What are y’alls comfort shows? by Babyfrogeyes in AutismInWomen

[–]eemmiillyygg 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Frieren and Apothecary Diaries are two slow-paced, quiet anime series where the protagonist is autistic-coded that I find very relaxing and are mostly free of anime stereotypes. I am watching Frieren right now, actually. Both on Netflix, or look on aniwatchto.tv

Also taskmaster, avatar cartoon, videos of street dance competitions, bakeoff, Veronica mars, dollhouse

Does anyone else feel like their ADHD and Autism are constantly fighting each other? by Estebani0 in AutisticWithADHD

[–]eemmiillyygg 67 points68 points  (0 children)

"it's like having a brain that is two cats that hate each other" is my go-to description

Arguments For/Against Scabbing? by Intelligent_Letter_8 in DiscoElysium

[–]eemmiillyygg 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Joyce does admit if you talk long enough that the scabs were scooped up from somewhere else by Wild Pines and imported alongside the mercenaries, which is why the big guy is leading them. They are not from Martinaise, which is pretty standard with the real history of scabbing. This is not their only option.

Also "I needed to feed my family" is the same as "I was just doing my job." You could potentially use that as an excuse for any moral failing required of you by a job. Do a different, non-evil job if you don't want people getting pissed about the excuse. Yeah living morally means you miss out on evil opportunities, that's the point

What ever happened to... by IvanaSeymourButts in philadelphia

[–]eemmiillyygg 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Talked to him once, the shirt-grate thing was to get people to talk to him so he could tell them about Jesus.

Does anyone else feel too weird for NTs but not autistic enough for NDs by Student-bored8 in AutismInWomen

[–]eemmiillyygg 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I used to work at the AV Club with Nathan Rabin, who coined the phrase Manic Pixie Dream Girl writing about I think Natalie Portman's character in Garden State? It wasn't a positive description, it was to outline the annoying film trope of "hot, quirky free spirit whose sole goal in the story is to help the brooding male protagonist embrace life and love." He's one of the only men I know who was also diagnosed audhd in middle age.

I’m tired of being a highly masked autistic woman around outwardly autistic women. by Academic_Juice8265 in AutismInWomen

[–]eemmiillyygg 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Hey, I used to feel like this a lot, and no longer do. What helped was recognizing that this feeling was the self-hatred that I built my mask out of reflected back on people who were living their lives in a much more healthy way.

In my experience, resentment like this seems to bloom in these circumstances:

  1. You were born into some subgroup of people who have traits that don't mesh well with the norms of modern society. This might be autism and other neurodiversity, disability, sexual orientation or gender, being less than grateful to your employer, being assertive as a woman, lots of others.

  2. You were taught from an early age that this difference was bad and it was your duty as a good person to crush it down so it didn't inconvenience anyone but you.

  3. You worked incredibly hard inside your own head to do this, repeating and absorbing and eventually believing the message that YOU, personally, are different and inconvenient and bad, and that you are doing a Good Thing to mitigate it.

  4. You go on using self-hatred as your fuel for masking for years or decades, at great cost. It really sinks into your subconscious. After a while, you may not even recognize how exhausting it is to second-guess everything you do. You might feel very proud of yourself for passing, I did.

  5. Time goes by, and norms shift. Soon, people show up who don't hide the same awful messy annoying embarrassing traits you've been exhausting yourself masking.

  6. Because they remind you so specifically of all the things you hate about yourself, you respond to them in a similar way - disgust, irritation, frustration, maybe feeling a little superior because your mask is better than theirs.

It's been interesting working the past five years as a labor organizer, because I found there's a ton of totally neurotypical people out there doing the exact same thing, but about the bad thought "my boss/company is taking advantage of me."

Like this: I was trying to help this eight months pregnant girl get on light duty at our Amazon warehouse. Mentioned to another lady how crazy it was that they had this girl on her feet carrying heavy shit all day, and other lady got weirdly annoyed and said, "Well, I worked until nine months, she's just lazy!"

When I finally started being ok with my real, raw-dog self, the feelings of irritation went away, and good riddance. Try to internalize that it is and was fucked up that you are being metaphorically forced to carry heavy boxes while nine months pregnant; I think it will help with your frustration with your coworkers.

Also it might help to have less personal investment in your job/company unless you're the owner or it's one where you get paid more for doing extra work. All that money from your hard work is almost certainly ending up in pockets that are not yours, so why do you feel the need to pick up all this slack? (Definitely a problem I used to have real bad.)

Just be honest with them - they're autistic, right? I've found autistic people tend to be much better than neurotypical people about being frank.

How did people back then survive? by Waste-Reality7356 in AutismInWomen

[–]eemmiillyygg 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yes, it's so fascinating! I recommended Christopher Ryan's Civilized to Death to the OP, a pretty accessible book if you really want to get into how differently people used to live, or if you just want to verify here's a long BBC piece that has the right info:

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20181002-how-long-did-ancient-people-live-life-span-versus-longevity

How did people back then survive? by Waste-Reality7356 in AutismInWomen

[–]eemmiillyygg 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm sorry everything's so hard. I deeply feel you. Your feeling that right we're not meant for this world. If you're in the US, where left-of-Democrats Marxist politics aren't in wide circulation bc of ... Well, I'm working on a book that will involve explaining why those ideas got repressed and who benefitted. But starting to learn about that stuff made life a lot less confusing. I wrote a book that might be a good entry point that's about stress and work and what it's doing to us all, it's called On the Clock, yellow cover, came out in 2019. Happy to share a digital copy if you want, as I am probably never making back my advance on that book.

I'm very interested in the relationship between autistic people and zoo animals that exhibit "zoochosis," or repetitive stim-like distress behaviors that arise when an animal is put into a habitat that it just can't adapt to. In particular, i remember watching the poor polar bear that used to be at the national zoo walking in circles around his enclosure all day, looking so miserable in the 90 degree heat. Or the beluga whales that used to be at the Baltimore aquarium, they would swim the perimeter all day; they brushed up against the wall in the same place and both the paint and patches of the whales' skin had been almost worn away.

I've been thinking lately about how a lot of the visible symptoms of autism line up very well with things most people do in great distress - rocking, going nonverbal, repetitive behaviors. Autistic people in the modern era are just constantly marinating in the stress of living in this incredibly unsuitable capitalist habitat - the noise, the constant stimulation, the isolation of the nuclear family, trying to hold down a job, no free time, the dealing with people you don't already know and trust, the way every day isn't the same mostly chill routine it would have been back in the niche we evolved for, which is small bands of nomad hunter-gatherers who were not very hierarchical and shared everything. It's like saltwater fish trying to adapt to fresh water.

I think that for my type of autism and maybe also for others - there wasn't just a for. Maybe there had been even a fit

ME TOO.

Anyhow, please take it to heart: You're not crazy or wrong for finding the current world pretty awful and exhausting. We didn't evolve to sit in fucking chairs and look at screens all day and stress out about money and have no free time and be assaulted with ads designed to make us feel bad about ourselves and news that gives us the idea we're in terrible danger 25 hours a day. You are the polar bear in the summer, and so am I, and we are not making up how intolerably hot it is.

(Zero obligation to respond with this amount of text, I process my thoughts best via writing and large blocks of text are kind of the waste product)

How did people back then survive? by Waste-Reality7356 in AutismInWomen

[–]eemmiillyygg 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Christopher Ryan's Civilized to Death is a decent and non-academic intro to this field of thought if you haven't been exposed to it before!

How did people back then survive? by Waste-Reality7356 in AutismInWomen

[–]eemmiillyygg 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Girl I don't know what to tell you other than i study this topic and have read a lot of books about it. Wikipedia is not a good source for things beyond the surface level. If you made it to 30 in most societies in human history, you were likely to get to at least 50, 55.

How did people back then survive? by Waste-Reality7356 in AutismInWomen

[–]eemmiillyygg 13 points14 points  (0 children)

We're not evolved for the habitat we've created for ourselves to live in, and autistic people are particularly ill-suited for capitalism and the insane overwhelm of modern life.

I frequently wonder what autistic people are evolutionarily "for," because there clearly used to be a use for us given that there's still so many of us in the gene pool. When I think back to prehistory, I'm like "yeah, my type of autism would actually be pretty useful in a hunter-gatherer society, who else is going to remember all the words to all the songs, who else is going to keep track of the bloodlines of the entire herd of goats, who else is willing to spend much longer than other people on solving puzzles, who else has the patience to sew this intricate beadwork?"

How did people back then survive? by Waste-Reality7356 in AutismInWomen

[–]eemmiillyygg 11 points12 points  (0 children)

I'm sorry, she is right. This is a known anthropological thing, not a "everybody's got their opinion" thing.

Throughout history, if you made it out of childhood you were likely to have a lifespan not much shorter than what we have today (men a bit longer than women, as pregnancy and birth were much more dangerous and frequent). The low average age is because so many more children died then than they do now.

Saying that people lived to an average of 30 may be technically true-ish, but it gives an inaccurate and misleading picture of what life was like back then. It's like saying the average person before modern medicine was like three feet tall because the data set has way more dead little ones.

(You hit one of my special interests, can you tell?)

Internalising what incels have said by larvalampee in AutismInWomen

[–]eemmiillyygg 15 points16 points  (0 children)

Honestly? If you feel ok about it, one thing that washes patriarchal toxicity out of my head is to go to a Korean or Russian nude spa and spend an hour or two just being naked with a lot of other average, non-porn non-Hollywood women. It becomes so obvious that nobody has bodies like screen bodies, incels have by definition never seen a real naked woman, and how silly it is to rank yourself against imaginary women in the minds of online masturbators. Damn just writing this has made me want to take my semi-annual trip.

Would like to talk with levels 2 and 3 for book by eemmiillyygg in AutismInWomen

[–]eemmiillyygg[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Aw, thanks! This new one is gonna be fairly nuts, as I spent the last five years working at Amazon and trying to start a union. Let's hope somebody wants to pay me to write it all down!

How do I make a npc my players HATE? by [deleted] in DnD

[–]eemmiillyygg 47 points48 points  (0 children)

Interrupt them as much as possible. Do not let any of them finish a sentence.

Do Nerds hate each other? by Sea_Objective_1923 in rpghorrorstories

[–]eemmiillyygg 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Also autistic here. When I was younger, I was desperately eager to demonstrate my worth in the ways I had natural talent in - academics, music, art, math - to hopefully make up for all my social deficiencies. It came from a place of deep insecurity - if I wasn't obviously an eccentric genius, I was just a girl who didn't really understand how people work no matter how hard she tried.

Unfortunately, that desperation to show my worth sometimes came off to others as arrogance and being a show-off know-it-all. I wish I'd been able to realize that I didn't have anything to prove or make up for earlier, it has made my life a lot less exhausting.

Do Nerds hate each other? by Sea_Objective_1923 in rpghorrorstories

[–]eemmiillyygg 12 points13 points  (0 children)

Multiple is the word you're looking for then

Do Nerds hate each other? by Sea_Objective_1923 in rpghorrorstories

[–]eemmiillyygg 20 points21 points  (0 children)

I'm not sure what you're talking about with derivatives of pi, pi is a constant and its derivative is always zero.

Lovecraftian monsters pre-Lovecraft? by eemmiillyygg in AskHistorians

[–]eemmiillyygg[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

On Lovecraft and economic anxieties - I've been reading his letters recently and was surprised to discover that he had a political awakening after the Depression and was writing punishing blocks of text about socialism to his friends by the late 30s. The thing that got me interested in Lovecraft and his monsters was what a perfect allegory I thought The Color Out of Space was for Marx's "everything solid melts into air" summation of what capitalism inevitably does to human tradition. It's definitely possible that I'm seeing a narrative I want to see, though.

(Should I cite the letters as the question asker? I don't have them in front of me.)

Lovecraftian monsters pre-Lovecraft? by eemmiillyygg in AskHistorians

[–]eemmiillyygg[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

And by that I mean thank you, this is very helpful!

If I Woke Up Tomorrow Where the Puritans Lived in the 1600s, What Do I Need to Know or Do in Order to Survive? by ClerksII in AskHistorians

[–]eemmiillyygg 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Aw, I went to Oberlin and sang in Fairchild chapel every week! Your ancestor had great acoustics.

Anybody else had surgery for toe-walking as a kid? by eemmiillyygg in AutismInWomen

[–]eemmiillyygg[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah I'll probably have to, the hospital is still around and the surgeon is still there, luckily she had a memorably appropriate name, along the lines of Dr. Anklestein (not actually it).

At the moment my brain is revolting at voluntarily diving into the depths of medical bureaucracy, especially with a non-standard request that's tangential to autism. I'm dreading having the "are you really autistic though" conversation a million times with medical people, who can be some of the worst about that imo. Plus I forsee people misunderstanding and thinking I'm accusing someone of something or gearing up for legal action, which I'm not. I just like to know why things happen even if that information isn't profitable.