While I sincerely value how my #neurodivergent brain so deeply & fully engages with anything I encounter...
...sometimes I REALLY envy the ability to engage with many things simultaneously on a surface level
(Like, for example, be able to stay semi-active on Mastodon while writing a research-intensive article instead of having to ghost out entirely in order to focus 🙃)
@MarkRDavid
Ha! I’m currently writing at a cafe. But I’ll do a combo. Yes I’m in public around people, but I also have headphones on playing brown noise :)
@EmilyMoranBarwick@MarkRDavid@actuallyautistic
I'm a software engineer, not an author, but I use sound tactically. When I need to solve a difficult problem, I'll pace the floor (or the garden), talking aloud, gesturing with my hands, and generally embarrassing Helen if we have people here. 😄 If I'm working on something of medium difficulty, I'll use a very familiar playlist to give me a little energy and block out the world. If I'm tired or trying to power through something boring, the I'll use raucous music as an audio amphetamine.
Why do I wave my hands about? Because I'm building data structures in the air. Autists think in a more visual way than neurotypicals.
Hung out with a friend yesterday and he was able—ON THE SPOT—to ACCURATELY estimate how much time it would take us to go to thrift stores and eat lunch.
@EmilyMoranBarwick@actuallyautistic@actuallyadhd experience. Me, AuDHD, PM-ing:
December, bosses speak of a new project:
-When can it be done?
Me, without thinking:
-September
Bosses: What? Why? It’s tiny, we need to launch it in June, let’s ask devs
Devs: We’ll be ready in March
Bosses: See?
Me: you forgot other depts
Bosses: we’ll add people, it’ll be ready in June
Me: tries to not say a joke about 9 women and 1 month
…
September, 3: the launch
@EmilyMoranBarwick@actuallyautistic@actuallyadhd I mean, I only come in time because I overcompensate a lot, going out 1 hour before to the place at 20 minutes walk distance. Being able to estimate doesn’t mean being able to actually follow the plan later. Maybe that’s why if I try to think logically and rationally, I can never guess correctly. But just intuition with no thinking says right normally for me, idk why
For the first time in months, I forced myself to get off the f—ing computer and go for a f—ing walk, where I met this little guy...
If at all possible, go outside sometime...
...your brain may stay in its spiral
...you may not notice any beauty
...but you may just encounter a random #cat in the middle of Amish farmland (who has no respect for it not being #Caturday) and be reminded for a moment that life...life is a thing
...but can we do it without suggesting that the reason a woman would dedicate her life to #science & #teaching was to fill the vacuous space of never having children?
...and maybe also without suggesting some intuitive maternal instinct as the source of her #scientific reasoning?
"Our communities are worth a lot more than the underlying tool used at some point in time. By accepting the confusion, we are destroying our communities. We are selling them, we are transforming them into a simple commercial asset for the makers of the tool we are using, the tool which exploits us"
"Studies investigating autistic community research priorities indicate a mismatch between what #autism research focuses on and what #autistic people want to see researched."
I actually just wrote a book chapter on this in terms of a missing segment of the neuroergonomics literature targeting neurodiverse individuals as a key sector of the populace that could benefit by developing their own coping strategies with direct feedback from brain measuring devices. No work that I could find anywhere in the literature has been done on this, so we wrote it up as a way to hopefully bring some attention to it.
My wife was my inspiration as she was recently diagnosed, and it frustrated me how little we could do and how little research has been done to help develop functional coping strategies that are backed by the wealth of literature we have in other similar domains that have been studied for neurotypical people. If you guys want, I can link it, but the article is super dry and probably not exciting for most readers…and I think Springer paywalls it 😖
"If anything, we should stop using #Luddite as a facile insult, and use it to invoke a cautionary tale of what can happen when the specter of automation stokes fears of mass joblessness in an uneasy public—a phenomenon already taking root today."
– from @brianmerchant almost 10 years ago. Hits even harder in the "today of today"
"when trying to make some change, we’re apt to notice and calculate all of the risks associated with making that change. We’re much less apt to notice all of the risks of NOT making that change—of persisting on the current path."
When people find out I’m #ActuallyAutistic & (well-meaning but problematically) say something like “Don’t worry, you can’t tell!”
I think to myself “You’ve obviously never seen me zoned out at the grocery store w/my over-ear headphones, making clicking noises in my throat & doing god-knows-what kind of hand movements that feel good in the moment”
To be clear: I wasn’t always comfortable being “#ActuallyAutistic in public”
Like many #neurodivergent kids (who didn’t know they were neurodivergent) I quickly learned that the self-regulatory behaviors I naturally did were “not socially acceptable”
So I #masked up like a champ for a good 3+ decades
I “passed” so well I even fooled myself. But the cost of masking takes it’s toll
Now I’m learning to let all the parts of me I’d locked away have their day again :)
@EmilyMoranBarwick@actuallyautistic I’ve been masking for nearly 6 decades. It’s the implication that you can & should hide it that is sad. Well meaning, but awfully mistaken.
As a primarily online-based educational #activist focused on areas of #SocialJustice#ClimateJustice, etc, I fear I often sound "whiny" when trying to explain the utter demoralization of digital platforms / social media giants / #Google
After all, isn't the cause more important?
This passage from @pluralistic 's lecture on #enshittification finally put into words what I've been grappling with.
And validates how very vital the fight for an open internet is.
@EmilyMoranBarwick@pluralistic I feel like Ruthanna Emrys's A Half-Built Garden does a very nice job of illustrating how distributed decision-making and community organization is enabled by a digital network in a climate-crisis-recovery world (sort of 'post-almost-apocalypse'?)... and how disrupted this can be by corporate warfare directed at that network...
@EmilyMoranBarwick@actuallyautistic
Well, since mastodon only has a chronological timeline (instead of say user-customizable algorithm), you probably should not post during nighttime. And maybe not at the time when everyone's working. ;)
The way I look at it. For you to be the most comfortable. Try to follow what your really interested in.
For instance most of my people I follow happen to be science/art/Neurodiversity/nature/birds/cats/comics… when you follow others content you will see other things appearing.
Most on fedi I have found are people being themselves but trying hard to respect each other.
Those are the people I boost. I try boost the content I want to see more.