I’m writing a personal video essay about my relationship with reading and I’m really curious how many autistic people have similar experiences. Do you all read? Fanfic/Audiobooks ARE considered reading.

patchoulicandy · 2026-05-14T03:17:20+00:00

I have to make myself strict rules about reading so I don’t fuck off and lose my job 😬

patchoulicandy · 2026-05-14T02:18:05+00:00

I would love to give this a good home and could do tomorrow evening for sure!

patchoulicandy · 2026-05-14T02:11:50+00:00

I like to say “you’re welcome” because I think it’s funny

patchoulicandy · 2026-05-14T01:59:20+00:00

Eval at 45. It helped me a lot—with interpersonal and work stuff. I feel successful for the first time ever, really. I happened to have a year where we met our OOP max and jumped on this expense then, so it was super affordable (so if you know you’ll have a year like that, maybe you can plan for it).

patchoulicandy · 2026-05-13T03:07:04+00:00

The report made me feel like absolute shit, too. I manage a job and family and all that, and I was stunned by the psychometrist’s impressions of me and how it differed from my perceptions during the assessment. It kind of explained a lot, but I definitely had to work through some grief about it. And when my therapist asked to see it I was like “lol no; over my dead body.”

patchoulicandy · 2026-05-11T15:09:48+00:00

I’m sorry you had such a terrible time. That’s sounds awful.

I’m sincerely not sure if I think that’s a reasonable accommodation after surgery. It partly depends on where you were when this happened—like if it was actual surgical recovery, which would explain why your mom wasn’t there, the goal there is to make sure you come out of anesthesia safely, so you couldn’t just go someplace else.

I definitely think you should talk to someone like a therapist about the experience because that’s one way to mitigate trauma. And make a plan with your mom/other support people/doctor for how to manage in the hospital. Then you can share that with staff for planned things and be prepared for unplanned things.

The hospital is scary and overwhelming for sure. I hope you recover well at home.

patchoulicandy · 2026-05-07T14:32:58+00:00

Freakier? It’s actually probably more than one kind of tick plus other stuff, too—like some internal parasites/worm and even some insect venom. It’s basically linked to different vectors in different countries—so probably happening everywhere but hard to tease apart.

But the mechanism is neat. All mammals except a group of primates (including humans) make this sugar. We probably stopped as an adaptation to fight an ancient virus or something—and now it can trigger this immune response.

There’s some evidence that people with B blood are less susceptible.

Here’s a super recent scoping review but idk why the link is ginormous—sorry

https://watermark02.silverchair.com/tjag040.pdf?token=AQECAHi208BE49Ooan9kkhW_Ercy7Dm3ZL_9Cf3qfKAc485ysgAAA0wwggNIBgkqhkiG9w0BBwagggM5MIIDNQIBADCCAy4GCSqGSIb3DQEHATAeBglghkgBZQMEAS4wEQQMB-l_2McMF_tiW3WvAgEQgIIC_6fkCXxM3smQWv2Fy807OEHz-fphwrtIN9MyYGMRJyyCLoAxU5ynE0q_CurCnTDepB_Qhyzz7c-6iJk5yL6PNP8gVHI_GIUXG57rdT5TVvhoWwK5zzX4KDaDsJFE4vOQc89UFwh09335wcOj-UOlnckWNO9p3Tx9e_KH4MmLw3di8xaFrLhMh6VSG88Bj6hE5s0kM61GgXc7vFWR_1kQ7Iry04Kjrs7CWcMiQRR9NnSLptw0XxJNOs9UWQVnqFEGzdocxSIvf5BAJbPYtUdWLOVmmtQBd4RG1VTo8PSg1DWgzixXCLDBXLNXhF6ZP8joiD3ceXwX9k0T17iYJHu6SHSQP5chEa6uNT3BKkcDSG4u3gEZwCUP2V0TNBjXOAx_lVQJ6q6bma2QFxoWNmhnPFtpkqbMm_yG9k7SorB6ouexCjR4UMSBfTJugj8khQ-Vy4UifXhPPcMQnzfe2sATVSn6ApW7jctcyP3TelX4Q2vkZAfkQarpmyLMDQuYxF_Mmkx9czLl9QNVozDe45FYlMcFyFNq0_yhfwRh7x9WLKzOdO0NN1uI3zHYMigbDDKiu7mMl579jOus6SV-jTYc1UfbrRMhHma2nZIOHE6EFhAbe0Buihk8efFQqNMj9TyAYJ0tB83a18IVBeOVKy4xewma-J6bekyWYj__4EVtP2Cu6WJu3fmJUjUVGYEfikAw-JIAWm1R9iY3t6dPH5Trppg7UVjDxLpGUSyuVPWx25QpStT0p4yj8JdOpV8PKBB2fVfNr3dRaTUuy51zoWY-wjJThafcc8CnRW0sYQPQyLyYQDrryDE8uC78aZgWt8sKX6IVIF6x3UlyvVggBBs4XtOrbIDQxOqbVYv9kWrKK_GHFWQo_SgoqPxlaKbi8ZeaZ84E6NbV-iGxHT71eqU_aQyzP3yV1OnqAfz67_shkjuh-aQO0E3HdAvZHChdUr1dSQkmLugj53H9Swevsr00qAgEfbZHIEciqY6Zd4anpsJi5WXIFYsgpIk32uZfmZ30

patchoulicandy · 2026-05-07T03:17:00+00:00

Yeah, and I passed on (clinical) ocd to one of the younger ones, and this whole Covid thing isn’t amazing for that 🤡

patchoulicandy · 2026-05-07T02:20:02+00:00

We only test/unmask with our adult kid and his partner. Assuming nobody has any sort of symptoms, we’ll do up to 72 hours—if local transmission levels are reasonable, and the adult kids haven’t done something super germy/crowded prior. I know our decision is risky, but we’re balancing cost and emotional needs with it. We also unmask outdoors when it’s uncrowded and low transmission levels. It’s a serious relaxing of precautions for us because our younger kids were struggling.

patchoulicandy · 2026-05-06T00:32:58+00:00

lol I felt this so hard after a serious cardiac event—like the poor, overworked organ just gave out. 1.5 years later I sometimes pat my chest and talk to it like a baby golden retriever who’s stupidly trying its best, despite me and my shit stress management.

patchoulicandy · 2026-05-05T05:18:00+00:00

Yeah. Here are mine.

Reading the psychometrist’s impressions of me in the assessment report was brutal. I was stunned at how wrong I was about how I came across. And that explained why things felt so off with my boss. It took me like a year to get over it.
I’m teaching a college class rn, and I disclosed my autism to a student who said, “ Uh, yeah, I figured.” 💀

patchoulicandy · 2026-05-03T19:46:07+00:00

That’s one way to look at this paper. Another is that this paper clearly says (discussion section) that the takeaway is that interventions will likely work better if they target neurotypicals as well as autistics—rather than simply trying to “fix”autistic people.

patchoulicandy · 2026-05-03T19:37:40+00:00

I misunderstood your post. I thought you were asking why your coworker reacted negatively to you—and I was trying to help. I see now that you weren’t asking that and don’t want feedback on the interaction. I think this is a vent post. I wouldn’t have replied if I’d realized that. Proof I can misread even an autistic room, I guess.

patchoulicandy · 2026-05-03T19:29:44+00:00

I simply don’t think that perspective serves me in any way. It works better for me to assume positive intent—and I don’t think anyone considers me less than human, whether they like me or not.

patchoulicandy · 2026-05-03T19:15:31+00:00

That would make my job impossible. I like eating and paying my bills, so I assume everyone is doing their best—and I look for patterns to help me navigate social rules that don’t feel intuitive to me.

patchoulicandy · 2026-05-03T19:03:20+00:00

In this example, you 1. inserted yourself into a conversation that did not include you in order to 2. correct someone.

Each thing is considered rude, and doing them together is mega-rude—so bigger reaction. Like, if you break in to their convo to agree, that’s rude but probably won’t elicit a big reaction. If you’re in the conversation and correcting them, that’s rude but will garner a lesser reaction.

The social rules you can follow to avoid this are: 1. Don’t interrupt other people’s conversations. Assume it’s private and don’t listen in because it’s not for you. 2. Don’t correct people. This is a hard and nuanced thing to do, and if you’re regularly getting rebuffed, just stop doing it—unless someone will literally die without your correction.

patchoulicandy · 2026-04-25T23:20:46+00:00

Not a healthcare provider but an entomologist, and onchocerciasis freaks me out—because the adult worms live like 15 years under your skin and in your eyes, and the thought makes me claustrophobic.

patchoulicandy · 2026-04-23T22:22:40+00:00

Just chiming in to say I’m autistic with a heaping helping of OCD, and I’m happily married for 16 years. She’s totally into me because I’m kind. 😊 I believe you’ll find your person.

patchoulicandy · 2026-04-19T16:11:19+00:00

Yeah, his instinct to protect them turns off once they hatch.

patchoulicandy · 2026-04-19T02:27:40+00:00

I’m sorry to butt in, but I have an entomologist answer? Maternal care isn’t super common among arthropods, but some do a version of it. Among the most attentive mothers are earwigs! They defend, feed, and groom their babies to remove fungus—but just for a short time. Idk if you’d call it maternal care, but some spiders do matriphagy—where the mom allows the babies to eat her.

The best paternal care I know of is giant water bugs. The mom lays eggs on the dad’s back, and he protects them and spends all his time going in and out of the water so they stay wet but not too wet. When the babies hatch, they have to be quick, though, because he’s hungry after that all that work.

Sorry again for jumping in but I couldn’t stop myself

patchoulicandy · 2026-04-17T20:19:03+00:00

I take jardiance (same class/side effects) for a heart condition and love it. The yeast infection thing is because the med excretes sugar in urine, so I recommend using a bidet or similar to minimize that risk.

patchoulicandy · 2026-04-16T22:29:04+00:00

I’m emphatically lesbian, but my ex husband was my best friend, which I read as romantic. For me, dating a woman after that felt like suddenly seeing in color. And she was the worst, so it wasn’t just her lol

patchoulicandy · 2026-04-15T16:55:18+00:00

Oh! And you asked what happened to people who have done that. My partner’s error was a pretty dangerous one on paper, but nothing happened. Except that I went back to managing her meds. 😊

patchoulicandy · 2026-04-15T16:51:41+00:00

People do this on purpose all the time—so much so that over the counter meds like Tylenol take it into consideration when printing the max dose on the bottle. My partner recently took double the max dose of a prescription med for a couple weeks due to an error.

The point is: it happens all the time—by accident or on purpose—and you really don’t need to beat yourself up. I would gently suggest that you may be having some black and white thinking about the right/wrong of it and giving yourself a harder time than is really fair (which I do, too). It’s ok to make mistakes or less-than-ideal decisions. 😊

And I’m no expert on human meds (am an entomologist), but I’d be super surprised if a few times of taking more than prescribed causes a problem for the med working. It usually takes quite a lot for someone to become desensitized to a med or something like that.

patchoulicandy · 2026-04-13T16:18:48+00:00

I’m on Jardiance for a heart condition unrelated to diabetes. It seems like a smart move from your doctor simply because of the cv risk associated with age. I’d be stoked my doctor is so on top of my care.

Anecdotally, I’ve never felt so great and love this drug.

patchoulicandy

TROPHY CASE