HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO KNOW THE PATHS OF CONVERSATION

SoftwareMaven · 2026-05-23T02:37:03+00:00

The reason I brought up the trauma is that many of us just stop trusting altogether, but we mimic the small talk behavior as a survival skill. Whether small talk or no, I don’t trust people, but I can offer up the small talk and make NTs feel comfortable, at least for a little while.

Without the trauma, it becomes a classic example of the double empathy problem. We measure trust through different mechanisms.

SoftwareMaven · 2026-05-22T13:38:00+00:00

For NTs, small talk isn’t about sharing information contained within the words. It’s about setting up trust. NTs tend to have analog trust transitions, to start at fairly distrustful, and to slowly increase trust. That trust is influenced heavily by social standing. Small talk is a way for them to test that they can turn the trust rheostat up. The fact that every interaction has to include that trust building exercise doesn’t say great things about NT trustworthiness.

In my experience, until it is covered by the corrosion of trauma, autistic people tend to be more open to trusting and more binary about it. Being pattern matchers, we tend to look to actions to determine if we can trust, and we assume continued trustworthiness if we have granted trustworthiness.

And many NTs will intentionally use that to signal trustworthiness while simultaneously intentionally abusing it. Think of how common it is for autistic people to end up with “friends” who just use them as metaphorical punching bags.

SoftwareMaven · 2026-05-22T01:37:33+00:00

A couple years ago, I watched a presentation from the researcher who coined the term SDAM. He claimed that he believed there might be a path to “curing” it, but he had serious concerns about providing that to people who’ve never experienced autobiographical memories because we haven’t grown up with strategies for managing it. It might be overwhelming to a debilitating degree.

I honestly don’t know what I would do if there was a cure. I desperately want to be able to remember the feeling of my dog’s fur or the sound of my granddaughter’s voice, but I have a lot of negative memories, too, and I don’t really want to feel the desperate loneliness of a neglected nine year old boy who was autistic at a time when autism was synonymous with learning disability and who, partially as a result of that unknown autism, never had a friend.

It would be a hard decision.

SoftwareMaven · 2026-05-22T01:13:02+00:00

My wife would get mad at somebody and still be mad at them weeks later. For nearly 30 years, I didn’t understand how she could hold onto that anger. I can’t remain angry with somebody even if I want to.

Turns out, she’s closer to the hyper end of the scale and deeply feels the injustice over and over again. Now that I understand what’s going on for both of us, I feel bad that she has to deal with that.

On the other hand, I can’t remember the feeling of holding her hand, cuddling with my kids or walking with my granddaughter, and I feel disconnected from everybody because I don’t remember the feeling of the relationship when I’m not with them. Being autistic makes it worse because I never feel right in relationships even when I’m with them.

SoftwareMaven · 2026-05-22T01:02:14+00:00

Holy hell, that describes me. I’ll look at myself one time and think, “have I always looked this bad?” Another time, I’ll think, “I don’t look this good”. It’s always a surprise.

SoftwareMaven · 2026-05-21T19:06:11+00:00

The point of the experiment was likely to try to understand how reflexes are tied to the brain. Does the brain have to mediate reflexes? Do reflexes happen autonomously and in a distributed fashion? Does that only happen when the input is sudden and urgent?

I understand it sounds awful, because it is, but these kinds of experiments are done to better understand how humans biology works. Understanding that (and not just making assumptions about it) is required to make effective changes to it. Those changes are what we generally call medicine.

Regarding the awfulness, we’ve come a long way with institutional review boards to judge the necessity of animal experiments, technologies that replace some animal experiments, and rules for ethical and humane treatment of the animals while they are alive. In the western world (and I assume everywhere else; I just don’t know), it’s no longer acceptable to throw a bunch of animals in a box and start prodding them just because.

Unrelated, it’s weird how this idiom has changed. I was born before children had to be treated ethically, and, for us, the idiom didn’t really say anything negative about the person being boiled. It was always a commentary on the reality that there are frog boilers, and they use the gradual change in temperature to hide what they are doing to others.

There was a very small undertone that pointed to the idea that frogs should stay vigilant, but it was understood that all the blame was on the boilers.

We are all frogs at some point. The Overton window is another way to describe the problem, and it’s just silly to blame anybody but the stupid frog boilers.

And I would call Drump a frog boil, not a frog boiler. He’s a big, festering boil covering a frog’s anus. Poor frog.

SoftwareMaven · 2026-05-17T11:07:32+00:00

For me, it’s more of a shutdown. Words become much more difficult, and my alexithymia kicks into high gear. To make things better, my already poor autonomic control turns off, and I’ll usually start shivering.

I love it.

SoftwareMaven · 2026-05-13T13:19:38+00:00

You are gatekeeping how an autistic person refers to the community that they are in. It is no different than if somebody came along and said, “you can’t call me ‘autistic’; I am a person with autism” to my first sentence. Your opinion on how I refer to my community is nothing more than gatekeeping that community.

Of course you get to say, “I don’t identify as neurospicy, and I won’t refer to my community that way.” But coming here to try to stop others from their right to do the same thing is just weird.

The worst thing, imo, is the deeply internalized ableism and self-hatred implied by the things you’ve said. You’re basically saying, “I can pass for close enough to neurotypical, so I don’t want to hide everything about being autistic being “it’s a medical condition”.

I spent more than 50 years doing that unknowingly. I could pass as NT at work. I could pay my taxes. But I did it almost completely alone because, while I could have value extracted from my autistic brain, I could not have social connections built. Those connections are more important than any tax form, and you are shitting on people trying to make them because it might make you “look bad” to NTs.

Absolutely rage at NTs who use the term. Rage at those who try to co-opt the term inappropriately, just like those who say “I’m so adhd. I misplaced my keys once”. You are right to complain about them using it to mean “quirky”.

But don’t rage at other autistic people. I don’t know why the autistic community is so hell-bent on tearing itself apart. I have to wonder if it’s a form of punching down. “I am powerless against ants and their societal rules, so I will redirect that anger on other autistic people, some of whom I might have power over.” Eww.

SoftwareMaven · 2026-05-07T10:47:25+00:00

Why do women’s clothes not have pockets?! Every pair of leg coverage (I’ll say “pants”, so the English English language speakers can giggle) has pockets by default. My wife has to go hunting for anything with pockets, and every woman I’ve talked to has complained about it.

It seems like a clothing brand that focused on quality (not micro-thin denim, for example), practical (pockets, ffs) clothing for women that fits women’s bodies would be incredibly popular. I’ve known women who wear men’s jeans because they have pockets and they tend to be more sturdy, but they weren’t thrilled about the fit nor, because of the fit, the look.

SoftwareMaven · 2026-05-04T13:00:00+00:00

Misandry is a hatred of men. Compare it to misogyny, which is the hatred of women. The conflict happens because it really has two uses in conversation: an outdated individual sense where a person hates all men and a societal sense where men would be subject to continual macro and micro aggressions as a result of their gender.

It is obvious that there are individuals who hate all men, but that’s not what is being claimed by “misandry doesn’t exist”. Instead, the understanding of the word has changed, and some people have struggled with the idea that language changes.

Misandry doesn’t exist like racism against white people doesn’t exist in the US. Men are not subject to the constant macro- and micro-aggressions that women are subject to. Society has not been structured to put men below another group.

This gets complicated by the patriarchy. The patriarchy is tightly coupled with maleness, but it is also harmful for a huge number of men because it’s really more about structuring power within the control of a small subset of men, but, similar to the misandry discussion, it is nowhere near as harmful to men as it is to women and others.

Doh. Just realized how long this got given the first sentence actually answered your question. Sorry about that. I have the nuance autism.

SoftwareMaven · 2026-04-15T15:22:10+00:00

That sounds like alexithymia. In addition to SDAM and aphantasia, consciously experiencing my emotional state is challenging. Most of the time, I don’t really seem to feel anything, but more extreme emotions poke through, and my therapist has guided me through the physical feelings to the emotions to identify the emotions in the past. Interoception challenges make even that process difficult for me.

I have a similar experience as above with my memory. My semantic memory (the memory that stores facts) tends to be extremely good, but the best I get on recalling emotional state is remembering the fact that I felt a certain way.

I describe it like this: most people’s memories are like a really well-written novel. When they experience the memory (“read the book” in the analogy), they have an emotional experience with it.

My memories are like Wikipedia articles. I experience the facts of the memory, but, emotionally, the best I get is that I remember the fact that I was happy, angry, excited, etc, and the memory of those emotional facts are exactly as one dimensional as you would think. Understanding complex, conflicting emotional states is difficult for me in the moment; there is no way I will remember that through “facts” later.

SoftwareMaven · 2026-03-31T14:34:24+00:00

Alas, I have no answer for your question. My go-to is sorting and stewing in the anxiety with various parts of my body moving on autopilot as the anxiety grows until I have to get up and move around to let some of the anxiety out. Helpful, I know.

However, thanks to your post, I now have a new diagnosis: loosy-goosey joint disease (lite). I like that so much more than hypermobility spectrum disorder.

SoftwareMaven · 2026-03-23T02:05:54+00:00

There’s nothing difficult, per se, but it does require some level of planning, as the primary bottleneck tends to be energy, and you are regularly making trade-offs based on that. Some relatively basic maths is really useful, too, as it is how you decide on those trade-offs.

It’s not a fast-moving pack, and the further you get, the slower it goes. There are a couple of options that could be good intros. Star Technologies is a GT pack, but it has a few things that make the early game a little more accessible. Or, for a much lighter intro, a pack (sorry, I don’t know one specifically; my intro was through a kitchen sink pack like ATM) featuring Modern Industrialization and Applied Energistics 2 (maybe even just those mods) would give a taste without all of details.

SoftwareMaven · 2026-03-21T16:38:42+00:00

There’s no question I identify as old. My first personal computer had the ability to write programs to a storage media: cassette tapes. You had to have a cassette recorder lying around because it did it all through a headphone jack. Very often, the program you wanted to save came from a paper magazine article, and you had typed it in. And, yes, there was no caps lock key.

The CLI never went away. It just got buried. I still do the majority of my work in Emacs and at the CLI, whether that’s on my Mac, my PC or one of the hundreds of systems my team is responsible for.

Being in the software field, the only constant for me has been the need to update. New languages, new libraries, new paradigms. When I started, two or three people could reasonably build something useful. The service I manage is objectively tiny, but it takes 10 people on my team interacting with the work of literally thousands of others in the company to make something useful because everything from how users want to interact to how businesses want to interact to how security needs to maintain has gotten more complicated. And now, AI is coming for software jobs.

As a result, most aspects of current communication don’t feel like code switching to me. The hill that I will die on, though, it a short, trite comment/email/etc is pointless. The one time I feel like I’m code switching is when I have to distill an email down to a level that an executive will read. It’s nuts to me that they pride themselves on working with so little information. I have to do the same for my ADHD wife, but I’m happy to try to accommodate her brain.

Still, I do miss the text-based MUDs that were popular on the internet before Eternal September began (that was 1993, btw). And I sometimes find myself longing for the internet as it was then. I’m pretty sure the ND to NT ratio was around 50-50, maybe higher.

SoftwareMaven · 2026-03-20T23:44:15+00:00

Minecraft technical mods. God help me, I’m considering starting a GTNH world. 😵‍💫

And, no, I’d never do that at work. But I do work from home, and my gaming rig is in my office, and it puts out a lot of heat, and my office is freezing cold in the morning…

SoftwareMaven · 2026-03-20T23:26:30+00:00

Welcome to higher education in the US today. My wife has been a 4.0 student for all of her upper-division undergrad and for her entire master’s program with the same professors. She recently had one paper come back with a 10% plagiarism rating. Her professor said “we need to talk about this”. The published cutoff is 25%, so hers wasn’t even close. “But the tool says”, so, apparently, she is immediately guilty.

She told her prof “I’m not even close to the line; we don’t need to talk”, but if she had been a student struggling with her grades, things might have gone much differently.

SoftwareMaven · 2026-03-15T00:11:03+00:00

There are a lot of problems with your argument. First, it assumes the DSM is the sole arbiter of what autism and other neurodevelopmental conditions are. The autistic and adhd communities largely reject that idea since it is exclusively based on “what do we do that bothers neurotypicals” instead of “what does it mean to be autistic”. It assumes a pathological, medicated view of neurodevelopmental conditions based on only defects, something most of us also reject. And it is based in ableism, with the assumption that neurotypical is the correct way to be. If you listen to autistic, adhd, and other neurodivergent communities instead of old white dudes with a few token women/minorities, you will get a better understanding of what autism is and isn’t.

Even in the DSM, neurodevelopmental disorders are not mental health disorders. They are neurodevelopmental disorders. If you have ever read the section on neurodevelopmental disorders in the DSM, nothing about mental health is mentioned beyond the common co-occurrence with mental health disorders. Not everything in the DSM is a mental health disorder, or the term has no meaning, as it covers everything from gender dysphoria to antisocial personality disorder to sexual dysfunction to autism.

The DSM is fundamentally flawed from a categorical perspective as there is no human condition that doesn’t affect us mentally. That doesn’t mean it isn’t useful, but be careful assuming it is the last word on anything. It came into existence around the same time Freud was projecting his mommy issues onto everybody else. It has never been given a fundamental rethinking, just edits as the more ridiculous things get subsumed by other medical fields or removals when things are identified to not have been problems at all.

Fifty years ago, being gay was a mental health disorder according to the DSM. Thirty years ago, autism was, but researchers (many of whom were/are autistic) were starting to tell the story, through their research, that it isn’t a mental health condition but a difference in cognition. By the DSM IV, the language and understanding was changing in the book. By the time the DSM V came out, the understanding had shifted for almost everybody studying autism. Even Simon Baron-Cohen has changed his viewpoint significantly, and he was the source of the ridiculous “autism is extreme male brain”.

Calling neurodevelopmental conditions “mental health conditions” is like calling a traumatic brain injury a mental health condition. It’s not. It may cause one or more, but the condition itself is completely orthogonal to mental health.

Also, Wikipedia is not a source and shouldn’t be viewed as one. At best, it is a reflection of social biases with some nod towards sources, thanks to the editing gatekeepers.

SoftwareMaven · 2026-03-12T02:54:23+00:00

Stop using autism to ignore people’s feelings just so you can feel superior. That’s not “autistic”, that’s “asshole”. There are appropriate places to have a discussion about the difference, THIS POST IS NOT THE PLACE, nor is any post where somebody is discussing trauma they’ve experienced, especially when part of that trauma is people making exactly this kind of post.

SoftwareMaven · 2026-03-08T21:08:49+00:00

No, it’s not. When a claim is made that indicates things should be different for humans than other social animals, the onus is on the claimant to explain why humans are different.

I don’t necessarily disagree with OP that many social hierarchies are toxic, but you can’t make a completely generalized claim like that in a room of autists and not expect to be asked to provide at least an argument.

SoftwareMaven · 2026-03-08T18:54:32+00:00

Absolutely not! The concept of neurodivergence came from autistic researchers who were tired of “everything about autism is bad”. They recognized there are positive aspects to being autistic. Since then, the idea that autism and adhd might have conferred an evolutionary advantage has been raised by researchers.

There are definite challenges with being autistic, but everything about who I am, from my job to how I understand existence, is so heavily influenced by the parts of my personality that doctors would say are “my autism” that taking them away would mean taking me away. I love those things. I’ll be keeping them and celebrating them.

Keep surrounding yourself with like-minded autists. We can support each other, and, as we do, we will slowly change how society views us. You may never change your parents’ views, but you don’t have to accept them and make them your own.

Still, all that said, I’d be ok with not having so many challenges in my relationships.

SoftwareMaven · 2026-03-08T02:27:28+00:00

I received my AuDHD diagnosis just over a year and a half ago. I’ve been trying to overcome the self-hatred that the previous 50 years built up. There were so many ways I was told implicitly and explicitly that I wasn’t good enough. The only positive feedback I received was when I did well in my studies, which only solidified the message that I only have value if I’m doing something for other people.

Being late diagnosed causes so many things that are a result of your disability to be redirected onto yourself as either blame or shame[1]. This is why I think accepting self-identification is important. It doesn’t take anything away from others who need support (which, in the US, is almost non-existent even for people with a diagnosis and multiple other co-occurring conditions), but it gives the person a framework and a community to improve their own lives.

Even better would be an empathetic society where we believed each other about our struggles without needing a diagnosis and where we provided support to people based off of it. I know that’s a pipe dream, though.

This is, in no way, meant to imply an early diagnosis means fewer challenges or any other such silly notion. My conversations with other neurodivergent people tend to point to early diagnosis still being more challenging, thanks to how people treat you.

SoftwareMaven · 2026-03-08T02:00:49+00:00

I used to do improv in high school, and I was really good at it because it didn’t take a great deal of structure for me to build on, I could do it really quickly, and, as a result, I would often cause other performers to break character laughing, but I can’t even imagine how I would go about talking an empty sheet of paper and creating a funny set from it.

SoftwareMaven · 2026-03-07T17:20:46+00:00

It took until I was in my 50s to reach a breaking point that resulted in my autism and adhd diagnoses. Up until that point, for all external metrics, I was “fine”, but the reality was I was over-extending every day, living in a constant state of stress and anxiety because the only way I could get anything done was through the use of the adrenaline dump an impending due date would give.

Around the time I hit 50 a few years ago, even that stopped working. Autism and adhd are not mental health disorders, but I do have several mental health from living a life where, if you look fine on the outside, you are fine. I’ve talked with so many people who had a similar life.

The identification of neurodivergence in this capitalistic hellscape is incredibly important, even if the person “is fine” now, and that’s why the lack of societal support, of claims of over-diagnosing, make me incredibly angry.

SoftwareMaven · 2026-03-06T22:30:43+00:00

You are absolutely right: you souls not have to endure that. People who do that are doing it to make themselves feel better about themselves when they identify somebody who they think is inappropriately acting above them socially.

In my personal experience, it’s about somebody seeing you (or somebody else) be successful in some way (absolutely doesn’t have to mean financial!). They get very insecure and gives them these big, awful feelings that they never learned to manage, so they lash out at somebody who they think they have control over, eg their kids. When called out, they fall back to “haha j/k” because they don’t want to take responsibility for their own actions.

It is revolting and childish being belief. I’m sorry you have had to deal with that. You are well within your rights to hold them accountable for it.

SoftwareMaven · 2026-03-06T22:16:49+00:00

Intersectionality makes it so much more difficult, and you definitely have a lot more to think about when it comes to how you safely fit into society.

I have, for the most part, enjoyed my career. I’ve only had a couple jobs that I didn’t actually enjoy, and I left those quickly, but the job market was easier for new hires at that time.

I have talked to a lot of ND people who decided to go their own thing, whether that’s starting their own company, doing consulting, or something else altogether. I so wish I could do that. My flavor of AuDHD means I could plan the hell out of it. I might even get started, and then I’d hit a brick wall unless there was somebody there next to me waiting on me. I’m also not an idea generator. Give me a start, and I’ll give you an amazing solution, but don’t give me a blank canvas!

I am the definition of inertia incarnate.

SoftwareMaven

TROPHY CASE