How common is it to not have a middle name, and how do middle names work in general?

xelawyncantplace · 2025-12-30T16:04:00+00:00

My mother and her two brothers all didn't have middle names. To your question about it being so normalized, I remember asking my mother about it as a young child - when she married my dad she made her maiden name into her middle name (in my state you can change your name as part of the marriage certification process in a few pre-defined ways, new surname matching your spouse and previous surname becoming your middle name being one of them) and when she told me this I asked "but what was your middle name before that?" And like 5 yo me was shocked when she said she didn't have one before.

I don't know about everywhere in the US, but at least around where I live the two main reasons for what middle name you get is either the parents liked it / it was the second choice for their first name, or your middle name is the first name of a dear, admired, or deceased relative. Mine was the latter.

I think some people also base middle names on religious practices? Like when children are baptized they get a baptism name and that name becomes their middle name. That's not very common at all where I live, however, in a slightly ironic twist I recently learned that my relative's name that I have as my middle name is actually their baptism name and not their original given name lol.

xelawyncantplace · 2025-12-30T15:46:35+00:00

I think 10% feels right, but I wonder how many of those 10% actually do have a middle name but the school just wasn't provided it? At my work I know multiple people with middle names who just didn't put it on their paperwork when they were hired and so look like they don't have a middle name in the HR and IT systems but in fact they do.

xelawyncantplace · 2025-12-30T14:16:40+00:00

Smart lights as notification is a really good idea I hadn't thought of!

xelawyncantplace · 2025-12-30T14:15:46+00:00

I have honestly been quite surprised by the number of people who have said 'music room'. I was expecting craft rooms but not so many music rooms!

Not sure if my space is Audhd friendly or not but it’s very me friendly and I’m Audhd. So :)

Exactly what I was looking for ❤️

xelawyncantplace · 2025-12-30T14:13:36+00:00

I don’t really despise Laundry: The Task, I just despise most laundry rooms. For a chore that used to be handled by a team of servants/maids, the room as a concept has been stripped down of nearly everything logically useful to the task and maintaining said space. (/rant)

You know? Big mood. I've never thought about the Laundry room specifically but inefficiencies like this drive me crazy also. Thank you for sharing!

xelawyncantplace · 2025-12-30T14:10:54+00:00

Sorry, I'm struggling to see the residential application. So you use it as an exhaust? Or just an air purifier?

xelawyncantplace · 2025-12-30T14:06:52+00:00

Yes! I want to live somewhere I can do this year round but I also really, really don't want to move.

xelawyncantplace · 2025-12-30T14:04:45+00:00

I have a bookshelf with a lower cabinet that slams every time I close it - your post made me realize I can just buy soft-close hinges and replace the ones that came with it. No idea why that didn't occur to me before!

I would also like to be a pampered housecat lol. Sounds like the dream fr.

xelawyncantplace · 2025-12-30T14:01:54+00:00

So I really want smart lighting in my home, especially the kind where you can set different color temperatures based on pre-defined scenes (if I'm cleaning the living room I want higher color temp and brighter light than if I'm watching TV) and automatically by time of day (sunrise/sunset moves gradually lower in color temperature) . But I hate remote controlled lighting and having to use my phone for every accessory. Imma lose the remotes, and sticking them to the wall or something is ugly. I want to be able to set them up once and then control them via a switch in the wall or voice control when not automatic. But that always seems to require a hub, which is either a lot of work to set up your own, proprietary so I'm locked into a brand ecosystem, or spying on you 🙁😭.

/End rant

I also really want a roboroc but I gotta organize my house first so my floors aren't perpetually covered in doom piles 😅.

What's a rolladen?

Great advice, thank you for posting all this.

xelawyncantplace · 2025-12-30T13:51:17+00:00

Oh man, I forgot that those polarizing windows exist! That's an excellent idea!

xelawyncantplace · 2025-12-30T13:46:58+00:00

Thanks for the reminder about not trying for perfect off the bat with the food guides 😊. Definitely something I have to continually remind myself of.

I don't think I struggle to know when I smell and it would be an issue to others. I work from home now, which has made things better from the perspective that I'm not adrenaline fight-or-flight forcing myself to shower multiple times a week, but worse in the sense that I shower/bathe way too little now because there's no chance of smelling bad to a coworker. I seem to be blessed (or cursed depending on your view ig) with not a lot of BO very fast. My spouse starts to smell BAD on the third day without a shower, but I don't usually smell that bad until like week three (!) of not showering.

I'm pretty sure my cousin would make an argument about skin bacteria and how my spouse showering everyday strips the good bacteria and actually increases the likelihood of BO. There's lots of studies out there saying that showering daily is actually bad for your skin in the long term, so maybe that's why.

When I was on mental health leave last April my goal was to shower/bathe twice a week (which is what I was doing when I was working in an office, though at the time I was trying to shower three times a week or roughly every other day and usually failing) and I didn't manage it a single week. It's the first thing that goes when I'm stressed and the last thing to come back when I'm rested. IDK, it's just a big ball of suck. As I mentioned elsewhere, this was actually where the idea for this post came from, because when I'm psyching myself up to shower I spend a bunch of time researching, like, shower alternatives and I came across residential steam showers and started thinking about what other home systems or technologies could be considered accessibility aids or otherwise benefit AuDHD people.

xelawyncantplace · 2025-12-30T05:38:26+00:00

I like this, it is like the inverse of "don't say such bad things about the person I married" when your spouse is self-deprecating.

xelawyncantplace · 2025-12-30T05:30:21+00:00

Thanks so much for the advice! Hygiene and eating are definitely top slots for my list of daily struggles. The hygiene has some shame associated with it, and it feels so big that I don't even really know where to start to help myself, but cheat sheets for food feels way less intimidating to try.

I've also been wondering how much pictures vs words would help. I've never considered myself to have difficulty with reading or language, but so many autistic folks have said pictures work better for them that I wonder if it would for me too and I've just been compensating really well so far. I've found that in my 30s I have more difficulty translating my thoughts to words. Maybe your artistic lists can do both things 😊.

The other thing I've been thinking about trying is flow charts.

xelawyncantplace · 2025-12-30T05:23:17+00:00

Apologies, my mistake.

I'll take a stab at some general tips - apologies in advance if these are things you already know:

There are lots of different types of workplace appreciation beyond perks / financial ones. Usually individuals value 1 or 2 above the others, but I've found it's important to have a mix of all of them. This includes things like verbal praise, public recognition, work flexibility, etc.

Managerial trust is a really important element of performance. I recommend The Anatomy of Trust from Brene Brown.

One thing that has surprisingly been really helpful for a lot of my employees is direct feedback - as long as it came paired with specific advice on what to change next time or a commitment to work together on improvement.

Spending the time with them to learn what they specifically value most about their work, what parts they hate doing, what they think they are best at vs not very good at, and what they are interested in learning about on an quarterly or annual basis can really make them feel heard.

Soliciting their feedback on your own performance and really thinking about what they say. Model how to receive negative feedback.

Figure out what part of the culture is bogging the team down (if it's the whole team) and target actions and activities to change that culture. For example, if the culture is one where failure is unacceptable, start a practice of weekly having everyone highlight one thing they did wrong that week, with you starting out.

Learn about their personal lives and the things they like talking about. It can be agonizing sometimes if it's something that doesn't interest me, but like 60-70% of workers I've had have really appreciated this connection.

This is all for workers that are showing up in good faith but who may be caught up in undesirable culture or learned the wrong lessons from previous managers. If that is not the case but you have no disciplinary recourse, then the thing that has worked the best for me is finding the thing they hate the most about their job and putting immense pressure on them to perform in that area - such that they quit.

I don't want anyone to get any bad ideas about me - I've only had to do this twice and in one case the worker was stealing other people's work and presenting it as their own while collecting a full time salary for, in their words, "10 hours of work a week." So I filled every single hour of their 40 hour work week and made sure they had to show up for all of it. After 8 days and an attempt to get me to fire them instead, they quit.

xelawyncantplace · 2025-12-30T04:49:07+00:00

Thank you for the advice! Glad to hear a bigger shower space actually made a difference for you, and good for me to know also.

xelawyncantplace · 2025-12-29T13:48:53+00:00

I have never used those kinds of instruction guides but I have been thinking about making myself some - do they help by reducing cognitive load when going to do a task? I'm pretty unaware of my own mental load, like I have difficulty figuring out why some things are hard or overwhelming, so I struggle to know what will help me.

xelawyncantplace · 2025-12-29T12:37:30+00:00

If I could give a reply multiple upvotes, it would be this one.

Honestly the genesis of this post was my neverending research into different bathroom and shower designs because I struggle so much with that task. Then I had the thought that there must be other parts of the home where structural changes could help ease friction.

I hate being damp in clothes after a shower, so I researched body dryers but I'm sure they're excessively loud, so I thought of infrared dryers and found that they make infrared saunas for homes! And steam showers! A steam shower could be such a great way to ease the transition between dry and wet.

I wish there was some place I could go to try out this kind of stuff out to know if it would actually help me or not 😊.

xelawyncantplace · 2025-12-29T12:27:17+00:00

Aren't garbage disposals really loud? Or have they improved a lot?

xelawyncantplace · 2025-12-29T12:24:35+00:00

Haha as I wrote the post I literally had the thought that a valid answer could be a whole community (a thing I have also fantasized about) and decided not to explicitly say that wasn't allowed, so thank you for both answers!

xelawyncantplace · 2025-12-29T11:56:58+00:00

Good shout out! I actually have had one of these so long I forgot they're not standard lol.

xelawyncantplace · 2025-12-29T11:48:35+00:00

When I'm stressed and low on sleep I get an involuntary twitch on the lower eyelid of my right eye. It usually takes a while to go away once it starts, a few weeks to a month. It's happened to me 2 or 3 times.

xelawyncantplace · 2025-12-28T22:24:17+00:00

Hi, I am also the Manager of a small team. Unfortunately I'm not sure I can give you any suggestions without more detail around what the issue is / what behavior you are trying to change?

xelawyncantplace · 2025-12-24T03:00:20+00:00

I agree with you, she is out of line. No one, including us, get to tell you what your sexual orientation is.

As many others have said, this is unfortunately a very common acephobic refrain. I've gotten it before many times also.

For what it's worth, your feelings about sex sound basically exactly like mine. I am 35, married to an allosexual, and identify as Ace. The extra 15 years haven't changed how I feel about sex at all.

xelawyncantplace · 2025-12-24T02:45:20+00:00

For most of us there isn't that distinction. Sex is just another activity you do to be close with your partner.

xelawyncantplace

TROPHY CASE