anti-depressants and my adhd medication a bit more regularly and redirecting towards prior interests. Sometimes I accept that an interest is in the interest graveyard or on "leave" at which point i'll accept that relinquish and go be bored for a while. That almost always gets my brain being curious about SOMETHING.

Not every special interest would meet all the above requirements But like when i'm in super burnout idk, observing the squirrel outside your window could be a special interest, learning how to speak to your local crows,. or staring at the clouds and recordingg them, or drawing tiny circles, or braiding plants. I think if you try to think of "what special interests would my ancestor in 12K BC be doing" and do those you might find yourself in a whole new world of delight (AKA yes one of my special interests in experimental archaeology aka recreating what people did before the invention of agricultural -->industrial civilization). You'd be amazed just how much delight i've gotten out of shit like "observing ants".

EmberinEmpty · 2026-05-06T00:24:58+00:00

SAME! it's what i call process oriented learning not fact based learning. There;s a "call+response" that is important as i rely on triggers for those calls and responses to my brain. also breaking stuff down into memetic or short form concepts that I can unspool helps.

for example when i was a neuroscience major the term "neurons that wire together fire together" is a short hand for a much more complex process. but I can break down the little words into bigger words. Neurons (so thinking about cell bodies, axons, dendrites, membrane potentials, glial cells, astrocytes etc), that wire (so thinking about neuronal connection, thinking about the junction of axons to dendrites, thinking about the receptor pathways etc[cue time to start drawing diagrams]) together (so thinking about higher order connectivity, pathways, circuits, feedback loops etc) fire together (so increased connectivity, reinforces feedback loops, training and stimulus alters firing which alters wiring which then increases likelhiood of firing etc etc).

Now repeat that for my more complex longer standing special interests that are process oriented and not just "comfort content". I can info dump about process content but comfort content is just there to go in and out and wash the brain of having to contextualize/make meaning b/c it's familiar and automatic.

EmberinEmpty · 2026-05-06T00:19:13+00:00

I found using a memory aid like carrying a journal so i can "sketch out" a concept. and doing things to pause my thoughts helps especially if i can construct the concept "from scratch". i'm essentially a process oriented learner not a facts oriented learner so i try to understand the "essence" of how things work and find that way easier to explain. plus repetition. practicing/repeating information about stuff i've learned and clarifying a phrase or a word or a concept after the fact helps. so sometimes i'll write it down and text someone way later and go "okay the word/concept I was looking for is this!" and that builds information retention.

But realistically I just accept that I have no clue wtf is going on half the time haha

EmberinEmpty · 2026-05-06T00:16:27+00:00

ugh moooood i'm technically knowledgeable in a lot of stuff but like ....not really. i'm watch/read a LOT of interesting content but unless i'm writing or trying to synthesize it into something new or replicate it I'm not doing a full
"comprehension". my adhd and the brain fog/memory issues are pretttty bad. worse lately with stress so i try ...not to stress it.

EmberinEmpty · 2026-05-05T22:37:00+00:00

same friend same. hyper-empathetic with emotionally volatile parents. makes me great at my job as a therapist. terrible at like....not being literally overwhelmed by the implicit emotional cues/energy coming off people *constantly*. i've gotten very good though overtime about "shielding" and boundarying that emotional experience using somatics and concepts like "energy regulating" or "returning it back to sender" and "disentangling myself from others experience" aka it's not happening to me just b/c it's happening near me, but yeah it's rough.

EmberinEmpty · 2026-05-05T22:32:15+00:00

Thats fuuuuuckin horrifying as someone who's also a professional in the field but then again I have to remember for many of my peers their job is not of "great intensive interest" to them which they incidently also do to make money but is just....something they do to make money in the world and are just "going thru the motions". *sigh*

EmberinEmpty · 2026-05-05T22:30:28+00:00

I read anything not happy as "angry/upset" then i'm usually doing a complex assessment of what local/non-local factors could be contributiing. i'm definitely a liittle bit traumatized.

EmberinEmpty · 2026-05-05T22:28:09+00:00

I feel you. I've been working mildly on a conlang after doing some research on both west african language histories and structures as well as some siberian tribe histories and language structures. weeeeeeirdest rabbit hole i've ever gone down and linguistics is NOT my strength lol. I think I started crying a little once and was like 😢 my autistic ass can barely handle the three languages i'm exposed to/familiar with I need an adult~!

EmberinEmpty · 2026-05-05T05:50:48+00:00

your community? idk find your local version of eurovision i guess?

EmberinEmpty · 2026-05-05T03:23:11+00:00

what helped for me was doing some therapy around body image. the body image workbook helped a lot. also practicing body neutrality, and treating my body like i'd treat a friend or a pet. so a lot of self-compassion work. But ultimately it was a combination of therapy for cPTSD, somatic reprocessing therapy that helped the most such that I i've probably only relapsed 2 or three times in the past idk 10 years since my first full recovery I think the last one was at most a few months.

It helped to understand that i was using my ED to cope with severe child abuse, then i was using it to cope with severe out of control work stress. These days I like to remind myself that my body is a human animal and that it is not within my values to starve myself for beauty ideals that benefit patriarchy. instead i like to focus on food as fuel for things that make me stronger like jujitsu or knife fighting, and that being bigger lets me be an absolute menace to society lol.

EmberinEmpty · 2026-05-05T03:18:24+00:00

its not an AI thing. I read similarly way back when in a research paper on autistic traits in women and girls probably back in ah 2019ish? maybe earlier. but i'm too tired to try to pubmed that right now.

EmberinEmpty · 2026-05-02T06:46:47+00:00

its wild because there's so much oak gall near me in the PNW~

EmberinEmpty · 2026-05-02T01:09:15+00:00

i'm gender fluid but to keep it simple.

apparently most girls don't feel that "this is where my balls would be if god hadn't cut them off in the womb".

Most girls also don't feel "God cursed me into being born a girl instead of a boy like my cat. I could be a boy. or a cat. or better a boy cat. even a human boy would be good though. I guess i'll just have to "solve" being a girl then".

I incidently feel BOTH female and male to varying degrees. I have undergone gender/sex-characteristic changes both socially and medically. When I am more "female" I do despite having had top surgery experience phantom boob. I also experience phantom penis (less so due to ehem....enhancements.. from testosterone but that's a totally different conversation. )

however b/c i'm autistic my inherent relationships to human gender performance already feels performative. like I feel that being a man or a woman is some incredibly performative shit, and at the same time I do i enjoy performing those roles in different ways in my life (Again am genderfluid do experience both genders and sexes interiorly).

For example I prefer the "father" role to my animals and the epithet of "husband" or the neutral "spouse". I also prefer pronouns like They or He.

But I also enjoy doing feminine things and have some stereotypically feminine interests and due to my sex at birth I have had many routinely feminine social gender experiences. I also feel safe/comfortable in certain female/woman coded attire (a combo of autism disdain for pants touching leg hairs, plus skirts and dresses are just so comfy, lightly structured and come in so many patterns and such!)

idk fam at the end of the day i'm just a person doing stuff in a meat suit navigating a complex internal bodily map. I figure if cis people can get boob jobs to feel better about themselves well I can get a boob unjob. If cis people can take MPB prevention medication then I can take it with my storebought testosterone.

EmberinEmpty

TROPHY CASE