I nearly didn’t listen to this episode, because I’ve never had an eating disorder, but it’s almost more about identity & addiction & autonomy than eating disorders, and is fascinating as a result. @actuallyautistic#actuallyautistic
Wow. I did have some sensory issues with food as a kid. They were very limited, mainly to fatty or grisly meat. (I loved food generally & as a child who was always growing, very tall, always had a healthy appetite.) And I remember a couple of unpleasant episodes with my mum trying to insist that I just swallow something. (Tablets were another problem.) But she must’ve backed right off, because they didn’t persist. And she was always very supportive & caring when I had gastro, which always distressed me & hit me hard.
My sensitivities seem to have been just a few for each sense. I’ve always worn a hat in summer & worn prescription sunglasses outside for years. Stuffy classrooms. High pitched noises make me nauseous & low pitched rumbling, like that noise used for sound effects in movies & TV, unnerves me. Chemical smells like paints, thinners, insecticides etc. And big disorganised department stores & shopping malls. We went to a big centre yesterday to buy cat stuff & couldn’t get out quickly enough. (Will they ever finish renovating/extending/altering Chadstone shopping centre? Doesn’t really matter. Wouldn’t go often anyway.)
Very emotionally sensitive. Always cried in the right places when watching videos on camps with my students, much to their delight. 😂 But also very sensitive to trauma in fiction, like The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, Once & dystopian fiction.
Was terrified of dogs when the new puppy jumped up to lick my face when I was 2. It went back to the breeder. I’d force myself to walk down a neighbouring street where lots of dogs were able to wander out of their yard in an attempt to desensitise myself. Didn’t work, but I did eventually grow out of it.
I’m probably more sensory seeking - naturally fragrant flowers & foliage, textures, colours, music of all types (but I need quiet time too). And I like people. I just don’t always get them, or perhaps more accurately, they don’t get me. And I like activity, games & sports, even though my physical coordination isn’t great. (Much much better than it used to be.)!
@pathfinder@actuallyautistic
I “ate like a horse”, had “hollow legs” & needed to have a heavy “ book on her head”. Was the youngest in my cohort (double whammy on poor social skills), but often the tallest.
The thing I like least about the recent wave of inflation is having to now forensically check every cafe/restaurant menu to decide whether I can afford to eat there. Never really had to do that before. But prices are soaring while my freelance income remains much the same.
My partner does most of our shopping. He’s had Not Covid & I had to pop into the supermarket, & was gobsmacked by the price of crackers… $4 for sesame vitawheat? Cafes vary a lot by location. We ate at one yesterday near Murrumbeena station. (2 excellent cafes there since the sky rail went in.) Certainly cheaper than Malvern, & as for Sydney… Rental clearly a big factor.
I often dwell on how generations heading into middle age are in weird in-between times: while older generations’ experiences were mostly not digitised and today’s young folk are over-digitised, only some of my generation’s past is digitised. That leaves us in an existence where life is patchily recalled.
@samhkennedy
I haven’t given this whole thing much thought, because it’s too much to deal with. I’ve decided to vote green next time in spite of liking my local Labor MP, but that seems to be all that I can do.
I was an avid reader of fiction when I was a child. Novels about challenging issues or strange fantasy worlds. In many ways reading was an escape to a safe place, but those books were also places where I could learn about how “people” worked. How they thought, felt & behaved. The diversity in those things.
I loved The Little Princess and The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett, because they were about children who were different & how they coped. I loved The Chronicles of Narnia because, although quite dated now, the girls had real adventures alongside their brothers. There was a series of books about witches, good & bad, which I loved but can’t remember the titles or author.
I loved Ivan Southall’s books, where tweens & teens faced dangers, often without the support of adults. (Marsden’s Tomorrow when the War Began is reminiscent of Southall.)
And as an adult, I still like youth & YA fiction, probably for the same reason, because I’m still learning how humans work. I also like adult fiction, but the naivety of youth fiction appeals.
And TBO, I read much more non-fiction than fiction nowadays. Obviously there’s the Autism & ADHD stuff that is currently dominating my reading, but also social commentaries of all sorts, by feminists, sociologists, etc.
@Fizzfizzpopop@actuallyautistic
I started reading the Narnia books to my oldest when they were 4. If I was having a bath, they’d drag a chair down to the bathroom & bring the book so I could read to them. They’ve just published the final volume of their portal fantasy trilogy.
My life has been one of chapters, written by someone who didn’t start the book with a plan of the narrative arc, or if they did, they kept changing their mind.
I’m feeling better about myself & my life than I’ve ever done before, having truly realised my autistic identity in the last year, at 63, but I couldn’t tell you what I’ll be doing in 5 years. There are too many variables. What’s the point of even trying to work that out?
That question should be banned from job interviews.
However a desired direction is good. Not necessarily a goal, an endpoint, but a direction. I do think we make better decisions when we have some type of path in mind. For example, “I want to be a kinder person” leads to wanting to be kinder to oneself which might lead to therapy etc.
My oldest sent me this. My head just exploded. The first draft of my first 3000 word essay in uni was 8000 words long.
My history essays at uni were labours of love. I could never understand the concept of “pulling an all-nighter” the night before the essay was due. How was such a thing even possible? You had to do hours & hours of reading, note-taking, reflection…
And then write & write & write all that stuff that begged to be said, and then cull & cull & cull & then rewrite to knit the remaining pieces together fluently… And somehow end up with a piece that sent shivers down your spine & got you an HD.
Didn’t you? Or was that just me?
When teaching narrative writing to teens, I could only teach it in a formulaic way. I could only write formulaic model texts. They were quite good, with some character development, voice, interesting vocab etc, but the structure was formulaic.
I could never imagine myself as a writing a novel. Quirky short pieces maybe, but not a novel. And yet my oldest wrote their first novella as a teen.
I need to lie down. Oh, I am. It’s 5am and my cat adoption excitement has woken me. I’m discombobulated. Again.
I literally can’t do it. I just don’t know how. I have to do the broader reading & note-taking to process that material before I can even start to think what to write & how to write it. On the one hand that process is what made it possible to write excellent essays & to perform well in exams, not that we had many history exams. But I couldn’t throw something together at the last minute if my life depended on it.
It’s not just about being nerds with high standards etc. it’s that we simply can’t do it any other way.
I was in my 30s, single parent & part time retail worker. Took 4.5 years for my arts degree, mostly HDs & Ds, but to have settled for a lower standard wasn’t possible. Assignments only came together in a presentable form at the very end. Pulling them together took hours, let alone all the rest of it.
Hard to see much difference between #Labor and #LNP these days Fortunately, my local member is #Greens Elizabeth Watson-Brown, so neither will get a preference from my votes.
Most definitely. I thought it might happen last time. If it happens next time, it might inspire Labor to shift back to the left. They got a big scare in 2019, but a lot more new young voters have signed up since then, and housing costs etc are hitting more people.
I’ve always been a “coper”, constantly trying to find ways to manage, to do what “needs” to be done etc, except for those periods when I was burnt out. I remember when feeling overwhelmed years ago, a counsellor helped me to see that it was possible to achieve everything that I needed to do over the next few days, as a single mum, students, part time worker. Which was great in the short term…
We got home from several days in Sydney yesterday. Monday & Tuesday we went out after spending the weekend with family, but kept it low key. Today I was supposed to head out for a counselling appointment, treating myself to a tram trip to a lovely neighbourhood & a cafe lunch afterwards. Instead she’s going to send me a link for an online session. And I might have a nap afterwards. I’m learning. Slowly. @actuallyautistic