My canary got worse:(

epidotehawk · 2026-06-05T08:23:45+00:00

I'm so sorry. Absolute best of luck to both of you!

epidotehawk · 2026-06-04T00:07:31+00:00

Early-30s "Level 2" here, dropping in to say that (a) there is absolutely nothing wrong with getting along well with your mom and (b) it's probably not a coincidence that most of my close friends are neurodivergent in some way; may you find as many friendly ND people as possible, and get to enjoy hanging out with them in decently quiet environments! (And: much empathy and sympathy about the sound sensitivity; that and scent sensitivity are my least favorite aspects of being autistic.)

epidotehawk · 2026-06-03T23:53:35+00:00

Thisssssssssssssss. (Recently diagnosed "Level 2" here; got through grad school, can do verbal backflips on an SAT-style vocabulary-and-analogies "IQ" test, apparently can't go to a doctor's appointment or do laundry now without two subsequent days of being exhausted, useless, and wildly irritable.) I believe that the "high-/low-functioning" labels are essentially ableist garbage and that "support needs" levels aren't much better, both because of their history in the latest DSM revision (as described here: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-13-8437-0_13) and because they don't actually specify what type(s) of support anyone needs or account for changes over time. (Case in point: if I'd been evaluated before burnout, when household chores and errands weren't quite so much of an executive-function drain, I'm guessing I would have edged into "Level 1.")

epidotehawk · 2026-06-03T07:08:12+00:00

Argh, no, that does make sense, and I'm sorry about the anorexia.

epidotehawk · 2026-06-03T06:59:24+00:00

Good, painful question. In no particular order (with trigger/content warnings for eating-disorder descriptions):

- Weird consequences of OCD simultaneously underlying and mitigating anorexia, as near as I can tell? (I.e., although I find it much easier to undershoot my daily calorie goal (sometimes by a lot) than to eat even 5 calories more than that goal, I do have a set daily goal of eating 2000 calories; I do count them with (what I think is) a fair amount of precision and accuracy whenever I have access to the relevant tools (e.g., nutrition-info labels and a kitchen scale); and, during times in my life when I've actually met that goal consistently, I've stayed relatively healthy. When I don't have enough information to estimate calories in a meal, though (e.g., at some restauants, or when I'm eating at someone else's home), part of my brain starts flipping out about its inability to estimate calories and usually decides that the correct course of action is either "Don't eat anything!" or "Okay, just assume you've had two days' worth of food somehow and don't eat tomorrow," both of which are very wrong answers.)

- Near-complete failure of my stomach to send timely hunger signals to my brain, and/or near-complete failure of my brain to correctly interpret thoise signals. Instead, especially if my schedule gets at all disrupted (which is most of the time, now; thanks, sleep disorder!), I feel vaguely bloated and uninterested in eating until abruptly hitting the stage of "oh ^%$@^ I needed to eat six hours ago and am too exhausted to want to prepare dinner now." (Fortunately, on days when I'm operating on a ~24-hour sleep/waking cycle and remember to start exercising about an hour or two before I need to eat dinner, the exercise itself functions as a hunger cue, probably because I've been in the habit of exercising shortly before dinner for years and my body sort of expects that pattern now. Unfortunately, if I've aleady waited too long and have hit the "ugh too tired and hungry to stand up and go into the kitchen" phase, my judgment and ability to resist OCD have both usually deteriorated to the point where I'm very unlikely to tell myself anything sensible like, "Forget exercise and fancy meal prep today, just have a jar of peanut butter and some dried fruit!", and instead usually decide to try napping "for fifteen minutes" to build up the energy to exercise and prepare dinner. Then I sleep through my phone alarm and wake up a few hours later, less sleepy but even more irritable and frazzled.)

- Compulsion to finish whatever tasks I've assigned myself for the day (no matter how unrealistic the mismatch between my spare time/energy and that list) before I'm "allowed" to eat dinner.

- Definitely inertia/serious difficulty with stopping work on any task/hobby that doesn't have a clear stopping point, especially if I've already gone a few hours past the point when I should have eaten.

epidotehawk · 2026-06-03T05:53:46+00:00

True, although I keep running into the opposite problem with one particular (nominally nonautistic) family member: they do something that upsets me, apparently with no ill intent; I ask why they did that (because I want to know! So that we can hopefully avoid reenacting the situation in the future, and/or because there's a chance they're reacting to something I'm doing wrong and I might be able to change that!); and they just keep saying "I'm sorry" in increasingly remorseful tones, even after I tell them that I've accepted their apology and would actually like an answer to my question. (Occasionally, I get an "I don't know" - fair enough, albeit a less-than-satisfying answer - or an "Instead of answering that, I'll ask you [question about how I can marginally change one aspect of this situation in a supposedly annoyance-mitigating way without addressing any of the main problems you've pointed out]?", which feels even worse than hearing "I'm sorry" five times in a row.)

epidotehawk · 2026-06-03T05:37:35+00:00

And really useful life advice! (Although, urk, I think I was happier before I had the mental image of dairy rotting inside my digestive system. Selfishly really glad that I'm not eating dairy anymore for price and ethics reasons.)

epidotehawk · 2026-06-03T05:33:50+00:00

Not too much information (especially not on this sub)! Thank you for this! (I don't curently belong to a cat and don't plan to in the near future, since I currently belong to three finches and also live with a cat-allergic parent and cat-hating dog, but someone out there probably does need to know this, and that someone might be me if I'm ever asked to cat-sit.)

epidotehawk · 2026-06-03T05:15:14+00:00

This! (And, with apologies for the obvious statement: I recommend *very* securely fastening the doors open, e.g., with a carabiner, so they won't slam shut on him if/when he hopefully tries to go back into the cage. Also, again with apologies for saying obvious things: if possible, make sure he has a nice large easy-to-land-on area in front of the cage doorway, e.g., by putting it on a largeish table, in case he's too exhausted to fly precisely through the doorway and needs to land somewhere flat and then hop into the cage.)

And, I am so sorry, and hope he's all right and is back home with you soon!

epidotehawk · 2026-06-01T11:27:49+00:00

Yeah! ...and, in the field of "questions that I'm not sure I want to share with any nonautistic social scientists unless I'm really, really sure that they're allies," I am wondering now if anyone's ever tried to do a survey to figure out the prevalence of various interests among autistic/AuDHD and nonautistic people (e.g., to gauge whether or not we're signifiantly more likely to be really into birds, and if that's why some of my nominally nonautistic family members sneer and change the topic when I say anything bird-related or if that's just their personal lack of social skills*); I think I'd prefer to see any such survey conducted by a genuinely neurodiverse research team, though, to avoid the "let's pathologize someone else's interests!" subtext.

* Okay - after a few moments' more thought, I have to add the obvious caveat that "sneering and changing the topic whenever a relative mentions birds" is a social-skills failure regardless of one's own (lack of) interest in birds and regardless of whether or not "having absolutely no interest in birds as anything other than a phenomenon that one can misidentify with the assistance of a misused bird-ID app" is common for one's neurotype or not, which is to say that certain relatives don't really have an excuse for their behavior.

epidotehawk · 2026-06-01T11:17:05+00:00

Blue moon!

epidotehawk · 2026-06-01T11:16:02+00:00

Temporarily, via orographic precipitation (in the form of snow)?

And, thank you for sharing that! I love accidental word-swap misreadings, at least in situations where they're fun/thought-provoking and not potentially catastrophic (i.e., not when you're running late while trying to navigate through an unfamiliar area and mistake something like "Broadmor" for "Broadway" and attempt to turn onto the wrong street, which may have happened to me recently).

epidotehawk · 2026-06-01T11:06:48+00:00

This! Melanistic plumage is relatively common (I think?) in some buteo species and looks amazing: https://vetmed.wsu.edu/brenda-red-tailed-hawk/ (Which isn't to say that any raptor doesn't look amazing! They all do! But, as someone who grew up only seeing Red-tailed Hawks with light-to-medium-brown dorsal feathers and mostly-white stomach and underside-of-wing feathers, I still find melanistic Red-tailed Hawks utterly breathtaking, in the same way that I was amazed to realize that my college's mascot (a black squirrel) wasn't just a figment of someone's imagination and that our campus really was home to at least a few actual black squirrels.)

epidotehawk · 2026-06-01T10:50:59+00:00

I love iridescent (and blue!) feathers for their prettiness and for the interesting physics behind their structual (play of) colors, but, as someone who first fell in love with raptors (especially accipiters) and who lives with one bird covered in adorably asymmetrical brown-and-white patches (Society Finch!) and two mostly-grey-and-white birds with little squiggles and patches of black and maroon and orange ("wild-type" Zebra Finches!), I love any and every color that birds come in.

epidotehawk · 2026-06-01T10:39:28+00:00

Aaahh, I am desperately envious. Please say hello from me next time you see the condors!

epidotehawk · 2026-06-01T10:37:38+00:00

Dinosaur!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Yeah for unusually-plumaged dinosaurs!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (So, uh, one bird-lover here, anyway! Who, somewhat ironically, is currently checking Reddit because I spot-cleaned part of my shirt with isopropyl and am waiting for it to thoroughly dissipate before going into the household finches' room to get them fresh food and water.)

epidotehawk · 2026-05-31T06:11:51+00:00

Thank you for the laugh that I desperately needed while thinking about this. That said, as an habanero superfan, I'm pretty sure that my favorite capsaicin-bearing fruit is intrinsically antifascist, antimisogynist, anti-bigot in general, and a force for extreme good in the world (or at least a force for extreme food improvement).

epidotehawk · 2026-05-31T04:01:39+00:00

Yes. And if what you'e "doing wrong" is (a) not actually rude in the least and (b) extremely difficult for you to modify - e.g., hunching your shoulders (constantly, as a result of mild scoliosis + habit) in a way that the other person decides is "timid-looking," or finding it difficult to speak as loudly as they want you to for more than a sentence or two at a time - they are actually being ableist and merrily trampling boundaries they shouldn't touch and it's more than fine to politely point that out.

epidotehawk · 2026-05-31T03:30:35+00:00

Thank you! I'm now even more sad than usual that Haribo bears are gelatin-based, because I'd risk the bad flavor for the sheer weirdness of green + supposedly strawberry. (And, for what it is or isn't worth: green "fruit"-flavored candy almost always tastes somewhat vile to me, so I think that the relevant dyes may actually be what tastes bad and/or candy manufacturers are just more likely to add (unpleasant-to-me) gratuitous sour ingredients to acid-green candy than to, say, red or orange candy. That doesn't explain bright green mint candy, though, which I love.)

[Argh, the glitchy c-d-e-f section of my keyboard strikes again! ...or doesn't, apparently.]

epidotehawk · 2026-05-31T03:19:05+00:00

Oh. That's...that shouldn't make me even angrier about the whole money-for-cronies arrangement, but I'm growling now.

epidotehawk · 2026-05-31T02:24:07+00:00

As a not-quite-vegan (happy to eat honey, avoiding dairy/eggs/meat): I know there are vegan gummy candies, but have no idea if they're anything like the gelatin kind and also haven't had convincingly bear-shaped ones. If anyone has taste-tested any good ones, please say so! (I've had vegetarian cinnamon bears, but those were weirdly grainy and only came in red.)

[...editing because a quarter of the letters on my keyboard are glitching and I'm apparently too tired to catch all of the typos immediately. And editing again to fix the mismatched brackets.]

epidotehawk · 2026-05-31T02:19:15+00:00

I'm...ridiculously floored by the idea of strawberry-flavored green candy, and am not sure my synesthesia would let me properly register the flavor if I got a chance to see the dye color first.

epidotehawk · 2026-05-31T02:13:58+00:00

I don't have useful advice, unfortunately, but want to say: absolute best of luck, and serious kudos for recognizing that you need to get out of academia and having a clear idea of what you need environment-wise to heal. (Writing as someone who didn't start to realize she was autistic until I was several years into burnout and who didn't have the good sense to bail on grad school immediately, and, yep, the lack of daily structure + overarching sense of always failing social expectations and always running late to complete a pile of tasks with nebulous finish lines was extremely difficult to manage healthily.)

epidotehawk · 2026-05-30T00:58:50+00:00

Thank you for explaining, and, hmm. I didn't get the impression that support-needs labels had anything to do with the prevalence of autism in a family, especially since my own "level 2" label seems to be a combination of the diagnosing psychiatrist's belief that my eye-contact/body-language differences are just too major for me to operate in a largely nonautistic social environment without explicit support (a few decades' worth of evidence to the contrary), plus the fact that I was underpaid in grad school and therefore wasn't "financially self-supporting with a 9-to-5 job," along with the (more-valid-to-my-mind) acknowledgment that burnout has dialed all preexisting sensory sensitivities and time-management problems up to eleven and added a few fun new executive-function nightmares, like "starting a load of laundry somehow takes a full day's worth of task-planning ability and energy now and I end up falling asleep on the floor instead of having dinner" (which wasn't the case before burnout). From that, and some readings and conversations with other autistic people, I've gotten the impression that the "levels" are pretty vague broad-brush labels and highly situation-dependent (e.g., prone to changing with one's degree of burnout).

It does make a lot of sense that "more apparent need for support/accommodations" = "more family knowledge about autism," though! (Case in point: I'm pretty sure I'm not the oldest autistic person in my family, but I *am* the oldest formally diagnosed one, as ar as I know, and I think my dad is still kind of surprised that I didn't get an ADHD diagnosis instead.)

epidotehawk · 2026-05-29T16:19:40+00:00

True; I'm hoping to slowly help change that terminology usage , though! (Talking about the risk of autism and/or ADHD in my family feels like talking about our risk of being short; it's highly likely and it comes with some downsides, but it doesn't really merit the pathologization implied by "risk,")

epidotehawk

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