DON’T
Don’t have a visible physical disability along with the neurotic personality type (like me). A neurotic personality type is STARVED for positivity from their environment but a visible physical disability makes every interaction with the abled world an incursion. So you get NONE of the positivity you are starved for.
I am a failure and I would like to blame it all on disability based prejudice but I more accurately think some of it boils down to the demoralization due to said prejudice (which I have unable to “cook the books” of my brain to smoke and mirror away). I don’t work on coding projects near as hard as I should. Because I only respond to positivity. That’s why I wrote a megabyte of poetry and not much else. People responded positively to my poetry at open mic. People did not respond positively to my programming projects.
People seem to think negative reinforcement can produce results. There is no question it’s great as a deterrent. For example we got spanked for lying growing up and I’m overly honest because of it. But negative reinforcement doesn’t work as a great motivator. At least not all by itself. There has to be some positivity too. And having a visible physical disability is a surefire way to make every interaction with the world to be like a golf swing out of a sand trap.
Friendship Degradation
The thing I found online pertaining to ADHD (which I almost certainly have) is there isn’t this thing called friendship degradation. We pick up on a friendship at the point we left off regardless of how much time has passed. For me that also means obsessing over close friends who ghosted me for being low status. To them I’m forgotten but that’s because they are neurotypical.
Communication
Great post on communication for those of us on the autistic spectrum. People have accused me of being too direct which I believe is fine but NT’s don’t.
Autistic Burnout
From an NYTimes article on Autistic burnout:
Autistic adults are also more likely to feel suicidal; a 2018 study published in Molecular Autism found that 72 percent of autistic adults scored highly for suicide risk, compared to 33 percent of the general population.
The fact that 33% of adults are suicidal should give one pause. The fact that almost three quarters of autistic adults (me among them) feel that way should really start setting off alarm bells. But it’s like that one Red Dwarf episode where Holi was saying there was an emergency really wryly and nobody was paying attention.
‘
I think they need to add to language that you put an apostrophe after things to delineate your experience of them. So example God’ told you to do something means your experience of God told you to do it.
Also they need to delineate the tripe psychologists shove down your throat with the prefix psy. So for example if the world thinks you are garbage you are not psy-garbage. So you have parallel tracks, one thing psychology is trying to get you to believe and the other what actually transpires.
This is complete bullshit:
Getting enough sleep, exercising, listening to music, meditating and spending time in the sun can all boost dopamine levels. Overall, a balanced diet and lifestyle can go a long way in increasing your body’s natural production of dopamine and helping your brain function at its best.
Internet pundits just say the things they want you to do treat depression and release dopamine. For me checking the Google News app, eating sweets, stemming, getting texts from people I like and being lazy release dopamine. But this isn’t the performance society wants for your brain so it’s swept under the rug.
spaces
For me being someone far from privilege I think it is so important to find spaces that are actually meritocratic (in my case making family videos and writing poetry) because the general world prejudice is going to rule.
Interpret
From 6 Ways To Be A Better Friend To A Disabled Person:
It may sometimes seem like disabled people make awkward situations worse by always interpreting people’s words and actions negatively. It may be tempting to think that you can improve a disabled friend or relative’s outlook by explaining how a bad experience can be interpreted more positively. There is still a lingering ableist idea that disabled people are less self-aware, and less able to analyze difficult situations rationally for themselves.
Capstone Feelings
People don’t realize I no longer much have that feeling where I have good feelings to cap off something challenging I did. For example I don’t have that clean feeling after taking a shower. And when I do hard volunteer work I often don’t have the feeling of accomplishment. Part of me has been so corrupted by late stage capitalism that I only feel good when I’ve made money and not when I’ve helped people.
I think these feelings are gone largely due to negative symptoms from bipolar 1 rather than autism. This is especially true because they are a more recent development in my 30’s and 40’s.
learning things the hard way
People don’t understand that if you don’t teach the unwritten rules people (especially those of us on the spectrum) are going to learn them the hard way. The more of a struggle learning something the more you retain and obsess over it. If someone had gently told me status was the most important thing verbally instead of having me find out the hard way by being treated like crap for being low status, I would have been grateful. I also wouldn’t be so obsessed with status or resentful of not having it.
Men perpetually lied to are easy pickings for the Redpill, MGTOW, and Incel culture. The right is drawing in men because they posit a narrative that matches men’s existence just like the left is drawing in women because they also posit a narrative that matches women’s existence.