Just a heads up — “Young African American men” or “African American youths” might be a little more precise. I don’t think one would often say “young whites” or “young Asian Americans”. Just a kind of person centered language — just a friendly word to the wise. Not trying to call you out or anything — just something that caught my eye. I apologize for any offense or discomfort in mentioning it.
Meanwhile, I think one would say “young Asian Americans,” or what I think the white version would be, “young white Americans.” I think your way works, too, I just don’t know that it’s better. (Though it might be for African American specifically? I definitely say and hear Black more, which would need a noun after it in a way that “American” can cover.)
That’s honestly like the perfect movie to watch behind her mom’s back. Damn, uhh, she’d have watched it 10 years ago I’d guess? So sliding comic time would take 10 years to get to that point
😰😰😰 This is gonna be a difficult thing for Joyce to sort out internally, isn’t it?
Whatever Joyce decides to do with this, I really hope her friends respect her wishes and how she chooses to identify.
I will surely respect everyone’s right to identify with any label, traits or descriptors they want, be it “autism” or anything else! 🤗
I’m really glad this word gives so many of you a sense of empowerment or understanding. But yet, I feel a little left out myself. 😔
I guess one part of it is because I have yet to get the opportunity to really understand all of you!
If you so choose, I would like you to write below me what your autism or other neurodivergence is like, and things about it you feel are unique to your own!
My curiosity is peaked, along with a few other things. 🤩 😨 🤩
Or you could just tell me your favorite comfort foods. 😋
A sandwich made from ground beef in a moderately spicy sauce with the ground beef not formed into a patty before browning, and then simmered in the sauce. I would call it good, but then my wife says I call a lot of foods good that aren’t actually good to anyone but me, like Mrs. Tobin’s codballs in onion creme sauce, which were made from salt cod which I’m told smelled like rotten fish. And also natto, the stinky cheese of beans.
my official diagnosis is ADHD and I am mostly comfortable with it—putting a name to my collective struggles and idiosyncrasies has so far helped more than hindered. the most fitting way I’ve found to describe myself, though, is “feral gremlin.”
I also like to describe my neurodivergence as a clown car joyride in which my brain has the steering wheel 100% of the time and I’m in the front passenger seat just flailing helplessly while the clowns party behind us. This is where medication helps: it enables me to put a hand on the steering wheel and work together with my brain some of the time. Because I’m a feral gremlin, however, sometimes I just have to guide my brain to a safe, deserted road where it can let loose and have a good time.
I call this chaotic, rule-and-routine-free downtime Gremlin Time.
Oh yeah, and two things I say a lot: “forgetting things is basically my brand, so…” and, referring to my picky eating: “yeah, I have the palate of a five-year-old!”
can’t believe I forgot to mention my Most Favoritest comfort food: eggplant!! it’ll make me happy whichever way it’s prepared, it’s pretty versatile, but roasted with tomato slices is the best of the bunch!
The mind is not the helmsman of the ship.
The mind is Odysseus:
crossing the sirens,
lashed to the mast,
screaming with the pain of wanting.
His crew toiled on,
wax in their ears,
hearing nothing.
Tossed on a neurochemical sea.
Yes! YESSS!! I want to see you all like this, I want to see the beauty, the diverse colors and energies of us neurodivergents laid out all pretty like this! 😍
I like NG. Reminds me of NRG (“energy”).
I had a friend once who called himself GPZ. (“Guinea Pig Zero.”) Not a friend anymore, but the name is still good.
Are your capital letters an abbreviation for something, NG?
The graffiti alone is a wonderful reason to pick a nickname. I have a nickname myself I picked for the same reason. (I can’t reveal it — I’ve gotten too close already to revealing my secret identity… 😉
I had 3 hours of play time in FFXIV before servers went down for maintenance and…I spent all of it on here. I don’t know how this was 3 hours, I thought it’d maybe been ONE at most.
RIP living on ADHD Standard Time.
Music is absolutely crucial to my ability to focus as well (or a show on in the background that I’ve seen a million times). Stuff like Riverdance, trans music, Lindsey Stirling…good depth and high energy music is perfect for when I REALLY need to focus on work: https://youtu.be/49tpIMDy9BE
I’ve always been a voracious reader, and had trouble imagining that there are people who actually don’t enjoy it and do it for fun. I know a lot of words that I’ve never actually heard pronounced.
Even with (or because of) my large vocabulary, I sometimes find it hard (especially lately) to pick exactly the right word – so I’ve taken to a shotgun/saturation/bracketing approach, like so. (Also, lots of parentheticals.)
Geez is this a common ND thing? Because I do this A LOT. For me I think it’s anxiety over being misunderstood/being unclear (see there I go).
I’d blame it on just having spent too much time on social media where misinterpretation is so common you get used to overexplaining yourself, but I used to do it in English papers too before Twitter even existed. My teacher would circle a paragraph and write “You just said the same thing 3 different ways. This paragraph can be one sentence.”
I don’t know if it’s common, but it’s a trait I share. I think the large vocabulary combined with aphasia from the brain damage I got from the wreck, plus the PTSD from my life, all contribute to this.
Hey you know, I think it would actually be very much better for the whole of humans on the multicultural frontier if we ALL took the shotgun/saturation/bracketing approach, given how much the same word can very much mean different things, and discerning their meanings across different cultures and contexts can get REALLY tricky.
Hey, I notice is very much like the communication equivalent of geolocation, where we use sets words/concepts like circles/ranges to hone in on what we want to express to others from different cultural contexts!!!!!
While I have never been properly Diagnosed with Autism itself, as the majority of my family doesn’t “believe” in that or many other mental illnesses or at the very least doesn’t think they are serious, but I do show a ton of signs of being a high functioning autistic person, or at least being somewhere on that spectrum. I have a VERY narrow set of interests, I have several ticks that Im constantly doing and if I don’t do them I get stressed out, I have a hard time with my own emotions and knowing what im feeling a lot of the time so I just got good at pretending the emotions, I prefer to be on my own most of the time, I don’t like physical contact from 95% of people and really don’t like the palms of my hands touching other people for some reason (handshakes are a nightmare when I have to do them), my sleeping patterns are majorly messed up, I almost always speak formally and using slang feels weird (something I have heard is a sign), I have strong Preferences when it comes to some foods and clothes and some clothes like Jeans make me super annoyed and stressed when im wearing them (not sure if I worded that right), I suck at understanding Sarcasm, my brain is filled with millions of small facts from the hundreds of books I read when I was younger, etc….
Since my family would probably disown me if I went and got diagnosed, as they would say im “just trying to get attention”, idk if I should go get the diagnosis or not… but the fact I show so many signs kinda scares me a little but at the same time it would explain so much…
Switchchrist24, that’s horrible! I’m so sorry you have to put up with that, you deserve so much better!
That stripe I have as a neurodivergent, those million small facts from the books I read when I was younger, I feel them coming to me less and less, just lots of melancholy these days, and i hate it, I fear I’ve lost the spark!!!! 😭😭😭
Please, spill some of those small facts from the book you read right here! If only for some vicarious enjoyment!
A lot of those small facts are stuff Dina has already mentioned in this comic, I was a huge Dino nerd myself growing up (Jurassic park disappointed me so much), now I work at a movie theater and have to hold myself back from giving out actual dino facts as people flood in to see the new Jurassic World movie this weekend, since those facts tear about that movie.
I also loved Animals growing up and would make Animal Reports for fun that I would take into school and the teacher would let me present them to the class during homeroom.
One of the facts I tend to tell people out of habit when talking about animals is that Butterflies drink blood, and there is a species of them that actively looks for corpses to drink out of.
Koala’s are the most stubborn animal on the planet, as their only food they eat can’t be fully digested and offers so little nutrients that they barely have energy to move, their babies get their nutrients by eatting the Digested food of the parent.
Lemur’s have a Female Dominant Society, so King Julian in the Madagascar is not at all accurate, they would have a Queen if anything. Also interestingly enough, they are the only primates besides humans that can have Blue Eyes.
🥰🥰🥰 Thanks for sharing this, good feelings from learning this.
A blood drinking butterfly? Ooo! Do tell more! An alien parasite myself, that really sounds like my kind of animal 😍
Also, if it’s any consolation, I’m actually making a game right now that features the DOA cast AND dinosaurs I want to make as scientifically accurate as possible!
All Butterflies will drink blood (as well as Poop and Tears) if given the option, they love it. There is a Moth that will actively “bite” you and drink your blood called the Vampire Moth.
Sort of conversely to the butterfly thing, most mosquitoes actually primarily drink nectar and the like – only females are adapted to drink blood, and only do so in order to store up energy for egg-laying.
Just to be fair, anything that lives and breaths and migrates a lot will also spread disease, and moving a lot is necessary for a lot of species to even LIVE to begin with,
and oh well, evolution of all lifeforms and their ecosystems on earth, the product of 4.5 billion years worth of happy accidents, can really only do so much “right” in the eyes of you humans
Only a handful of mosquito species (about 12 out of 200 in the US) carry diseases that are dangerous to humans. All the others are, at worst, nuisances.
You. I like you.
Those are some sweet animal facts. Half of which were already on my own collection, the other half is now.
Serious thought/question – I wonder how much benefit there really is in getting diagnosed for autism. At least for the ones of us who have already found a fitting niche to exist in. Like, I have always assumed I’m autistic – it just explains a whole lot of things about how I think, and about how most people don’t quite have the same experiences as me. But I’ve never tried to get diagnosed, because I want to keep checking the ‘no’ on the ‘have you everbeen diagnosed with any mental conditions’ question on applications. (and yes, that was there, and I don’t think there are any laws against using that against you, where I live…). But anyway, it’s not an illness in the ‘you need treatment’ sense. Sure, everyone has to figure out how to best live their lives, and understanding you own brain workings is important for that. But does a diagnosis really help with that?
Sorry, just some thinking or loud.
Just getting Diagnosed can cost a shit ton of money, and a good handful of different tests, I looked it up. I don’t have health insurance cause I can’t afford it (cause America’s government doesn’t care about it’s people’s health), and just the process of getting Diagnosed with Autism can cost up to $5000…
Yes there are some Benefits, but its mostly just “Hey, I know this now, it makes sense” and some doctors might point you towards things that could help you.
Its still good to know for a fact if I have it or not though, it might quiet the part of my mind that tries to gaslight me every chance it gets.
I’m not sure how to say the following to make it sound right, but I’ll try – if it makes sense to you, let it make sense, and get whatever benefits you can from that understanding. [there was an entire paragraph here that I deleted, why is communicating so hard XD]
Oh, that’s exactly where I’m at except for one thing – I have been diagnosed with depression and I still select no on questionnaires, because who the hell is going to stop me or contradict me. Fuck em, I’m not handing that ammunition out to my employers.
The way I see it, given how little we know about the brain and how it actually works, “autism” is a concept that cannot exist in a vacuum. It has to be observed by others. And ergo its usefulness.
Depending on who you choose to disclose it to, it can either keep you from upward mobility (in case of employers), or it can economically help you (in case of government aid and school accommodations).
So on that level, it’s basically a tool we can use to make things easier in an otherwise broken, fucked up capitalist system which is intrinsically unstable.
In terms of having something you can use to tell friends why you do the awkward things you do, depends on your friendship circle, really. I myself would use “neurodivergent” in my case, or another word like “autism” or more specific and that feels “more” that makes sense.
@Switchchris24, I am so glad it stopped that internal gaslighting for you. For me, “autism” was only ever used to gaslight me, to make me doubt my own senses and memory all the time, and it nearly broke me. 😖
Regarding “”””official”””” diagnosis, the way I see it, the need to have “professionals” confirm it is strictly speaking an unstable attachment, where you you seek to be acknowledged and respected by a system that’s established deliberately to oppress us. Even if they lower one hoop, they’ll just raise another to maintain the social pyramid, or worse yet weaponize self-affirmations like they always do.
I havent gotten the Diagnosis yet, I was saying that if I did it might stop the internal gaslighting. But at the same time, that didn’t work with my depression diagnosis.
my fiance decided to get a diagnosis when the “oh there is a name for this?” ball dropped in his mid 20’s because it basically meant that employers *had* to accommodate for him- specifically things like ear defenders/noise cancelling headphones. because of laws in ontario surrounding disabilities and employment questions about medical history/diagnoses are not allowed so he doesnt have to disclose it before hand.
…. Now I’m just weirded out that people can’t simply have now cancelling headphones if they want them. Surely there are many who could focus better that way, neurodivergent or not?
he had to prove he needed an accommodation to wear ear defenders in an industrial bakery where there was a sign on the wall saying ear defenders were required as protective equipment. employers HATE the idea of people possibly listening music to an illogical degree.
Remember, just because you receive a diagnosis doesn’t mean you have to share that fact with unsupportive family members. If you opt for therapy, tell ’em you’re going to a night class, or a D&D session, or something. If they can’t respect you enough to support your efforts, then they don’t deserve the respect of being told the truth.
I’ve been diagnosed since very young, and most of my life I’ve been trying to fight it because being hot and autistic SUCKS horribly. Because people will show a huge interest in you and everything you say, and then they get tired of you. And it’s like… you never know if people are humoring you or wanting to get in your pants. So you learn to find other autistic people and it feels a lot better to be around them.
My most prevalent symptoms now are hypersensitivity and sensory overload, and I hear things like Dina does. Most of the time, I’m just sort of enduring the noises people make. I thrive in job settings where I don’t have to interact with people and can use my creativity. My social skills are pretty good now, but that might be because I instinctively flirt with everyone because it makes me feel good and I can get away with it.
UGH though I’m not autistic (at least as far as I know??) I feel the “being hot and ND is a pain” thing so hard but, like, in a different way than you. I’m not a very social person and rarely ever interested in people the way they’re interested in me, most of the time I just want to mind my own business and not be perceived at all!!
it let does let me get away with a lot more because society is full of silly double standards like that—if most people perceive you as weird and unattractive you’re just a freak, but if you’re perceived as weird and hot? oh, just lovably quirky!! blgh. I’m not a fan of double standards, lol.
I myself am no stranger to that endurance of noises. 😖 And I also vie for a job, living where I can just have creative hyperfocus overdrivu with minimal interaction. There’s a reason I stay in this alien hoodie all the time. 😥
Not knowing whether or not someone is genuinely into you for your uniqueness like that must really suck. But given what you said about it in that second paragraph about being hot, would you say then that it’s a double-edged sword? I’m genuinely asking, just want clarification, no worries, no harm done just by asking I hope.
My diagnosis is dysgraphia — which is to say the form of dislexia where you can read just fine, thank you, but your handwriting is awful (having a palm pilot and using it religiously for like 6 years actually helped my handwriting a lot because I -had- to be able to consistently block print, even if my letters were definitely not a 1/1 match on the roman alphabet.
That said, basically everyone who knows me and knows from adhd thinks I have adhd. They’re likely not wrong (adhd was called add when I was in college and wasn’t getting diagnosed to college students, and after that I got enough coping mechanisms and rotes that I’ve never bothered getting an actual diagnosis); I hyperfocus hard, and have a lot of problems switching tasks to the ones I “should” be doing.
It did take me a long time to learn effective social skills (basically I learned them from trad SF fandom during college), but I never talked oddly (other than a nasal voice that I learned to recognize during college voice classes and trained out over the course of a year in my 20s; I did have an odd accent while I was working on that due to overcorrection but it was gone by the end of the year) or had difficulty (mostly) understanding other people.
I did tend to rage out a lot as a kid, which basically ended in my 20s when at some point I learned to mostly live in the moment and enjoy what I was doing most of the time (rather than spending too much time focusing on the past or the future). But I think rage moments are the more normal thing, and my current (and for the last decade or so) chill is the odd bit and comes from a lot of stuff, including a bit of self-taught Zen and also a lot of time spent reading.
In answer to your last comment in our thread last night, humans have a tendency to be REALLY cruel to outgroups, and come up with a lot of cognitive dissonance to justify that they DID have a good reason actually because they know deep down it’s shitty to mistreat those who are Different without good reason. Neurodivergence is a marker of Differentness, and if you have a diagnosis people don’t like being reminded that being cruel to the Weird Ones is actually pretty fucked up. Physical disability is also a reminder that the able-bodiedness ableds pride themselves over is inherently temporary and up to chance, and probably eventually comes back to fear of death. People REALLY don’t like that. Better to just… not think about us, if they can. How DARE we demand to make public spaces accessible?! That implies disabled people are PEOPLE. (Aaaaall my hate.)
As to what I like about my brain? (Not quite what you were going for on reflection but eh, want to close this one on a lighter note than THAT paragraph.) It’s FUN to be able to expound on what I like about a thing in detail, or to just use my very analytically-focused skills. I genuinely enjoy my ability to remember incredibly obscure details in a thing I’m passionate about. Special interests, in general, are just something I like having. Audio stimming’s fun, and I have a REALLY sharp ear and while that can get overwhelming it is a DELIGHT listening to music with headphones in. I sing by ear 90% of the time (not that I’ve sung much lately between the pandemic and the recent ‘yeah we’re all SERIOUSLY CONCERNED about your airflow due to Weird Issues’ from my doctors,) which can be a fun trick. Super fast reader and memorizer, too – I was among the first off-book when I did theater. (Once got called in last-minute to join a show on tech weekend from my high school director because a role wasn’t fillable and she knew I could learn the lines and blocking for like three scenes in a week.) Not something I have strong feelings about but hey, useful skills. And I care a lot about justice and doing good when I can, which are apparently negative traits when they’re found to be common in autistic people. (That particular study got a lot of ‘Shit Abled Scientists Say’ mockery when it started making the social media rounds. For obvious reasons. There are many ways to cope with a world that doesn’t accomodate us, but finding other people to look at This Bullshit and mutually go ‘can you fucking believe that?’ helps a lot.) My body might cause a lot of pain, and people may frequently suck about it, but I like being autistic. I like my brain, even when I have to doink it a bit to go to sleep or deal with its depressive-anxiety bullshit. If only out of spite for the people who do suck about it, sometimes.
Most of the people who were the shittiest to me in school are now very performatively inclusive on their social media.
“Oh there’s no excuse for treating a PERSON with AUTISM badly just because they’re different!”
Uh huh. But you’ve got no problem asking the weird kid who talks about the weather too damn much and moves weird out as a cruel prank, huh? Eat your own bullshit and call it cake because I sure won’t.
(I’m a little bitter and also don’t believe most of them have changed at all. With the exception of a few who’ve actually made amends and been accountable to me for past behavior).
They’re also very insistent on separating the person from the autism and I just roll my eyes because nope. I know some people do prefer that phrasing but at least 80% of the time if you actually, you know, talked to an autistic person? We’re gonna say ‘no, this is pretty intrinsic to our experience as humans, and it’s a less clunky phrase anyway.’
(It’s like ‘differently abled.’ Buddy, stop trying to avoid it. You’re just making it clearer you see disability as a negative trait. Pretty sure even the Deaf community, who are a recognized culture that considers deafness a totally valid way of existence and argue it is not a disability except how society does not accommodate for them, doesn’t like ‘differently abled’ as a blanket term. They usually go for Deaf or hard of hearing for themselves, because… you know, deafness is a perfectly valid condition and thus Deaf is a neutral adjective describing those with it. Neurodivergent communities likewise use ‘Neurodivergent’ or a specific diagnosis if necessary because, again, it’s not a dirty word to us. We can recognize that these are valid differences in human experience that should be celebrated and still come together under the disability rights banner when needed because we know society’s not built for us, and that in and of itself is disabling. People who use person-first will usually go for ‘people with disabilities,’ because even if they aren’t defined by it they still recognize it’s the kind of difference society doesn’t account for. Tiptoeing around the disability just annoys us more.)
In my teaching courses in college, in the too-brief time we talked about disability in school, the instructors talked about “the importance of person-first language” and all that, and I thought it was kind of a mess. I sent in several things countering the claim of “always use person-first language.” And then I had to drop out of college for a bit (unrelated), and retook the same course the next year, and it was the same…with a bonus slide thrown in of the sources I had sent in before. It just struck me as “so little work was done here” on the department end.
Also, I went to a college with a very highly rated teaching program, and the amount of attention given to disability in the classroom and the way it was talked about when it was brought up was just such bullshit.
Yeah, this can be REALLY tricky stuff, but realistically speaking, the people out there who we have to inform in order to make a difference for ourselves, the people who we have to spread awareness to en mass to make the world at least a little better for us, don’t have the time or energy to sort through to complex theories like this with lots of nuances and maybes, and depending on how we simplify messages to be more digestible to the neurotypicals so they can actually act on it in helpful ways in their day to day lives, depending on how it’s simplified it ends up helping some of us in some ways and hurting the rest in others.
Regalli, I really appreciate the work you and others do to make the world a more bearable place for disabled people such as myself, even though it might end up hurting me in some ways and helping in others because of my unique circumstances I find myself in, mind, body and otherwise.
I learned the hard way that in this crude world, in an unjust, indifferent universe that doesn’t care about anyone or anything, including itself, imperfect solutions are really all we have. But I definitely wish that those who come after me have it much less rough in the future, however we make that happen.
Sorry if that’s incoherent at all, I’m just really bad at expressing myself sometimes (neurodivergence!!!!!), but I hope you take no personal offense from it, and if you do, I definitely don’t mean it and I’m sorry in advance if anything you read in there causes you any stress. 🙏
God, the “person-first language” crowd are so obnoxious. No one with autism asked those people to speak for us, and if they had actually asked us, they’d know that we actually usually prefer “autistic person” or just don’t care. And as one blog I follow points out, if you need people to mangle the flow of their sentences in order to remind yourself that the person you’re talking about is, in fact, a person, that says a lot more about you than the people you’re correcting.
Got an ADD/ADHD diagnosis when I was young (1st grade?) but my parents, as former alcoholics, were and still are kind of against drug use, even prescription, especially any that meddle with the brain. Also, this memory is old enough that I’m not even sure it actually happened or if it’s a story I made up after the fact that fits. Learning how fallible memory is was pretty scary…
Quite likely that I fall somewhere on the spectrum, given things like aversion to bright lights, loud sounds, aversion to eye contact, hyperfixation on any new media series I dig into, poor posture, aversion to certain textures on my hands, etc. Not until high school or even into college that I started to understand how different I was and started looking into how and why. Of course, once I knew the different symptoms it was now impossible to objectively relay my own behavior to a professional without filtering it through that lens and effectively diagnosing myself, which is definitely something I’ve spent waaaaaaaaaaay too much time thinking about. You can chase yourself in circles FOREVER with that kind of thing.
Had a breakdown around junior year of college, when engineering classes actually started to get hard. Struggled through to senior year, rejected my parents nonsense ideas about mental health and treating the brain like it’s magic rather than another organ like a heart or lung, started seeing a psychiatrist, got meds, got a shitty customer service job to pay the bills, put myself through my last few classes with the money from that job, got an actual engineering job, had that for a few years until the company was bought out, passed my Professional Engineering exam recently, and just today had a fantastic interview at a great company!
There’s a lot of things I could say about my brain, such as “it’s a Ferrari, high performance, amazing reactions, breaks down constantly and spends more time in the garage than on the road”, or “(probably) ADHD, autistic, definitely depressed and maybe slightly bipolar/cyclothymic” but ultimately…
I got this one brain, and all of my attempts to return it for a refund/exchange have fallen on deaf ears. So I’ve had to work to make a functional version of myself that knows its own weaknesses and does its best to pave over them. I don’t naturally make eye contact but today during my interview I made TONS of eye contact because I forced myself to! I always have sunglasses in my car because I literally cannot drive on sunny days without them. I try to do work with headphones on and music so familiar to me that it is entirely background and not distracting. I have a Customer Service Face & Voice Package ™ that I developed, and it’s passable enough that I could be a project manager and interact directly with clients. Maybe today’s just one of my good days but I feel fucking awesome, like I took the little clown car I was given and strapped rockets to it and rode that fucker to the moon.
…whew that was a lot, ‘s been a while since I talked about most of that. Feels good to get it out.
Technically not a PE yet, since I’m still short a few months of work experience, but definitely in the cards for this year and the exam is the hard part for sure. I appreciate it though! I like to imagine a happy story is a little like bailing out the overflowing dopamine with a bucket and sharing it with others.
Thank you for sharing!!!! Glad that me asking this led to you feeling good like that!!!! 😊😊😊
Re: “Professionals”, I’m so sorry to hear about that trouble you went through!!!! 😞
Regarding psych “professionals”, and their evaluations, they are a bongo and a half to work with a lot of the time, ESPECIALLY in regard to how they do diagnostics.
since there’s no way for a “professional” to test you for absolutely EVERY kind of condition you might have, they use THEIR intuition to narrow it down.
And, SURPRISE SURPRISE, they are often very much afflicted with bias, racial, sexual, gender or otherwise.
Re: Filtering it through THEIR lens, yeah I know very much how you feel, the feedback loop you get yourself into trying to work with the established oligopoly of labels made by “professionals” is just fucking AWFUL. 😖😖😖
I know some pre-built boxes like these work for SOME people, but I REALLY just want to emphasize the importance of having a system of description and exploring yourself that can work for ALL kinds of neurodivergents that can be potentially left out.
If you need a label that you can use to get government subsidies or accommodations in school to help you make ends meet in a broken ass capitalist system, that’s valid too!
RE: Diagnosis for SELF affirmation
But I think I should also mention that if you want a “professional” diagnosis JUST for the sake of having self-affirmation for the way you are and how difficult things went for you and your life in this crude world….
…. considering just how EXPENSIVE a diagnosis can be, and how many times you have to try over and over again to get JUST THE RIGHT ONE(S) in a faulty system, not only could it not even be worth the effort and time and money, but also this kind of cycle of “professional” diagnosis and re-diagnosis in and of itself is very well a kind of UNSTABLE ATTACHMENT.
What we’re trying to do here in this vicious cycle is get acknowledgement and affirmation from a whole system DELIBERATELY designed to oppress us. By valuing their acknowledgement and respect of our identity too much, we give them a hold over us.
TL;DR, “official” diagnosis just for the sake of affirmation from biased “professionals” isn’t worth the money or time, you’re better off getting that affirmation from friends, communities who see you as more than just another checklist they can cash on
Sorry if I wasn’t clear, but actually the professionals I’ve worked with were incredibly helpful and (combined with my states’ medical assistance, which I was on at the time, literally covering 100% of my medical costs) absolutely 100% saved my life during the difficult 5-7 years I glossed over in half a paragraph. I realize I was lucky as hell and a lot of people don’t have the good experiences I did, but it would be a disservice to those professionals if I left the impression otherwise.
“It doesn’t actually matter what I’ve got” was kind of the conclusion I came to in regards to a lot of this stuff, like it’s all just me and I’ve gotta make it work anyway regardless of what you call it. Cognitive behavioral therapy is more or less just that, it was focused on which behaviors *I* wanted to promote or stop, which helped sidestep a lot of the self-diagnostic whirlpool I tended to slip into. I was always a bit worried I could quite easily lead the doctor around by the nose, like hey I know this rubix cube is here for the ADD/ADHD people, I’m not going to pick it up during this appointment even though I want to, I’m going to make eye contact even though I don’t want to…but those behaviors are the kind of thing I would work on anyway if I did get a diagnosis, so if I can successfully control them during the appointment…mission accomplished?
A bit rambling, but it is a pretty sweet comeback to people that start complaining about welfare handouts and I’m just like “free government provided insurance absolutely saved my life”, give em the dead serious stare, no one has a response to that.
Wait, you’re just giving me permission to ramble about myself? Well, I can’t very well miss this opportunity!
*deep breath*
I was diagnosed (sort of, it’s complicated) with Autism when I was 7, so it’s been part of my identity for pretty much as long as I can remember. My parents always went out of their way to assure me that my brain didn’t work worse, just differently, though it’s taken me until the last couple of years to really start believing them.
I have moderate sensory issues, I can’t comfortably make eye contact for more than about a second at a time, I frequently walk on the balls of my feet, and I have a habit of thinking out loud. My communication skills aren’t the best – I frequently struggle to put my thoughts into words during conversation, and reading other people can be particularly difficult – but it’s something I’m working on. I also have pretty severe social anxiety, which makes it very difficult to make friends. Luckily, I have a very loving and supportive family, so I’m not lonely most of the time.
A lot of my special interests are games, I think because they always give me clear rules to follow and systems that can be meaningfully understood, which is especially nice in multiplayer games as the presence of those rules and systems makes the social dynamics much more accessible to me. Games are also one of the best ways to get me to sit still – I’m also ADHD, so trying to keep me in one place focusing on one thing for potentially hours is usually a doomed cause, but sit me down for a board game and I end up being the one corralling everyone else (like, yes, this ongoing conversation is undeniably fascinating, but I’m pretty sure it can wait until AFTER YOUR TURN!) I’m also really into a lot of cartoons and anime, I think at least partially because it’s a lot easier for me to read animated faces than actual live human ones.
I think that about covers the basics of who I am and how I relate to my neurodivergence. Hope this was helpful or enlightening or at least entertaining!
“yes, this ongoing conversation is undeniably fascinating, but I’m pretty sure it can wait until AFTER YOUR TURN!” my god what a mood, I feel that one for sure. That and the joy of games having clear rules and systems is so very me. Love it.
BIG AGREE on the animation thing. reading fiction always bores me and live action has to look REALLY COOL to keep me interested, but even mediocre animation will hold my attention. animation is the only medium that has ever made me cry or really feel anything, probably because the exaggerated expressions make it easier to understand and relate to
Agreed, and they tend to take more care in ensuring you can tell people apart by hair color and clothes (especially when so many only have one or two outfits) so it’s way easier than the ‘which of these two similarly-aged blonde women is who?’ game where some live action directors assume face alone will make it distinct enough. But yeah, exaggerated emotions and the knowledge that every possible expression has INTENT behind it is also super helpful in my recognition.
Huh. As someone who’s been having the “wait am i autistic” conversation with itself lately but has never been diagnosed with anything, that sounds… very familiar.
Hello Wellerman! I’m usually a lurker here but come out of the shadows when disability stuff gets discussed because I spend a lot of time dealing with that (I’m ND and have Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome/MCAS).
On the ND front, I have generalized anxiety disorder, pretty well-managed depression, Inattentive Type ADHD, and Dyscalculia. The last 2 I was just diagnosed with last month and it’s made so many things make so much more sense. Looking forward to starting treatment (appointment to discuss medication is this week, fingers crossed!) and hopefully having a less chaotic brain finally.
I’m still learning a lot about this stuff so I don’t know what I’d describe as unique about mine. I generally describe it as having a brain that will not chill out. It’s like there’s a hurricane in my head. Constant static. I have most of the typical inattentive type issues like distractibility and hyper focus depending on the subject and my stress levels. Procrastination. I’m very very scatterbrained. I have trouble keeping accurate track of time (2 hours will pass and I’ll swear it’s been 10 minutes). I joke my brain feels like a pinball machine full of live bees. Sometimes I can spend hours on something, other times it’s like there’s a block and no matter how much I want or need to do something I just…can’t. And I forget things. A lot.
The dyscalculia is a little harder to describe. I don’t know if it’s the same for everyone. A lot of people say it’s like “dyslexia but for numbers” but for me it’s not an issue of mixing numbers up. It’s with processing them. I’ll read a math problem and it’s like I’m reading a foreign language. I recognize the numbers, I know what they mean, but I can’t make sense of how they relate. My husband tried to show me something related to our mortgage once and I literally did not understand what he was saying. It’s like my brain just can’t make sense of math. I can muddle through math with clear step by step visuals, but I’m slow at it. And I hate being asked to rate anything on a scale from 1-10. (1-3 I can do. There you’ve got a clear low, medium, and high.)
It’s also been really fascinating to hear people describe their autism symptoms because there seems to be a lot of overlap with ADHD: hyperfixations/hyperfocus, some social struggles (in my case its due to distractibility rather than trouble reading emotional cues), a need for order at times to help soothe anxiety (I have a lot of food weirdness and other quirks), rambling…. XD
That’s really interesting with the math! For me it’s the opposite. I had this ‘advanced math explained for children’ book when I was in elementary school, and for the first time in my life, something *made sense*. Predictably. Although somehow, dealing with numbers rather than abstract concepts isn’t all that much my thing. Which seems to be surprisingly typical for actual mathematicians.
oh shit math not making sense has a name? there has just always been a point in which math stopped making sense and i could not explain why guess i have something to google now.
My autism did not affect my charm at all, so I hope one day to go and speak publically about Autism to groups of people and use myself as an example of, “If you’ve met one person with Autism, you’ve met one person with Autism”
I am both Autistic and ADHD plus several mental illnesses that may or may not be misdiagnoses or the result of growing up as undiagnosed Autistic. I started to realise I was Aut during a 1hr uni class on “childhood disorders” which prompted the reaction of [i]wait… isn’t it like that for everyone?[/i]. Followed by a few years of meeting tonnes of ND folk who were like “SAME HAT!!” and my psychologist telling me to also look into ADHD.
I have a lot of sensory stuff (more so tactile, sound or smell), have trouble picking up on social cues and timing, and big emotion regulation issues. My experience pre-DX was double plus ungood. I was over medicated, pushed into therapies (for trauma/anxiety) that traumatised me further, and was involuntarily hospitalised during what I now know was an Autistic meltdown.
One of the reasons I went so long without diagnosis is that my special interest is *drumroll* PEOPLE. Either specific people (in highschool I bordered on obsessional/stalking) or with people-related things. I studied (social) psychology, linguistics, body language, sociology, gender studies, everything. In school I had a notebook and literally wrote down everything about people, what they said, how they acted, I watched shows like Lie To Me, all so I could understand people and mask better.
I picked my current degree, social work, literally because it involves studying all aspects of being people. I also think Autistic people make great social workers because there’s such a massive emphasis on social justice, evidence based practice, critical thinking and reflexivity, and pattern-finding in the world. Unfortunately, it’s also super unaffirming field of study towards ND people because there’s still heaps of ableism in the content and how we’re taught to interact with people. Too bad for them I take the social justice thing very seriously and have started my unrelenting campaign for neurodiverse affirming practice to be centered.
Same hat re: special interests! I’m exceptionally good at languages and linguistics, dabbled in history and anthropology and psychology and the liberal arts, my obsessions mosttly revolve around creating elaborate worlds and characters… I just sort of assumed I was bad with people until I was a teenager and realized, hey, fuck what everyone else thinks, I can just learn this stuff.
And I did, and I have entered the wonderful if frustrating world of you know how native speakers of a language actually make bad teachers because they don’t know what they don’t know, I’m kind of a half-taught non-native language teacher for allism.
I do not have a diagnosis, but I have years of reading about things that sounded familiar, that I explained away as poor socialization or things like that. The poor socialization was because when people were mean to me I took that as a rejection and left, not knowing about frenemies and pecking order. That may be the best part though, because the people who became friends have been generally great people. Otherwise, fascination with spotting patterns in things like upholstery and ceiling popcorn and tile, kind of going into what I thought of as trances but could probably call disassociation, lots of getting fascinated with topics and especially making lists, and once noticing a numeric pattern and filling a little notebook with number combinations to see if the pattern held up. (It did.) Compulsive reader. Very good with animals.
I don’t have a diagnosis of any sort, so… I don’t really know if it’s my place, but here’s my story. My parents were strongly considering getting me tested for autism as a child. I was doing well enough in school and with friends that they eventually decided not to, since they were pretty sure the ‘accommodations’ would have done more harm than good.
Looking back, I think they were right, but I’m also not sure what the outcome of the testing would have been. My therapist has suggested I go for one. I didn’t want to, because insurance and new things and pandemic and if I don’t get a diagnosis what does that mean and if I do get a diagnosis what does that mean and aaaaaaaaaaaa. But maybe I’ll bring it up again with her.
It’s all about things that I don’t do, or have trouble with, or struggle with, so… I try not to fixate on it. Things like not knowing how to make eye contact – though I’m not sure if that’s innate or learned behavior – not knowing what faces mean what emotions – not wanting to try a new thing that I desperately want to do and know I’m going to enjoy – knowing the script for a new meeting, but never knowing what to do after that or how to get to know someone and make friends – saying things that are statements of fact as I see them and then spending a night figuring out why my SO is upset – having trouble with humor and sarcasm but having learned to play the straight man for long enough until I figure out or someone understands the joke – and it’s never so much that I can let myself think I might be not neurotypical?
I’m pretty lucky though. I was one of the weird kids in grade school. I found the other weird kids, and we became close friends. I had a great school experience, and I have my close friends, and we’ve been figuring out this whole adulting thing together since then.
Also: congee. Made with a chicken, and with a little ginger. Maybe a hundred-year egg if I can get one that I think is safe to eat.
not officially diagnosed, but considering it took 7 years of me not being able to see shit to get glasses and 13 years of crying myself to sleep every night to get a depression diagnosis, I’m not really surprised autism would be missed
I never knew anything about autism at all until I was 18ish. I found out my friend was autistic and decided to look up what it was. took me a very long time to understand because everything I read just made me go “I think that’s just what being normal is like”, BUT I GUESS NOT
I never had any friends until I was 16 and started lying to my parents that I’m totally not talking to people on the internet. I still have never made friends with anyone I didn’t meet online first. I always thought “well at least I don’t get bullied”, but then as an adult I’d hear about the ways other people got bullied and realize those things happened to me too. I didn’t realize they were trying to be mean to me, I just thought everyone at school was kind of weird
for me dating has always been easier than making friends because when you’re dating someone, there’s usually a point where you both verbally agree that you are dating. I have no idea how to tell if I’m friends with someone unless we do things outside of work/school. also the expectations of what’s generally acceptable between partners culturally seems a lot more defined than with friends. I can generally trust that someone I’m dating should be okay to physically touch and share emotions with and stuff, but there are no “general baseline boundaries” with friends. it also helps that I’m cute I guess, otherwise I’d be screwed
food is a big problem because I’m a picky eater and I hate so many textures. veggies are the worst because they combine the worst texture (plants) with a bitter taste that nobody else seems to notice. I’ve had veggies made “the good way”, but they still always just taste gross and bitter, but now with seasonings trying to hide it. I also tend to forget what food I like so I struggle to think of what groceries to buy. then I run out of food and just subsist on milk for a day or two. thank god I work in a grocery store so I have a lot of opportunities to buy food once I think of something. also I keep my nails long so I can use them to do a lot of things instead of having to touch stuff with my finger tips. I HATE modern touch screens that only work with your fingers. I’d much rather have the older style that the DS & 3DS use even if it means no multi-touch input
I used to try very hard to play pretend as a kid because that’s a game you’re “supposed” to play, but I never really got it. how do I know what to say?? how do I know what to do?? my mom says it was always hard trying to play pretend with me because I never really knew what I wanted to do. ultimately just setting up my toys in nice scenes was more fun than acting anything out. I think it finally clicked for me a year ago when I realized that improv is pretend for adults. the rules of improv really made me get it
as a kid I thought there was like an unspoken rulebook on how to be cool and you learned the rules by studying other cool people and learning from them and I was always seeking out ways to learn this information. apparently that’s not a thing most people believe?
I could go on about this stuff for hours but yeah those are some of the main things that stick out in my head
I think technically it is but they don’t think it’s like This Whole Thing that you gotta do. like most people just like do it without thinking much about it, rather than thinking “surely there must be a book or something where someone wrote down the unwritten rules”
which is why I took “a girl’s guide to growing up” out from the library long before I otherwise would’ve learned what puberty was
I frequently discuss with my therapist the inadequacy of contemporary mental health and development labels. My slate says depression, ADHD, and agoraphobia, but I strongly suspect that the enormous variability among people who carry these labels w/r/t response to medication (and other things) means these are several disparate conditions, mistakenly lumped together. When our understanding of the human brain grows, future humans will look back at today’s categorizations as being embarrassingly wrong.
No, you’re completely right. A lot of this stuff is still in the “box of symptoms” stage of understanding, where we’re just observing a pattern of things that often occur together without knowing much at all about why.
So the only real value in seeing these patterns is also developing patterns of treatments/skills/coping mechanisms that have high success rates, at least as of yet.
And a lot of these patterns can just look coincidentally the same, with different underlying mechanisms, I think. Pretty sure there are different types of depression, at least, with different neurotransmitters being the issue, and different causes…
We understand SO LITTLE about how the brain works, the best many “professionals” can do is little better than a blind guess, ergo finding out how our own brains work is a very personal journey and not an easy one if that.
But frankly, having some better tools for understanding ourselves and ideally for others to understand us would REALLY help.
To add to what you all already said (THANK YOU AGAIN), I can tell from personal experience that this “boxing of symptoms” paradigm is intrinsically flawed because it will either
1. exclude neurodivergent stripes and combinations of them that don’t quite belong in any one of the categories even tho they matter just as much (such as aphantasia, the inabilitiy to form mental pictures), or
2. will have those stripes lumped in with a million other things yourself and others are just too tempted to assume about you.
I guess just writing about our quirkiness like all this and having caring communities take the time to read it works for the time being, at least as aids in our personal journeys to understand ourselves.
I was called “strange” and “too smart for his own good” growing up during the ’60s and ’70s, well before they had diagnoses for things like ADHD or autism. And my life was a nightmare because we moved so often because my dad was military intelligence and we had to go where the radio signals bounced off the ionosphere. It was like a personal warzone because the townies would gang up on the military brats who didn’t know each other and generally couldn’t gang up for self-protection because of that. Add getting caught in a shooting war at one point because the locals couldn’t agree on the form of their government, right before I went through registering for 4 schools but only staying around long enough to attend 2 of them (long story). Somewhere along the line I got PTSD about 20 years before it was a diagnosis, which because they didn’t know what it was or that kids could get it turned into depression about 50 years ago, which turned into something illegal, which got me 5 years in prison about 40 years ago, and it’s a miracle I survived until the ’90s. Then I got killed in ’01 with the brain damage on top of the existing psychological issues, plus what may be hallucinations caused by all the sh*t my brain has been through because I’m not sure what’s real and what my mind has made up to get me through my life.
And now I’m in my 60s and on top of everything else my hips and knees are not functioning to tolerances much less design specifications and it looks like they’ve reached wear limits but I don’t have the $$ to replace them because ‘Merica decided I don’t really need health care. I’m an unkillable badass, but it’s more of the too cranky to die than the T-1000 can’t be killed.
ADHD in particular definitely kinda has this problem, where it’s essentially at least two separate disorders with a few overlapping symptoms, but it all gets lumped under “ADHD” and then given some sub-labels as an afterthought.
Reading today’s comment section is really nice. Makes me feel not alone. Reminds me that, while I might be currently all out of friends, there are lots of people out there who think in similar ways as me.
I wish we could all have a board game party together 😀
Also, THANK YOU ALL for your participation in this!
It’s just so affirming to me, seeing that spite people wanting to shove us all under a single umbrella word connected to so much baggage,
that there’s much more than meets the eye
between our personalities and our quirks,
the things we need help with and the things we are extra good at
we’re all just so…. DIVERSE.
In fact I see it as a kind of irony.
The neurotypicals in power give us so few categories to shove ourselves into, giving the ILLUSION that you can expect more or less the same from all of us
when in reality, all our brains, seen alongside each other in this beautiful mosaic, display even MORE diversity than the whole of the human species
First off, currently recovering from major surgery and having autism is a perfect storm of overstimulation and over-exertion.
I was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, but I got rediagnosed with Autism Proper, and honestly, it’s for the best as Asperger’s has a ton of Nazi connections and it just got to the point where, socially and progressively, nobody really wanted to say they had AS anymore.
Looking people in the eyes for a long-ish period of time is hard. Hugging people is an on-off switch, and it gets incredibly annoying when relatives forgo a handshake in order to hug me.
I like being social but at the same time don’t.
Certain fabrics are better for me than others.
I really, really have a hard time explaining things to others and often don’t understand for days or even years what others mean or why they do what they do.
oooooo! Sorry to hear about that overstim, that must be so hard!!!! 😣😣😣
yeah, I’m very much that way about hugging people too, and I absolutely HATE it when people do it without consent and call me “autistic” and a “mental disorder” and wrong for refusing,
the way I am about hugging is NOT a mental disorder, not always part of “autism” (however you define it), it is NOT part of my neurodivergence, it’s just the way I personally am, and anyone who says otherwise can eat a double-decker manure and battery acid sandwich with plutonium flakes on top
I’ve never been diagnosed. It wouldn’t surprise me if I were, though. I feel like I have to read something half a dozen times to make sure I got the meaning of something correctly. Distressingly, a lot of times when I read or hear something, even after going over it several times, I’ll still get the opposite meaning than intended. When talking to others, I’ve often found myself desperately searching for the right word. Sometimes, my best-fit works, but sometimes it’s the opposite, or, weirdly, completely unrelated. This is a non-insignificant reason I find myself not talking in social situations. This also comes up in written texts, and I used to use asterisks around words to indicate the best-fit, but I’ve realized I use it for emphasis on words, too. I’m unsure what to use in its stead.
If I hear about something I hate, I end up obsessing over it for days at a time. It becomes part of my mental background somewhere around three days, or at least three sleep cycles. It can rear its head again in a different permutation, but *usually* (emphasis), not always, it’s not as strong the next time around. I’ve been learning to mitigate of its effects on me, but sometimes that *results* (best fit) in me simply withdrawing from whatever it was that bothered me.
Not much of a fan of food in general. Having either a very weak sense of smell (dysnosmia) or no sense of smell (anosmia) from birth probably has a hand in that. I only really notice sweet, salty, bitter, sour, savory, and texture. Most food has a deeply unpleasant texture. I’ve never stated it out loud to anyone before now, but any food that doesn’t have a deeply unpleasant texture I call SafeFood.
It didn’t occur to me until reading above that this could be a symptom, but I can’t sleep still to save my life. I’ve found myself in many odd positions when I wake up, without the slightest idea how I got there. At least one of those times made me fall out of the top bunk of a bunkbed.
A hobby I’ve enjoyed for some time is driving, specifically exploring new roads and mapping them to my internal map. If there’s a road that I haven’t driven on, and I pass it by, I can this little twitch in my head that doesn’t like to go away unless I’ve done so. On the positive, my internal map is very developed. On the negative, it needs to be updated periodically, which makes the project effectively endless.
I’m pretty sure there’s more, but as I’m writing this, I’m getting progressively more uncomfortable explaining in greater detail.
Food textures reminded me of mochi. It’s SO GOOD. They don’t even taste like much, but I love touching them and chewing them. So soft. Have you tried those?
Thank you for sharing Chronos!!!! BTW LOVE that name!!! 😊
Re: your unique neurodivergent stripes, I must say I ESPECIALLY relate to your hobby about roads and maps, because the relationship you have with it really reminds me a LOT about my relationship with science. Like, when there’s a new science video on youtube I just pass by, I remind myself that I don’t have the spoons to really absorb it all, even though I want to, so I just add it to my infinite backlog of things I want to learn and have to constantly update, and all in all I hope I get my spoons back for a thing like this one day but in the meantime all those itches in my head persist and it’s AGONY 😖
Re: hate obsession in mental background, I have this too, believe me you are NOT alone
Re: Struggling to find the right words, BRUH, all this, ME TOO.
In fact just a bit earlier StClair actually just introduced a system of bracketing with selections of (words/concepts/ideas) that I think would make communication MUCH better for those of us this these particular language-related stripes, but for ALL kinds of humans living on the multicultrual frontier!
I’ve never been diagnosed but reading up on aspergers when I was 19 or so gave me some really helpful ways to frame the way I think (and the way I think about other people and they might think about me).
I was the queen of “um actually” as a kid and I still have to fight the tendency if i hear something *wrong*.
Saaaaaame! I can deal with ‘something wrong’ now, but if someone had all the info yet draws an illogical conclusion I implode.
I once met a flat earther. It was… interesting.
adhd/bipolar ii is a fun combo because my hypomanic periods would basically treat my adhd like adderall does now- ie provide enough stimulation to my brain decreasing my executive dysfunction and inattentiveness so every once and a while i would be able to just… do shit. however when the hypomania started to taper off so to then would my ability to do shit which would trigger a depressive episode. a weirdly unexpected side effect of having meds now is my hypomania is more intense, and while it thus far has not progressed into full blown mania when it mixes with hyperfixation i feel like a potoo bird looks BUT i have fewer depressive episodes because the hypomania episodes are more “I have spent 20 of the last 24 hrs writing and i will sleep when i have exhausted mankinds supply of words” and less “oh hey i’m hungry i think i’ll fry an egg” so the come down is more “im very tired good night” and less “i am a worthless lazy toad who cannot be assed to get myself food why do i bother”.
i had a lot of friends as a kid- ive always been super outgoing and charismatic but i didn’t really want to hang out with “normal” kids so often i would just walk up to weird quiet kids i felt a vibe with and ask if they like [insert thing i really liked] here and if they said yes they were my friend now. this is a weirdly effective friendship tactic.
generally speaking i like my brain, its a little wonky sometimes but i wouldn’t give up all the fun weird bits for all the functioning executives in the world.
Also my comfort food is currently homemade vegetarian banh mi ( but at a base level it’s a simple vegetable soup with celery, carrots,leeks and tomatoes )
As I’ve said, I’m autistic. I was diagnosed when I was 3 because i was nonverbal(they thought I was deaf before they figured it out) had various language lessons that I feel weird about. I like talking but also don’t know if I like that it was forced I guess?
Anyhoo, I was bullied and isolated yadayada and devoted various mental illnesses. The main stuff is depression, anxiety and a mood disorder. I then realised last year that I was also adhd and have started medication for that.
My autistic experience mostly feels like I have all these thoughts and feelings that are not being listened to, I feel like I’m on one side of a canyon and I can’t reach the other side even when I scream. But also I’ve realised it’s because there are ways I think about the world that not everyone does. I value my interests and know they are a part of what keeps us all alive, I value justice and truth in a way that I see others struggle to state. Autism doesn’t automatically mean morally better but I think the structure of mine at least has helped me get to that place easier.
Although I’m Australian I’ve never felt a deep connection to my culture to the point of my accent being very obviously influenced by my media diet, and while I used to feel embarrassed about it, I now have pride that I don’t sound like I’m from around here.
I also feel like My experience with understanding autism has made understanding other experiences easier.
oh hey, I also have no cares about my local culture. Not Canada as a whole, and especially not the yeehaw pocket of it I was born in. But totally cool with the culture formulated from the games and shows I grew up on
I don’t know if I’ve ever thought about the uniqueness of my neurodiversity before.
Alright, so I’m aphantasic. If you’re not familiar with that term, brain no can imagine picture. (Yes, I struggle to see in dreams, it’s actually resulted in a couple nightmares related to lights not working the way they should). But I do have sound imagination. There is constantly music or dialogue going in my brain. Sometimes I need to toss on youtube videos to drown it out, sometimes I need absolute silence to let it run its course. Despite that, thought buffering still a thing.
I make noises, and I’m highly kinesthetic. Which is to say I stim. Never thought of it until well after I knew about stim toys. Stim toys are garbage for me tho, I need more. I took apart pens in high school. Fidget cubes don’t come apart, they just have a couple of moving parts, my old phones’ battery covers gave more stimulatin than them (rip those covers).
Not diagnosed officially. But in the age of today’s short videos and twitter, I’ve seen many people talking about their experiences with both ADHD and autism. Sometimes it’s nonsense, sometimes I respond with “what do you mean that’s not normal?”
One instagram guy is on point constantly. He’s diagnosed with both. If the effects of one neutralize the effects of the other, me having both would make sense of the times I don’t relate to people’s experiences with either. I mentioned getting a diagnosis appointment with my physician. That hasn’t happened yet.
Identity wise it has manifested in me having no idea what the fuck gender is supposed to be. It’s all made up why are people playing along with it? Just do what you wanna do, what you really really want. You wanna be pretty, be pretty, you wanna be stronk, be stronk, you wanna be an asshole, reconsider your life.
Uhhhhh, hopefully that paints a unique enough picture. Is getting pretty long. Oversharing, y’know?
My comfort foods are pastries. Fucking love fruit danishes. Pastries of any sort are expensive up here. Japan was a blessed ground for that, I miss melonpan.
Oh right I wanted to mention over-stimulation too, I don’t get any like pain or anything like that, I just get majorly fatigued. Malls suck for that. In social gatherings I’ll retreat into my phone, ipod, or handheld gaming for a bit. Arcades also suck but like abrasively. Malls just wear me down, arcades shove cotton into my skull and act like they’re a fun time for it. They’re not
I have ADD. When i was young I would just stare out the window and then realize the blackboard was full of words that I hadn’t written when the teacher said class was over. My desk was easy to spot. It was the only desk where the teacher just told me to put everything in a neat pile. Dexedrine was eventually the medicine that worked the best. When I was in high school my father said I was taking too much medication and I just needed to deal with it.
My apartment is a dumpster fire and I am constantly losing and forgetting things. My boss is not happythat I am constantly late. But hey, no medication!
I seem to be the opposite of a lot of people here. With the exception of onions I will shove just about anything in my pie-hole.
Thanks Max, for contributing to the Neurodivergent Mosaic!!!!!
I’m sorry to hear that, if you need Dexedrine to make things better, best wishes to you getting it soon!!!!!
Also, LOVE your alias and avatar!!!! Whenever I see Max Tate from Beyblade, I always think about and get hungry for mustard and noodles, mac and cheese. 😋
Thanks for sharing!!!!! Nice to get to know you better!!!!
Autistic with ADHD and dysautonomia (aka neurovegetative dystonia). Being without my stimulant medication frequently feels like my thoughts are made of slippery jello, and my body weighs a ton of very achey and crunchy rocks. My comfort AND same food is pasta with handmade tomate sauce.
I find others tend to word things better than I, so instead of trying to re-say what’s already been said let me link a tweet thread that resonated unexpectedly strongly with me : relationship degradation mechanics relating to the passage of time simply don’t happen very much for me.
It’s been suggested by many people, including my family, that I may have autism. Rarely in a derogatory way, at least to my face. It has always been clear that I’m neurodivergent in some way. I guess when I was a kid they tried to get me diagnosed for ADD, but I have never had trouble focusing on tasks. If anything I tend to focus too much on what I’m doing.
People often like me I guess. I picked up a lot of social skills in college. I also used LSD regularly for years which I think may have helped. I have no trouble looking into peoples eyes the normal amount and social situations are rarely overwhelming or anxiety-inducing any more (although crowded/noisy rooms are). Only a few times have people been really cruel to me for my perceived autism.
I like it best when people don’t dance around the topic of my unusual personality. People tend to treat me like a child when they do this, and if I’m accidentally rude it can create static. I’m comfortable with being unusual and it makes for good jokes sometimes.
I am uninterested in trying to get a diagnosis and I don’t identify as autistic. I just don’t see the benefit to it.
Also, when I was a kid/teenager I would sometimes get bullied but it didn’t bother me very much. I think I wasn’t a good target because I would barely react.
Woah, LSD? Cool, really glad to hear that helped you! 🤩 #LegalizeIt
Re: Treating you like a child, RIGHT??!?!
I might not know much about your “unusual” personality, but I’d LOVE to learn about it.
Whatever it’s like, it definitely DOESN’T make you a child, any more than mine makes me seem like that.
Also, totally on board with you not identifying as “autistic”, I’m a neurodivergent who doesn’t like that label either, wish for better ways to describe my neurodivergent stripes
What would you like people to call you? If you don’t know yet, that’s OK too!
>I might not know much about your “unusual” personality, but I’d LOVE to learn about it.
Well, for sensory things, I definitely stim in a few ways, and if I’m in a crowded room with lots of people talking I have trouble filtering it out. I’m socially capable in most situations, although I often let others do the talking.
I *love* wordplay and I make jokes all the time that are only funny to me. But I also try to develop a patter with my friends, so we can always joke and have conversations. Some people there’s chemistry other people not.
I tend to obsess over mathematics. It’s where I have found the most community too. I think that if you interviewed the professors at a typical research university you would find at least 50% of them are atypical in some way. The office manager at my current university is a real champ for dealing with all the eccentricity in that building LMAO.
>What would you like people to call you?
I don’t know! I don’t have a problem with “autistic” but I almost never hear that word used without a lot of baggage that I could do without. I like “eccentric” because it doesn’t make it sound pathological, and also just feels more descriptive.
*I think that if you interviewed the math professors at a typical research university you would find at least 50% of them are atypical in some way.
The typo may also be true but I have less direct experience with universities at large. It seems to me that the more esoteric and cash-poor a discipline is, the more it’s filled with odd people.
Kk. My brain runs at 1/3rd of average, but thoughts come into it about 1.8 – 2.0 GHz. I cannot get bored; the brain just plays a memory, or a scenario for a story/novel/play/other, and just does that until a person comes along to talk to. I’ll talk to anyone, sometimes if they want me to or not. I have trouble with introverts.
Owing to about 50 years of mantric meditation, and yoga, my physical body is somewhat still and calm in the outside. So I pass for “Average.” I’m not. On my first school eval. in third grade I scored reading/verbal skills 98.2% against my peers. I scored 7.5% on math skills.
My first half a century was, “Look, you’re really really smart. You just need to try harder.” No, just No! I was trying as hard as I could, my brain just doesn’t do complex math or algebra. Geometry, sure, arithmetic yah, maybe; but algebra no, very no, hard no. It’s possibly fetal-alcohol syndrome, or just genetic random, but my brain runs in a linear fashion, at 2 gigHz. and might look at something and go, “Okay; a, b, c, oh! I see. Then x, y, and Z, I got it! I understand this now!
Other times it steps through the whole alphabet one letter at a time with glacial slowness, running out on side thoughts and tangents, but I get it.. eventually, I get it. Y, … Z, I got it! I understand this now!
I really get words, but show me a diagram, and I got the whole thing in the brain at once. For me, my physical world is a map. Second time I drive to a location I have the route and landmarks memorized.
Odd thing: I have trouble knowing which letters come before or after others in the alphabet. I have to use the alphabet song, to be sure. And 8 year old me had to have a high school student tutor me to learn the times tables. Took me FOR EVER. ADHD meds have helped me a LOT with focus and impul … hey! That’s a squirrel! Look! What was the question?
One person gave the exact one, but a couple of us had similar ‘autistics and people close enough to see us unmasked/low-masked-because-the-mask-is-instinctual ping us from a mile away’ stories. There’s a decent number of quirks that are REALLY common but aren’t ‘stereotypical’ as such, and so your gait or vocal cadence or something that’s JUUST shy of infodumping tends to give off Cousin Vibes.
*Almost* exact – unlike Joyce, I’d already known I was autistic at that point for decades. I figured it out when I was 15 and read an article about Darius McCollum. He and I are pretty much nothing alike other than a. living in NYC and b. being autistic, but still – that article rang some pretty loud bells.
Also, how he’s been treated is an absolute travesty.
I haven’t told them yet, but after coming to terms with it myself, I think both of my parents are neurodiverse. Makes me think there’s some form of genetic primers to it because my brother and I seem to have it hella bad in completely different ways, and I think it’s because we inherited a different mix from our parents and then put our own spins on it (y’know, nature /and/ nurture).
But yeah, it’s basically exactly that. They’ll do some sort of quirk that I just ping out and go “aw hell, that’s nd as hell”
Yuuup, patrons reading that yesterday and trying not to give it away, but those people got it in one! I guess it shows that Willis knows his stuff, writing exactly the experience that others have had.
Sadly, the whole “aliens stole my memories” thing might actually be a bigger deal and prevent her from being properly diagnosed. A lot of strips read very differently now that we have a picture of her horrific homelife.
I would assume it crosses over, same as sexuality – Dina listed neurodivergence specifically when she returned at the end of Shortpacked as something to avoid (which she accidentally filled) to prevent excess diversity breaking reality, as quote, ‘she had time to figure things out’ while she was off-camera there.
Oh, yes, the joke was she fit ALL categories listed (the other two were non-white and non-male, in addition to non-heteronormative and neurodivergent.) ‘Sexuality and gender identity crosses over across universes’ is one of the rules of the Dumbiverse/Walkyverse thing (started with ‘yes, this Ethan is in fact gay, stop asking,’ is now ‘retroactively Walkyverse Danny is bi and Walkyverse Malaya transcends gender’ among other things like Jocelyne getting retconned into the Walkyverse,) which is why I brought it up: No reason to believe neurotype isn’t another factor that’d cross universes.
Ah ok.
Speaking of stuff crossing over, I remember Willis saying that character pairings from the walkyverse wouldn’t repeat in DOA but after the end of shortpacked he said that dina and becky get together in the walkyverse too.
Ruth/Billie. Danny/Sal. The Squad 48 polycule. I think it’s not that no pairing will be repeated, but that the ones that were already thoroughly explored in the Walkyverse don’t need to be rehashed here. We’re not going to see Joyce/Walky or Danny/Billie or Joe/Rachel. But Walkyverse Dina/Becky only got a few strips After the End.
So that seems to have been basically ‘I won’t repeat a dynamic I already feel I’ve explored as much as I can.’ Jason and Sal hooked up and had that relationship’s dysfunction explored in-depth in early DoA, as did Ruth/Billie, presumably because Willis felt he could do more with them than had been explored in the Walkyverse. Dorothy/Walky was originally a thing in the Walkyverse, it’s just that it was always the ship that wouldn’t sail because Dorothy was created for Joyce & Walky, And of course now Danny/Sal is happening again, but with a RADICALLY different dynamic than they had in the Walkyverse. I think it primarily existed to say ‘no, Joyce/Walky has been explored as a ship as much as it can be, let’s do something else.’ Ditto Billie/Danny, and in the pre-Shortpacked ending days Amber/Mike. I think the idea was just that these people aren’t DESTINED to be together, soul mates aren’t really a thing in the greater Willisverse, because it’s more fun to be able to shake up the box of action figures and see how they play off each other this time. (Note that Joe being totally in love with Joyce has been a thing since It’s Walky. It’s a well-trodden dynamic, but Willis likes playing with it still and they’ve never gotten together for real yet except in the Nowalkyverse. Does that make it endgame? Not necessarily! Endgame isn’t real here.)
So Dina/Becky sailing in the Walkyverse after it ended was fine because it would never be explored in the Walkyverse in detail, DoA will always be the place where their relationship matters. It’s just a really fun idea to play with in an April Fool’s strip or two and some one-off art. It’s not that they CAN’T repeat, it’s that they’ll only repeat if Willis thinks there’s something he wants to do with them, new or not. Same characters, different scenarios.
Somehow those shortpacked ending comics still relevant to the handful of people crying about tokenism in yesterday’s comments. Although admittedly it’s funny that the author had already finished dunking on them years before they even posted.
I mean, what was Shortpacked but dunking on entitled nerds like those whining about diversity, and what better ending than an endless horde of identical white vaguely sploogelike entities being fought by a diverse group of nerds carving out a space for themselves in fandom, forever?
I mean, on one level, yes, but I think the idea that there will always be shitty takes whining about our existence but there’ll always be someone to fight them still works for me.
I mean it’s an apt metaphor. The more visible diversity you have, the more angry bigoted people who hate diversity tend to come loudly out of the woodwork.
“I don’t hate people who are different from me, I just turn into a frothing chimp the second I’m made even vaguely aware of their existence, no matter how fleeting.” – Probably lots of Those Sort
I don’t know if it’s a 1-for-1. Walkyverse Joyce had similar issues with personal boundaries, but she also exhibited less obviously neurodivergent behaviour like food touching or fidgeting (Walky got most of the latter).
Her upbringing was also different – she wasn’t as obviously religious, she had five siblings instead of three, she didn’t have Becky, etc.
I believe Willis said somewhere that Walkyverse Naomi was cooler with it because that version of Ethan didn’t realize he was gay until he was in his late twenties, by which point his parents were already pretty sure anyway.
On the other hand, she also said that after 35 years in which Ethan had never brought anyone home, she would’ve been happy with him bringing home a chihuahua, so there were still some not-so-great undertones to her.
Dina doing a lot of watching in the background and it makes me wonder if this is a rare glimpse at what she’s up to when people can’t roll a high enough perception check.
20s aren’t automatic successes on skill checks. I played a rogue for a while where it was literally impossible for our paladin to roll a high enough Perception check to beat my Stealth check. Or a high enough Sense Motive to beat my Bluff.
It’s just a dungeons and dragons reference. Dina naturally goes unnoticed. This translates in dnd to her having a high stealth stat. You can counter those hiding or with high stealth with perception stat which you usually roll for known as a check. Too low and you don’t notice the person. This isn’t just for stealth but essentially any action can have a roll check, strength, wisdom, intelligence, faith, ect.
It’s a game reference – Dungeons and Dragons, usually – where you play a character who has various numbers assigned to various attributes such as perception – and you roll a die to see if your perception value allows you to understand the situation as it actually is, or if you only see/hear/perceive the surface of what’s going on, or miss something entirely.
It’s a reference to tabletop Role Playing Games, such as the classic Dungeons and Dragons, or the less-known GURPS.
You decide on a character, and choose numerical stats for your character. Whenever your character has to do something, you generally roll some dice and determine whether or not you succeed based on how well the die roll. In some games, you add the dice roll to your stat, in others, you roll a number of dice equal to your stat. In DnD, in particular, (to spoil my own joke), a 1, on a D20 is an automatic failure, no matter how good you are, and a 20 is an automatic success, no matter how bad you are.
Oftentimes, these rolls are “contested”. She’s trying to hide, and you roll to find her, you roll D20, add the number for your perception, and hope you get a high enough number, (or a 20), to spot her. She rolls D20, adds the number for her hide skill, and hopes she gets a high enough number to stay hidden.
In some games, to generate a more realistic curve, you roll 3 dice, generally six siders, (hence 3D6), and sum the numbers. You get a pretty decent bell curve that way. A 3, or 18, only comes up about once every 216 times, or less than half a percent, (as opposed to the flat 5% for any D20 roll), while a 10 or 11 are quite common at the top of the curve, at about 12.5% of the time, each. (If you only need to roll a 10 to succeed, then you’re going to succeed about 5 out of 8 rolls).
Incidentally, I did some playing around a few months back, and found that rolling 3 D20’s, and taking the middle, gives a similar bell-like curve, but has the advantage that you can keep using DnD difficulty charts, without modification. D20 still is an automatic success, but you have to get 2 of them, and D1 is an automatic failure, but again, you have to get 2 of them.
DnD already did something similar once, when they had you roll 4 D6’s, and sum the best 3.
Imagine a scale of 1-30. At 1, your ability to notice things that might be happening around you is so poor that you could walk into traffic and not notice the truck bearing down on you at 80MPH until your entire body was reduced to spaghetti. At 30, you could be lying in the middle of a forest with your eyes closed, and by simply putting up your ear and listening, you are able to determine whether the kittens in the rabbit warren fifty feet off are ready to leave their burrow for the first time. You are simply that in tune with your surroundings!
Ability checks (such as a perception check) in Dungeons and Dragons are dice-based random rolls, but the outcomes of the dice rolls are stacked on top of existing character stats. A character can have a zero (or even minus) bonus to an ability check, or they can have a very high bonus. High ability bonuses usually mean you win your ability checks, even if you roll badly. (Low ability bonuses are more of a mixed bag, since you can roll very high on a dice roll and still do well, without any help). Under 10 is generally not good; between 10 and 20 is mixed, depending on what your ability is being checked against; if your ability check is over 20 and you fail it, you get to angrily interrogate your DM about what this dude’s spell save is, what the fuck, Gerry! Ability rolls are done with a twenty-sided die, so the minimum you can roll is a 1 (very bad, this actually obliges the dungeon master to give you a horrible outcome, like walking into traffic) and the maximum is 20 (rolling a straight 20 is very good, and obliges the DM to give you a good outcome, as good as they can without wrecking their own adventure). Character ability bonuses get added or subtracted to the dice roll, and generally speaking, the lowest outcome you can get is 0, and the highest is 30.
Apparently last he was asked Willis said Dina hasn’t been officially diagnosed but he might have changed his mind since then (or decided it was something that happened over the time skip) so it’s entirely likely none of the cast know
At the same time, Becky doesn’t see your brain working differently as a big deal.
She doesn’t have a problem with Dina’s hyperfixation on dinosaurs. And Dina being asexual has never been a problem with her, she’s more concerned with her own issues.
Are you serious? Dina being asexual is a HUGE, honking, massive problem for Becky and it’s recently been the focus of their storylines. The fact that they had sex yesterday in comic time doesn’t make that not exist. Becky’s acephobia is the most substantial threat to their relationship they’ve ever actually encountered, not that they’ve actually dealt with it at all.
The whole thing about “She doesn’t feel the same kind of lust for me that I do for her, so it’s all my fault for not being good enough the relationship is doomed!”
That ascribes a lot more cruelty to it than they were actually doing. Maybe the ‘peanut butter dog food’ thing was mean, but pre time skip Joyce herself said her friends were ‘acceptable losses’ about them seeing her be weird about food.
Even if there’s no intended cruelty, it still does suck. Speaking as someone who has food aversions both for psychological and chronic illness reasons and grew up being mocked for being “weird” about food, it does make you feel bad and like there’s something wrong with you or shameful about your behavior.
I will make fun of my own food weirdness and jokes from friends who I know understand that it’s not necessarily a choice and respect the struggles I have are usually okay, but there’s a fine blurry line there where people can easily accidentally make someone feel bad by poking fun at their “quirks” that may actually be caused by a mental or physical condition.
And also as far as the person themselves saying they’re fine with it, people with disabilities are conditioned from a very young age (even when they don’t know they have a disability) to accept mockery of their symptoms as normal. Often in the same way women may laugh along or play down sexist jokes because they’ve been socially conditioned not to make a fuss about it. We feel like we’re the problem and not allowed to be bothered by people making fun of our “quirks.”
What business is it of Becky’s? Much like her bs sex secret, Joyce can tell her at her own discretion if at all. Now their friend group has two competing secrets neither bestie is aware of! Secret for secret. A battle of secrets. A Secret War if you will.
I think it all depends on whether or not Becky perceives the diagnosis as a “change.”
Like, with the glasses thing, Becky’s going to notice The Thing That Joyce Did Not Have Before every time she sees Joyce (which has me a bit worried about her eventual reaction to Jocelyne coming out, but I digress). That wouldn’t really apply here, though, so it’s possible that she’ll just take it as “I learned a new thing about Joyce that I didn’t know before.”
It kinda depends on what Becky was taught about autism growing up. If she was fed a whole bunch of dehumanizing and/or demonizing stuff– stuff which did not line up with her perception of Joyce– then I can see her perceiving this as a change and reacting potentially very badly.
I mean my prediction is that Becky doesn’t react great, tbh. Historically, Becky tends to not react great about anything different when it comes to Joyce.
Quite frankly I don’t think its going to be along the lines of “HOW DARE YOU BE DIFFERENT???”, and might be more…dismissive, potentially?
Like “I don’t care about this, it doesn’t matter”. Which sure, on the one hand, fine, sometimes it’s better to not make a big deal over something! But on the other hand, it could be like the time Joyce first voiced doubts about her faith, and Becky just went “shut up, this is a stupid phase, get over it”. Maybe not that harsh or anything. Something like ‘ok cool! congrats or whatever, bye’. Not horrendous in of itself, but since their relationship is already strained, it probably wont help.
tl;dr Methinks Becky’s reaction will be sub-optimal in some way and will contribute to a further straining of their relationship.
I feel like there’s an even chance Becky will
a) react badly because change! In Joyce! is unacceptable! Becky was almost as hostile to Joyce getting glasses as Joyce was, with far less justification. (Yes it was kind of silly of Joyce to kick up that much fuss…but it was her actual body, face, and self-image at stake, and that is not nothing. Becky was just being an ass), as there is that Becky will
b) go “huh, I guess this explains a lot about you, same as me being gay explains a lot about me”.
My guess would be that she’d react sympathetically. Not perfectly, of course, it’s still a gaggle of dumbass teenagers in this comic, but potentially being diagnosed as autism is a serious enough situation to break through a lot of Becky’s bad habits.
Will she express some concern that, if Joyce is confirmed as having autism and begins some form of treatment for it, that she’ll lose her a bit more? Yeah, I can see that happening, as a sort of inward thing that she’d recognize is far less important than Joyce’s actual health. But figure there’s no way that she’d so much as imply that Joyce should avoid the referral or any treatment, at least not without it being a moment of weakness thing that she quickly realizes was a shit thing to do.
It’d be like arguing that Becky would flip out that Joyce lost an arm, because that means that Joyce is changing too much, and that’d be horrible. “Needing glasses” and “potentially being autistic” are two very fucking different scales of things, and really shouldn’t be compared.
If Dina was diagnosed during the time skip, I suspect a “You can’t be autistic because you’re nothing like the one autistic person I know!” from Becky.
Because apparently everyone with autism is supposed to be carbon copies of each other? (Seriously. This is something that I have gotten from MANY people. Yes, Karen, my mid-30s grownass adult self is, in fact, nothing like your four year old. Very astute of you. A thought to ponder: is it POSSIBLE that I am not obsessed with mailboxes and screaming for hours if my shirt has a tag not because I am faking, but because I am 30 years older, and also I buy shirts without tags?)
Also I would very much love to see Roz – because let’s be real it’d TOTALLY be Roz – try to enforce person first language because that’s what Autism Speaks says autistic people want (never mind the majority of us prefer identity first and the consensus among the autistic community is use identity first to refer to the community, for individuals follow the person’s lead and if in doubt ask.
Not that I think Roz is bad or anything, I just think her tendency to assume she knows what’s in people’s interest more than them and to steamroll others in her activism could make this a very interesting dynamic, especially if Joyce and or Dina get to be the one teaching her about a progressive issue for a change.
To be perfectly honest, I’m just hoping this doesn’t completely steamroll over the fact Becky’s a boundary-pushing jerk a lot of the time by blaming Joyce’s diagnosis for their recent unpleasantness.
Yeah, that’s pretty much the way it goes sometimes. You get lucky and someone’s like “you know you/your symptoms remind me of something…”
That’s how my asthma was diagnosed. My autism was more my Mom dumping the information on me that hey btw when you were three they basically said you should’ve been diagnosed but you’re AFAB so they decided they couldn’t, and then my entire social and medical circle going “wait, you don’t have a formal diagnosis??” That was a fun car ride.
You know, I think I technically still don’t have a formal diagnosis, even though I am very clearly autistic and everyone has known that since I was like 3, and I definitely remember having to go through a whole testing gauntlet during second grade, but there was some specific reason that I wasn’t technically given a diagnosis. I think it might have been some particular weirdness with the diagnostic criteria at the time (I think this was still under DSM-IV), or possibly because getting a diagnosis would have meant pulling me out of public school, which wasn’t really a viable option. Which did lead to me having a bit of an identity crisis in high-school about whether or not I was *actually* autistic. (Which itself kinda feels like a prelude to my more recent crises about my queer identity; I wonder what that says about me?)
I found out I had ADHD thought a conversation about fucking. Wei Wuxian and his school antics. I was liveblogging the book to a friend and went on a tangent about How To Be A Distractable Disaster In Class And Not Get In Trouble and my friend was like “ADHD mood” and I was like “wait what” and she was like “oh wait i forgot ADHD isnt a thing for you sorry” and i was like “no seriously wait what” because it uh. lit a lamp. and i started talking about my middle school experiences and she was like “these are literally criteria for referral of a small child for an ADHD diagnosis” and I went to research more and talk to my mom and yeah that was a fun day.
Yeah, it’s a hard question to answer, but at least now you have a referral to someone who might be able to help you figure it out.
And tbh, if your upbringing is causing you to have similar difficulties or traits to people who are autistic, the same things that help them out might still help you out, so it’s worth a shot.
The hall has probably emptied out and only Joyce is really talking, the floor is probably tile, the walls are probably either drywall, shower board, or some other “hard” surface, only the ceiling is likely designed for absorbing any amount of noise.
If the air conditioner isn’t running Right This Minute, there is a decent chance she can make out 4 words out of 5, and make a good guess at the fifth.
I think she hears it all. Last strip her head turned to pay attention as soon as she heard Joyce mention autism. The real question is what she will do with this information? My guess would be to have a private chat with Joyce and possibly confirm the long standing theory she is on the spectrun herself.
Dina’s definitely autistic and has hypersensitive hearing. And if anyone’s gonna try and disagree or argue with me, I’m willing to bet that Dina is gonna either try and go up to Joyce and talk to her about it, or that she’s gonna be afraid to because it’s so politically incorrect to talk about autism even though it needs to be talked about.
Dina is autistic and this isn’t debatable. And Becky clearly has a type lol
To be clear, “hypersensitive hearing” doesn’t mean you have, like, Super-Hearing; it has more to do with how you process sound, making you, among other things, more consistently aware of all the noises around you. If anything, it can actually make it harder to pick out specific sounds if there’s a lot of background noise.
You know I was actually wondering yesterday “How to go to a clinic to get a walk in check up for minstrel pains and end up walking out with someone giving you a referral to see weather or not you have autism?”
Fortunately today’s update layed out the scenario on how in great detail, A+ there.
Joyce, at least at the start of the comic, was open, energetic, eager to make friends and meet new people, while also being firmly Christian. It’s that whole group of things, and a few others, that would lead to that assessment.
I think it says more about Joyce than her peers. Could also be linked to Autism. My experience as a child was being the friendliest, most helpful, and most keen to please adults. I performed the traits that teachers praised me for (even smiling) because it was part of the social script. She also shows a really strong tendency to follow rules assigned to her or at least to do what is “right”.
I mean that phrasing makes sense from the perspective of “something is clearly going on and we live in a society that frequently tells people with chronic illnesses or mental health issues (especially women) that they’re making it up/it’s all in their head.”
If you have autism, yes. Because there’s still a lot of gatekeeping, and most people don’t know that a lot of autistic people are usually really good at masking for survival. Being AMAB, in an entire family unit that was autistic, and being a savant helped me get a diagnosis in 4th or 5th grade, but I also learned how to mask fairly well after the diagnosis. So my symptoms would only show under stress. No one would recognize that I was sinking usually until it was too little, too late.
If you’ve ever watched Atypical, most autistic women don’t act like Sam from Atypical, they usually act like Paige. They never gave her an official diagnosis, but she has so many traits that they should have had her get a diagnosis in the series and find out that she was. It was actually a huge disappointment to me that they never explored the possibility. Especially when she tanked in college from being a social pariah and having a hard time managing everything. That’s what happens when autistic people mask too well and don’t get necessary supports.
ALL THIS IS TRUE. For me, it wasn’t till my son got an ASD diagnosis when he was 10. I look at the things he was doing and said out loud, “Well, I don’t get it he’s not nearly as awkward and isolated as I was……at that…….
Oh.
Ooooooooooooh.
Ooh…
Frankly understanding that I… and he… aren’t just giant assholes sometimes was transformitvely positive for me. Like…. hard to explain how much better it feels to know that it’s not just me.. and him being “wrong” I very much relate to what Joyce is processing here.
When you didn’t get diagnoses as a kid you need to try really hard to get the diagnosis you actually need to get accommodations at work or school or disability benefits. Because there are a ton of obstacles in the way of getting the diagnosis that even medical professionals are pretty sure you have but they lack the authority to be the one who actually gives it to you.
It’s disturbing that some of the replies you’ve gotten make it sound like the goal is to get diagnosed with something (or make it sound like just because there’s a tendency towards false negatives people should go to a doctor aiming to get a positive diagnosis). Quite the opposite of that, I take it ‘try for a diagnosis’ just means looking to see if you have anything or trying to find out what’s going on, which includes checking for a negative diagnosis (i.e. nothing going on).
I don’t think anyone is saying that? Our replies are very much coming from a place familiar with the medical gaslighting women deal with. It’s not about “wanting to have something wrong with them” it’s about knowing SOMETHING is going on that is causing symptoms or making things difficult and wanting to try to find a clear answer.
Yeah, having had the Zebra Conditions Gamut as well as autism, the thing about a new diagnosis, especially one you have to wait months to pursue because the specialist’s next available appointment is like eleven months out and there’s no one else really qualified in a reasonable distance (though a cancellation came through so I did ultimately see said doctor a couple months ahead of the original appointment, yay,) is that YOU ALREADY KNOW something is wrong or different (autism not being ‘something wrong,’ inherently, though it does present challenges, this particular point I want to emphasize because ‘why would you want something wrong with you’ was the exact phrasing my one shitty psychiatrist who tried to change the diagnosis while I was in outpatient used because he thought I was ‘too social’ to be autistic. So, obvious sore spot which I know you did not intend autogatos, just echoing the attitude abled people usually take here, but still wanted to bring up for the crowd.) It’s immediately apparent. My patient intake form for the EDS assessment asked ‘when did you last feel well?’ I read this out loud to my parents before laughing and saying ‘how do we define well?’ (Ultimately I think we answered somewhere in the 2012 range. This was last fall.)
It’s finding out WHAT is going on that’s the difficult part, and yeah, especially for AFAB types, this is hard. For autism, yes – it is notoriously undiagnosed among AFAB people and people of color, with a high rate of misdiagnosis, and EXTREMELY difficult to get diagnosed as an adult if you flew under the radar, all assuming you can find someone who CAN diagnose you – but also in general, there are horror stories of women, especially women who are otherwise marginalized by society, having very common physical conditions ignored by doctoral bias. (This is especially bad for black women – there have been several studies on the subject – and fat women, ranging from ‘yeah the doctor kept telling me my foot would hurt less if I lost weight, no, turns out I had broken it several months ago and now there’s permanent damage’ to shit like ‘yeah I had my pain ignored in the ER until one doctor actually thought to check me for appendicitis, yeah, THAT WAS THE PROBLEM’ or horror stories where symptoms were dismissed and it was actually a tumor. That had spread significantly in the time they’d been ignored.) But even thin white women will have things dismissed as anxiety fairly frequently, even for acute conditions. Medical gaslighting is a real and pressing concern, particularly in cases like this.
Yeah definitely didn’t mean to imply autism is “something wrong” was sort of speaking to my own experience with this sort of thing where in my case there was something clearly WRONG and it turned out I had a chronic illness.
Or in the case of autism or ADHD (I just learned I have the latter) “something is clearly causing some challenges for me in how I interact with the world.” Basically, you know something is going on that not everyone around you is dealing with, so it’s a relief to finally be told you’re not imagining it and have a clear answer as to what it is.
And yup I sadly have SO MANY stories like you describe, as a woman who has spent 36 years living with a chronic illness, but my favorite story is the time I went to the doctor for chronic leg pain after a table fell on it and the doctor couldn’t immediately find anything wrong after an MRI of my knee and an x-ray, so he asked if I’d been under a lot of stress lately (yes…because I was in constant PAIN) and told me anxiety can sometimes manifest as pain.
So I went about my life for another year thinking I was crazy because it was so weird how my anxiety was manifesting as this very severe and specific pain confined to only my right leg.
Finally I couldn’t take it anymore and my mom suggested I get a second opinion. That doctor believed me thankfully and suggested the first doctor had missed something and that we should check my hip to see if there was referred pain coming from there.
Turns out I had spent a year walking on a MASSIVE labral tear complete with tissue that had torn away from the bone. I had to have hip surgery and have the tissue reattached with a pin.
And I’d been told it was just “anxiety.” I was so mad.
If you don’t know what condition you are dealing with and recognise that diagnosis is difficult and uncertain, certainly. I went to see my GP with a slight persistent cough, suspecting gastro-esophageal reflux and hoping for a prescription for a cox-2 inhibitor. My GP tried about a dozen hypotheses of four months before working out that I have haemochromatosis. About a dozen attempts at a diagnosis before we got one that could be confirmed.
Aaah, yes, fun times in medical ambiguity land. It sucks even with a GOOD doctor because you’re both like ‘well, clearly this is an issue, but it’s not any of these so let’s try Bloodwork Order #8.’
A few years ago at age 60 (sixty) I was sent to a neurophysiologist office for testing with a presumptive diagnosis of early onset senility. Turns out that cognitively I’m fine, the diagnosis was ADHD+ASD. The recent notable symptoms (e.g. forgetting family members’ names) were caused by cumulative brain damage from the ADHD reaching a critical point. Stimulant therapy has helped with the worst symptoms, but the diagnosis really only served to get the insurance to pay for meds. Otherwise it’s just the clinical expression for “annoying nerd who could have been something if only they had applied themself.” Yeah, thanks, I already knew that.
Oh, dear god, that hurt my heart to read it. “You’re just Not Trying hard enough!” “You could’a been a contender!” “You just need to pay attention in class.” “Class, if anyone sees Genesee daydreaming you have my permission to call him back to earth.” Did you get that one, too? Or just me?
Interesting replies all around. To clarify, I think it’s more apt to say you want to be evaluated with a presumptive diagnosis. Maybe things are different for autism spectrum diagnosis, idk.
I’m a day late but just wanted to say I kind feel vindicated when Joyce didn’t freak out about the birth control pills in the way everyone in-comic said she would. Kinda want to rub it in Becky’s and Dorothy’s faces actually
Keep in mind that:
– Joyce has freaked out in the past (eg over glasses)
– she herself had admitted a little… Concern over taking birth control
– whatever reaction she might have had over the birth control is probably overshadowed by the autism referral
Yeah, the second thing is my bet. Any issues that she might have about the birth control pills are being buried under an avalanche of concern about if she’s autistic…
All of this is such a mood. I don’t even have autism but very late-diagnosed ADHD and gosh the experiences both in terms of struggles and in terms of it being missed for so long especially in women and the ways we overcompensate have so much in common.
yes, exactly, I’m loving this storyline bc of how relatable it is!! I was diagnosed with ADHD at age 29 because YEP, AFAB and exceptionally good at masking/bullshitting
If you wouldn’t wager against a loaf of bread, I’d advise you not to pick me as a gambling opponent/partner/idk gambling jargon. I only ever lose and wallow in anticlimax or win in a way that actually causes somebody distress and can therefore not celebrate with any amount of tact.
Huh! I remember years ago Willis said something to the effect that Dina (who I have always read as autistic because she is shockingly similar to me (an autistic person) and I therefore relate to her a great deal) was never canonically autistic because they didn’t think they were knowledgeable enough to confidently portray an autistic character accurately. Maybe that’s changed! I never thought that Joyce would be suggested as autistic in the comic before Dina.
I’m pretty sure Willis has autism, though. I’ve seen some comments on here to that effect, and it would make sense because I get like none of his Transformers references.
IIRC he has OCD and it’s a comorbidity with autism so I think it was exactly that. He got meds for his OCD but still couldn’t handle certain tastes and sorted his food and misread social cues and then a few years later, “Oh…Well. Shit.”
Dang, Willis. I read the above comments and thought, “woah, commenters shouldn’t be trying to armchair-diagnose the comic author, that ain’t cool, if that were me I’d be pretty peeved.” Then I scrolled further down to your comment and saw that not only did you reply, but you were just clarifying which parts of the diagnosis were incorrect so you don’t misrepresent yourself. Respect.
Oh oops looks like we only had to wait 24 hours for an explanation. Guess some people jumped the gun. What an unimaginable thing, not having 200% of the information within the first strip of a character mentioning a complex subject.
Some days it’s unbearable, especially when the particular subject hits close to home, but this time it’s pretty funny for me. Especially with the advantage of seeing tomorrow’s strip on Patreon, since there were a few people basically saying “Hey, where’s the information I’m gonna get tomorrow night???”
I don’t know why, but I love it when Dorothy slip into her completely non-engaging mode. Supportive, active listener and gives enough prompts for the person she’s talking to to keep talking, but she does her best not to steer the conversation.
I suspect she was also just plain caught off guard by it, Joyce went in for help menstrual pain and came put with a referral for an possible autism diagnosis
That’s quite a swerve even if the explanation provided makes perfect sense
I’m really proud of Joyce for not being hostile to the suggestion. Like, it does seem she is genuinely giving it a lot of thought. Additionally, really speaks to her trust and comfort level with Dorothy and Sarah that she’s talking about it with them. Glad Dorothy and Sarah are listening along and not derailing her, since she’s got a lot to unpack.
You can see the gears turning in her head, and that little bit at the end makes me feel like she’s already being open to this, likely because suddenly a lot of pieces are falling into place. That weird emotional duality of being scared and upset because “omg this is overwhelming what do you mean I have this, this is just me??” vs. “Wait…this explains everything?’
The confusion and conflict about wait, what’s *me*, what part of my behavior comes from my brain, and and what’s the product of my upbringing….like fucking OUCH. I am at the point in my life where I think will never be able to unravel certain aspects of my personality from trauma, because they’ve been intertwined for decades. I can make some guesses, but I can’t go back and time to put my child-self under a microscope and do controlled experiments. I can only work with what I have now.
There’s some real fantasy catharsis in seeing a character get a chance to explore that kind of thing when they’re still young enough to have a shot at disentangling their brain from their background. (Although even if they can’t? Still so goddamn relatable, and it moves me to see someone try.)
I was about Joyce’s age when I found out (no less than 5 people who either were autistic or knew autistic people asked if I was sure I wasn’t autistic so I mentioned it offhand to my sibling who was a psych student who was all, “Wait, you don’t know? I thought you knew!” So I mentioned it to my parents who were all yeah they thought you might have that in school but you were just gifted (not exactly mom and dad, you chose not to pursue evaluation after I got the gifted label to avoid our shitty sped track there’s a difference) and screened positive at university counseling services before they told me it’d be like $7K for the evaluation and oh by the way it’s not covered because you’re 19 not 17 so that’s where it sits. and eventually I threw my hands up and decided that was a knot I don’t feel like detangling.
Still kinda pissed my folks didn’t tell me when I was a teen and could have got it covered because like *I* knew there was something else back when I was like 9. And everyone just told me to quit being a little weirdo and fit in more.
I am pretty sure I was diagnosed as a child (can school diagnose you, in America?) Because one time at school I was evaluated and my parents were furious, angry I answered in ways that apparently made them think something was “wrong” with me,angry I cooperated with being evaluated (which consisted of going to a different classroom and answering questions), just freaking out and screaming at me over this. But my friend who in retrospect is just as obviously autistic as me was there too; it was a different class thing she went to regularly.
Later I was homeschooled, but this was public school.
I mean as far as I know for sure, I’m self diagnosed. But I know the school said something after that evaluation that made my parents angry at me and maybe it was that I was autistic.
As far as I know, if the school as a psychologist (which some do) then yes? But even if not, a teacher or nurse might recognize symptoms and then suggest to the parents the kid be tested.
The latter happened to me with ADHD when I was in 1st or 2nd grade (teacher suggested my parents have me tested) but my mom didn’t agree soooo I never was until this year…at 35. oops
Yeah, in my mom’s case I think a lot of it was a product of the time…ADHD was not portrayed favorably. The general (harmful) attitude was that too many kids were being diagnosed and put on meds and there was this stigma that it was the troublemakers who were disruptive in class, and that the teachers wanted them on meds so they didn’t have to deal with their behavior. So to her, being told that her quiet, polite, but daydreaming daughter was like THOSE kids was offensive and made no sense.
Obviously all that was wrapped in tons of harmful social bias/ableism but I don’t begrudge her for her reaction. It is what it is and I’m just glad I’m getting help for it now.
But yeah in general it’s a common issue in society for parents to bristle at the idea that there could be anything atypical about their kids. Especially as we live in a society rife with ableism that treats “disabled” as a dirty word and disabled people as lesser. It’s a sad problem.
I will say to the credit of both my parents, they are trying. They’ve always been supportive and I think it’s just taken them some time to unlearn their own biases and preconceived notions that are common among boomer-aged parents.
It’s entirely out of fear. These creeps are so afraid that their kid is gonna make them look bad, that it’s safer in their mind to do anything except help them, up to and including murder. But we’re not allowed to call them wild animals and be so much as relieved when misfortune hits them, because it’s “not polite”, even though they laugh and toast and celebrate every time one of us dies.
In the USA, the public schools are supposed to have an evaluation done upon parental request, even if the child is not enrolled in the public school system.
Sometimes, a doctor, teacher, manager, or even coworker having an autistic kid can make life so much easier for the occasional ND person who crosses their path.
Yeah that was my guess too! Much easier to spot if you know someone with the thing you’re spotting. I got on the EDS dx path because an ortho PA I saw happened to have it herself.
Oh Joyce. I have never more wanted to offer a fictional character a hug, just because she’s in such distress and I wish I could offer her comfort. That is SO MUCH for her to suddenly have to think about, given the upheaval of her life, and her immediate physical pain, which is not going to go away right away, new meds or no.
It’s not the Joyce-perhaps-grappling-with-her-sexuality-as-an-ex-Christian-on-birth-control material I’d hoped this storyline was heading towards….but this is equally as big a deal for her as that would be, and I’m SO interested to see where it goes.
Also, I’m trying real hard to withhold judgement on Dorothy, but, Dorothy, are you actually *that* surprised? I promise you that autistic people can be social butterflies. (My best friend is autistic and also extroverted and significantly more social than I am.)
Tbh, I don’t read Dorothy as shocked, more processing. Like, “I am now taking inventory of our past interactions and reexamining them under the lens of this new information and it tracks.”
But I am also shit at reading people and Willis’s alt text seems to indicate she’s shocked.
(That kind of jaw dropped expression is my deep concentration face so I am probably projecting? People tend to assume I am confused or surprised when I am concentrating on stuff.
That’s a fair alternate reading! I might, in fact, be pre-judging Dorothy’s reaction here, when we haven’t gotten much actual reaction to clue us in how she’s taking this or what she’s thinking.
I think I was just thinking “Joyce has a whole pile of neuroses that are very compatible with some flavor of autism, some of which you were making fun of her for earlier this morning, so yeah you’re very aware of those?” Joyce certainly doesn’t fit the stock autistic stereotype of how autistic follow socialize, though, and I was perhaps unfairly jumping to the conclusion that this was the course of Dorothy’s seeming surprise.
Possibly Autism, but will wait for an official strip diagnosis. At the very least I’d say that Joyce very likely has OCD (which can be common in the spectrum).
Glad to see this being explored! but gosh the comments of people wildly jumping to conclusions about what happened and such. I mean that happens a lot but really. chill. stuff gets explained through time in the comics. if it doesnt then you can be like uhhhh hey wait a gosh dang minute
am hopeful tho her friends arent awful about it. I know we need story and character drama but 😭
Oh, also? Fair warning? If you don’t have actual knowledge of this particular subject, now is the time to shut the fuck up and listen. Plenty of others are being tactful and restrained, and sharing their experiences, and might be too polite to tell you off if you say something incredibly stupid. I, on the other hand, am already pre-emptively exhausted from dealing with you for almost three decades and will only mock and belittle your willful ignorance and stupidity. If that’s not okay, I’m sure somebody can explain why.
Well-meaning folks asking questions and paying attention to answers are neat though.
When I was a kid, some (not all) doctors thought I was autistic. I was a late talker, developmentally, not talking until I was 5.I bounced between some speech therapists. It should be mentioned that I am a middle child, with an older sibling and a twin, in a religious home, with a Meyers-Briggs mother who had us profiled as babies. This would’ve happened in the late 80’s, early 90’s. It’s possible I was/am autistic, it’s also possible that I was misdiagnosed. Doctors are a lot better about this stuff now than they were 30 years ago. I don’t have a couch diagnosis for Joyce, to me it could go either way.
I probably would never even have started to suspect I might be autistic if I hadn’t learned early last year that my nephew was diagnosed, and my sister had told me he acts kinda like me sometimes before that. I’m definitely convinced that autism is under-diagnosed, both in women and also in adults of my age (early 30s) and older in general.
I’ve been wrestling with whether or not I should get diagnosed for a while now. On the one hand, I’ve made it to my 30s without knowing and I’m doing relatively ok but on the other hand I can’t so much as go through a checkout at the supermarket or order fastfood without having an anxiety attack/sensory overload. I have a small friend group as I don’t people too well and I’m practically a hermit as the aforementioned sensory overload makes hanging out at crowded venues an ordeal. I have two nephews on the autism spectrum so I know it runs in the family, plus my dad now suspects he also has it as he has struggles very similar to mine. I think this current storyline is hoing to hit me hard haha…😅
Even if it’s not autism causing sensitivity to crowds, you might be able to get some help to make that less stressful by talking to an expert about it. Perhaps there’s a first step you can take remotely, before setting up an in person chat? This storyline is giving me more motivation too, to push for a diagnosis even though I’m mature enough to have developed coping strategies for all the little things.
Overcompensate by rambling is an interesting way to describe the tendency for ND ppl I know to kind of preemptively verbal wall of text at people when anxious or nervous or worried about perceived or anticipated impending rejection.
There’s nothing to apologise for. Just wandering if there was something else you had wanted to add – you wouldn’t be the first person here to have their posts cut in half. 🙂
Sorry to hear that your dysgraphia is acting particularly up today. 🙁 I hope it doesn’t affect your day too much.
When I was a kid I was flagged on 2 different occasions as possibly autistic. First in first grade (I reminded my very awesome teacher of his kid who was autistic, but I wasn’t at the time having too much social trouble or behavior problems so they decided to wait and see) and again in third grade (my abusive POS teacher had me in several times a day meltdowns & parents took me to a child psychologist thinking I was having emotional issues related to the military lifestyle or our family history of mental illness but this was the 90s and at the time a developmental disability diagnosis with significant behavior issues – which I was exhibiting – would have meant the school would have basically shoved me in a room to be ignored with the other SpED kids and possibly tied me down to a desk all day if I was prone to meltdowns or self injury (it was pretty common practice in my region).
The child psychologist found I had a high IQ and smacked a gifted sticker on me to try to get accommodation (since at the time giftedness wasn’t something that could get you SpED tracked) and suggested to my parents they not “pursue a label” of autism to avoid limiting my potential. It was probably the correct call, and also I was deeply upset when I found the referral paperwork as an adult. I did get a “you probably have autism” from a psychologist in grad school but a formal diagnosis would have cost 60% of my salary & not be covered by insurance, so. I am extremely similar to a nibling and a cousin both who do have formal diagnoses so we just say I’m autistic at this point.
I could pursue a diagnosis now, but I find it hard to see the point. I muddled through schooling without accommodation and I’ve found disclosing my diagnosed ADHD only ever harms my career so why would I want to disclose autism, which is even more stigmatized?
Right on the money with your summary. Because of the idiotic stigma, you’re better off keeping that information (semi)private, and just using the life strategies you’ve developed over the years.
Thanks for sharing (I’m an ADD diagnosed dreamer prone to anxiety).
In my area, government assistance isn’t granted unless you’re too disabled to work and there’s no disability protection laws to speak of (Fun fact: disability is not recognized as a vulnerable class in need of protection by Canadian national human rights laws. Unless a provincial law says otherwise it is not illegal to discriminate against someone for being disabled, and my province doesn’t say otherwise so I keep shit buttoned down nowadays after discovering that the hard way).
Could be both Joyce! I mean the food thing I think lays credence to the possibility of a diagnosis but like: you could have had special interest in something else entirely with different parents (Imagine a world where Dina and Joyce were switched at birth).
Personally I have a form of dyslexia which means my memory is garbage and I also have auditory processing issues. Mostly I have to have notes or a list to refer back through at work or take notes if my manage says something because it’s not happening otherwise.
Granted sometimes people talk about both autism and adhd in ways that seem pretty relatable but honestly kind of hard to say.
I’ve never been officially diagnosed or tested for autism, but aside from the fact that I’m a man and wasn’t raised with biblical literalism or home schooling this comic describes me pretty well
I know an atheist who had biblical history as a special interest – he just got VERY interested in the politics around the early bible like how they decided what would be included and how that one early figure in the church basically invented a lot of the misogyny in Christianity nowadays and how what counted as the supposed divine revelation of God was decided at a old timey convention vote basically?
I’d be very interested in seeing Joyce’s thoughts on that stuff btw.
(oh also how a lot of the verses the charismatic branches base their worship styles on were added to Mark several hundred years later by someone else and are basically forgeries.)
Probably the first YouTube video where I went ‘this is fucking fascinating ‘ is about how the Abrahamic god may have come from a polytheistic pantheon and grew from monolatrist polytheism. I honestly never got to do my own research into its accuracy as a proposal but I could imagine Joyce being interested into who put what together and who wrote what. (Like I remember that Genesis 2 was written first and way before Genesis 1 by a different author).
Timely for me as two years ago my (clinical psychiatrist) sister told me she suspected I may have Asperger’s. I asked her last time I talked to her how one would find that out. So, yesterday I talked to my personal doctor and have a referral. So we’ll see how that pans out.
(I’m in my 40s, so I’m not looking for “treatment” or anything. I’d just like to know, you know?)
I’m in the same boat—I have a kid on the spectrum and it got me wondering about myself since I had never felt “right” around people as a kid (which was chalked up to shyness or being “gifted” causing me to be bored in class or some such.) At 40+ and otherwise holding down a job and otherwise “adulting” tolerably well, I wasn’t looking for treatment or special assistance, just a chance to understand myself better, I think.
There are known and well documented gender based differences in autism presentation. Because the diagnosis standards were written with boys in mind this means girls generally have to be more affected to get a diagnosis and are largely under-diagnosed.
Girls on average tend to:
* Be more social
* Mask more and more effectively
* Be more likely to have co-occuring emotional disorders like anxiety and depression
* Have special interests that are less odd but no less deep than boys, (so a girl would be relatively more likely to have an unusually intense special interest in barbie dolls than in gnat biology, for example)
Note that despite masking more effectively, girls with it are no less disabled. Which is to say: they’re better at pretending everything’s fine and hiding their suffering. This means girls with autism are at high risk of stress related illness and death by suicide.
The jury’s out as to why girls present differently (gender based differences in brain structure, or social conditioning from early infancy that’s less tolerant of deviations from the norm?), but it’s well known they do.
could it be BOTH? both actual structural differences, AND social conditioning? I know, heresy to think that a problem can have more than one cause simultaneously, right? Especially given society’s tendency to pidgeon-hole and seek a single ‘magic bullet’ explanation for anything that might be a touch complex…
Getting a diagnostic is like getting a permission or a justification. I don’t particularly care for it. “Yes, he does that, but that’s because he’s *autistic* you know”. You don’t need a permission to be you, and I don’t like entrusting doctors the power to categorize someone like that. We don’t need more high priests or sorting hats.
This is a touchy subject and I don’t want to speak for anyone else, but I got “diagnosed” with a mental disorder and I felt like it was an excuse to write me off and say I was exactly the same as everyone else with this diagnosis. God forbid the medical field treat me as an individual. I don’t care for it and I never describe myself this way. I don’t need permission to be me, exactly like you said.
I think the point is less “You have permission to be you” and more like one of those medical bracelets people wear so you can find their heart medication. It’s a semi-loose baseline to help form an understanding of a very broad category of the human experience, not a brand of sausage.
I know it’s just a metaphor but those bracelets are for situations where the patient can’t communicate with you. I feel like doctors would rather check my bracelet than talk to me about what I think, feel, and experience. The diagnosis was also forced on me against my will, rather than being something I sought out. Like I said everyone’s different but I don’t care for it.
Well put, James!
They do say “if you’ve met one autistic person, you’ve met one autistic person“ for a reason. Being autistic can be just another adjective describing a part of your experience and possibly also a part of your identity… but it’s only one part and there’s an individual identity beyond diagnoses… let people be themselves and the expert on their own experience 🙂
No, a diagnosis is a precursor to treatment. It’s the first step toward receiving whatever assistance, accommodations, or tools you might need and want to live your best life. If it turns out you’re already living your best life, and there’s nothing you want or nothing that can be reasonably done to improve your quality of life, then the diagnosis is benign.
i hope this isn’t a case of overdiagnosing to correct for underdiagnosing.
i get rather concerned when doctors try to diagnose or take guesses based on incidental behavior, especially without proper patient history.
and now, a tale from my childhood.
Picture it, New York city, early 2000’s.
a young boy enjoys his like, he is energetic, he is happy, he is a child.
one day his teacher informs his parents that this young boy is too energetic, and that something needed to be done about it.
so the parents take the boy to a doctor, on the request of the school.
the boy doesn’t really know what is going on, but he does what his parents tell him.
then they diagnose him with adhd.
the prescription? the hard stuff.
so they give him the drugs and the boy’s energy seems to have died down.
of course, that’s not actually what was happening.
the boy still had energy, but he just couldn’t bring himself to move.
the boy lost all his energy, all his enjoyment in doing things.
he once loved going to the park with grandma to play on the swings and the slides and the monkey bars. after the pills, he just kinda sat there in the living room, doing not much of anything.
a teacher’s wet dream: a quiet child that only sits there and does what he is told without any trouble.
i was told that i was too energetic, then i was drugged. all for the convenience of a teacher that didn’t want to deal with kids being kids.
now you may be wondering, “Jighole, what does this have to do with dumbing of age and autism?”
the answer is simple. i was a child that acted like a child would, and was punished/poisoned for it.
Joyce is a woman that is acting as she was taught to act as a child. certain foods, certain methods of talking, kept ignorant of sexual this and that, so she doesn’t know how to really approach these things. and now some doctor that has known her for all of 5 minutes thinks it’s a mental disorder, rather than just conditioning that needs to be dealt with.
what joyce needs is a psychiatrist, or psychologist… i get the two mixed up.
basically she needs someone to talk to so she can sort through and throw out the harmful shit she was taught as fact.
her entire character recently seems to be someone that has lost their way, and needs some kind of guidance so she can find herself and who she is as a person. rather than grabbing onto every strong personality within 10 feet of herself to try and get the slightest grip on where she is going and what she is doing.
Psychologist is the one that can’t prescribe you medicine. And yeah, she definitely needs one – but also, a diagnosis will help with the untangling of all her trauma and her relationship to religion, and help find her tools to manage her everything going forward.
Anyways, diagnoses can be wrong, and in any case it’s good that Joyce might get help this way. Worst that can happen is either a false positive autism diagnosis, but whether she has autism or not, she might benefit from autism coping strategies. or a negative diagnosis result but them still pointing her in the direction of therapy. I sure hope so. And at least she’s an adult (for a given value of adult) and she can decide whether she’ll take medications or not.
Totally agreed with you that no doctor is supposed to assume any mental illness and/or neurodivergence within 5 minutes of knowing you.
Been there. According to a random GP i only went to once (gee, i wonder why) and an art teacher (!!!) i have borderline. Weird how there’s a standardized catalogue of 9 different symptoms and needing 5 of them to “qualify”, a gp can simply look at my (non-self harm) scars, and an art teacher(!!!) sees me taking notes on my arm and equating it to self harm….. teenage me was just like…. lol what? i just didn’t have paper 😛
Thanks for the assumptions, jeez.
The misdiagnosis isn’t the fault of having a diagnosis. I was misdiagnosed with about half a dozen mental and physical diseases growing up. Fed medicine i didn’t need that wrecked my body and mental health.
I actually have autism, and getting a real diagnosis helped me understand myself and help me explain the behaviors that were already happening to others. No i can’t watch that movie. Before i would be pressured and censured for what i couldn’t handle. I’d have to give some awkward explanation for why i couldn’t handle something. Now i can say, i have to go i’m getting overstimulated.
Getting a diagnosis isn’t evil. We don’t need to vilify it for people who need the help. Even if others used medicine to harm you, medicine itself isn’t evil. If someone hits you with a hammer, don’t blame the hammer and blame others who want to build houses.
I’m so sorry to hear that Jighole, how your childhood was just ripped away from you like that, that must have been AWFUL!!!
😭😭😭😭
The same thing actually happened to me, except it was “autism”. Whether or not I was ever “autistic” (depending on your definition), the label was basically used to hold me back from all the things that would enrich my life, gaslight me, abuse me physically and emotionally, it basically took my childhood away, nearly fucking broke me.
😖😖😖😖😖😖 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭
But now I’m doing my best to work through this, sorting myself out just like Joyce is now, and even though the place the comic is going from this point re: neurodivergence might seriously re-activate my traumas, I REALLY want to be able to enjoy it, and interact with it’s community, who I have learned so much from.
Much like you, I had my childhood, my identity, ripped away by this kind of system, and I too fear that the comic and its community I have engaged with in order to compensate for my trauma, might just come to downplay or even venerate the very thing that ruined our lives. 😩😩😩
Basically, Jighole, please know that YOU ARE NOT ALONE in how you feel.
If it’s any consolation, I too really wish for the acceptance of better ways do describe how our brains our different from each other, not only to stop people and “professionals” from making hurtful assumptions about us and acting on those assumptions, but also to make it easier for us to understand ourselves and for others to understand us.
Your view on the issue matters as much as anyone else’s here, and we need to here from everyone and discuss these kind of things to make real progress regarding how we’re treated, given the historically AWFUL place we came out of. Thank you for sharing. 🥹🥹🥹🥹
Worth pointing out the doctor didn’t DIAGNOSE anything. She gave Joyce a referral, which is exactly what a doctor should do when they suspect something but don’t have sufficient data to make a diagnosis.
gotcha Joyce.
is it me being neurodivergent, or me just having christianity-brainwash to deal with, or me being neurodivergent AND brainwashed?! hard to tell, hard to tell.
Please get therapy, either way! <3
Huh. I didn’t twig on Joyce as being autistic; I definitely just assumed the first option. Defo agree with Felian that therapy is called for either way.
All of these kids need fucking therapy, in fact. I’m kind of aghast that no adult adults have insistently offered them some, what with the kidnapping. Kind of surprised Dorothy hasn’t insisted at least Joyce and Becky get therapy after the attempted rape, the rapist’s mutilation at the hands of Amber, TWO gunpoint kidnappings for Becky, the death of her father in front of her and resultant orphaning, I mean it’s been pretty Titus Andronicus around campus this year, jfc. Dina’s the only emotionally healthy person in the main cast, and the lonely weight of that is going to be a strain if this Gotham City shit keeps up
To be fair, it’s implied that, at the very least, Walky and Amber attended therapy, but that they weren’t very good therapists: it’s possible that the rest of the cast attended, but had the same problem.
I’ve worked with more than 300 autistic children in my secondary education years. I know very well from experience that diagnosing most girls is more difficult to get correct than diagnosing most boys. Masking alone can defeat ill-trained observation frequently.
While it’s possible that Joyce is on the autism spectrum, it’s also possible that she was just EXTREMELY NERVOUS about seeing a doctor for the particular reasons she was, and this nervousness manifested, in that moment, as the kind of atypical social behaviors that are more generally associated with autism. If you’re meeting someone for the first time and they are extremely confused or uncomfortable, they can quite easily manifest the same behaviors that often form the basis of an autism diagnosis, but they’re acute rather than chronic.
My answer to the doubters in the comments is that being autistic is not a bad thing and to stop focusing on over diagnosis which is an that prevents people from accessing necessary services. I know this cause there never seems to be a movement to actually increase funding in therapy for example, just denying people access to diagnosis and the drugs that might help them regulate their brain. Funny how that works.
I say this from a mood disorder and adhd perspective in particular, there’s not enough empowerment in health care in general, to trust the person asking for help is a rare thing.
So much more focus on will powering your way through life.
Also apologies for dramatics, but I only recently got a little healthier after a lifetime of struggle, and I would’ve gotten there sooner if I was trusted and informed about my health
but on the other hand I really don’t automatically blame any of them for being touchy about this, because some of them have actually suffered greatly as a result of a misdiagnosis, or watched it happen to someone they love.
I mean that in no way to invalidate what you’re saying, we DEFINITELY need to take the fucking hoops out of this system that stops people from getting the care they need, which might entail removing the requirement of diagnosis in the first place and instead focusing on individual patients with individualized problems that need individualized solutions
One of the most important things here though is that we never subject people to any treatment or put any label on them without their consent.
By the way thanks above for sharing what your autism is like for you, really appreciate your contribution to the Neurodivergence Mosaic!
I’m fully on board with empowering people to be valued individually, I just wish the energy was in that direction instead of fearmongering about over diagnosis.
ya know i can’t say i saw this coming but it is not at all surprising once you lay joyce’s character all out. also now i understand why i found her so relatable despite actually being very different 🙂 lmao
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you ever tried to be funny every day
like, do a daily joke comic, or similar, just… come up with some laughs on the regular?
but some days it just doesn’t work
like, no spoons or the comedy well is just dry
and like
absolutely definitely not gonna get laughs about stuff that 1. you don’t know enough about to joke about and 2. is way easy to get taken the wrong way
so you just bunt
and instead
like
ask
“I wonder when the Comic Book Time sliding calendar will make it such that Joyce would have snuck behind her mom’s back to watch Turning Red”
or something
idk
prolly better just to take a nap
Out of spoons manifests in many ways.
Quite relate.
Sending cutlery.
I’ve been spoonless for about two years.
The demand for spoons is inflating.
Yeah.
Fortunately, Willis has you covered on the “being funny every day” front, for the next several months at least.
Every day?
Even when Becky’s dad kidnapped her with a gun?
Toedad xdxdxd
Now he’s Toedead.
Insert gif of a group of young african americans celebrating their peer who stands there triumphant for the excellent joke they just made.
Just a heads up — “Young African American men” or “African American youths” might be a little more precise. I don’t think one would often say “young whites” or “young Asian Americans”. Just a kind of person centered language — just a friendly word to the wise. Not trying to call you out or anything — just something that caught my eye. I apologize for any offense or discomfort in mentioning it.
Meanwhile, I think one would say “young Asian Americans,” or what I think the white version would be, “young white Americans.” I think your way works, too, I just don’t know that it’s better. (Though it might be for African American specifically? I definitely say and hear Black more, which would need a noun after it in a way that “American” can cover.)
Huh. Good point, Yumi. Thanks!
…Sorry, maybe I’m just being too hyperfocused of a language nerd!
https://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=3470
Funny?
Sometimes it’s sad clown funny, but yeah, generally speaking, there’s usually a chuckle to be had.
Probably 7-9 years from now, we’re already at the point where Joyce would have needed to see Frozen behind her mom’s back.
That’s honestly like the perfect movie to watch behind her mom’s back. Damn, uhh, she’d have watched it 10 years ago I’d guess? So sliding comic time would take 10 years to get to that point
😰😰😰 This is gonna be a difficult thing for Joyce to sort out internally, isn’t it?
Whatever Joyce decides to do with this, I really hope her friends respect her wishes and how she chooses to identify.
I will surely respect everyone’s right to identify with any label, traits or descriptors they want, be it “autism” or anything else! 🤗
I’m really glad this word gives so many of you a sense of empowerment or understanding. But yet, I feel a little left out myself. 😔
I guess one part of it is because I have yet to get the opportunity to really understand all of you!
If you so choose, I would like you to write below me what your autism or other neurodivergence is like, and things about it you feel are unique to your own!
My curiosity is peaked, along with a few other things. 🤩 😨 🤩
Or you could just tell me your favorite comfort foods. 😋
I think the map to my brain was written on a paper airplane and tossed into a fan that doesnt got the cap on
I like mac and cheese with sloppy joes.
In my dialect, a sloppy joe is a type of pullover. Like a sweatshirt. On the assumption that you don’t eat pullovers, what are sloppy joes to you?
A heavily sauced loose meat sandwich.
A sandwich made from ground beef in a moderately spicy sauce with the ground beef not formed into a patty before browning, and then simmered in the sauce. I would call it good, but then my wife says I call a lot of foods good that aren’t actually good to anyone but me, like Mrs. Tobin’s codballs in onion creme sauce, which were made from salt cod which I’m told smelled like rotten fish. And also natto, the stinky cheese of beans.
my official diagnosis is ADHD and I am mostly comfortable with it—putting a name to my collective struggles and idiosyncrasies has so far helped more than hindered. the most fitting way I’ve found to describe myself, though, is “feral gremlin.”
I also like to describe my neurodivergence as a clown car joyride in which my brain has the steering wheel 100% of the time and I’m in the front passenger seat just flailing helplessly while the clowns party behind us. This is where medication helps: it enables me to put a hand on the steering wheel and work together with my brain some of the time. Because I’m a feral gremlin, however, sometimes I just have to guide my brain to a safe, deserted road where it can let loose and have a good time.
I call this chaotic, rule-and-routine-free downtime Gremlin Time.
Oh yeah, and two things I say a lot: “forgetting things is basically my brand, so…” and, referring to my picky eating: “yeah, I have the palate of a five-year-old!”
Very pleased to meet you, Feral Gremlin! 🤗
Heyyy 😃 *finger guns*
can’t believe I forgot to mention my Most Favoritest comfort food: eggplant!! it’ll make me happy whichever way it’s prepared, it’s pretty versatile, but roasted with tomato slices is the best of the bunch!
Yummers! Eggplant parm is such a comfort food for me. ;-9
The mind is not the helmsman of the ship.
The mind is Odysseus:
crossing the sirens,
lashed to the mast,
screaming with the pain of wanting.
His crew toiled on,
wax in their ears,
hearing nothing.
Tossed on a neurochemical sea.
Huh. Maybe “dopamine sea” would read better. More precise, and a bit of a rhyme. Work in progress.
oooh, love this
Thank you! 🙂
…Says the little splash in my dopamine sea. ;-D
Simply beautiful Laura!!!!
Yes! YESSS!! I want to see you all like this, I want to see the beauty, the diverse colors and energies of us neurodivergents laid out all pretty like this! 😍
Thank you, The Wellerman. (For some reason, I keep wanting to call you “Welly” (See: https://twitter.com/damnyouwillis/status/1324005661080981505/photo/1)
I’m a total dopamine junkie. Part of why I have to be careful about not spending too much time in this forum. I can lose hours without knowing it.
Awe thanks 😊
“Welly”, hee hee 😆
I also go by NGPZ, or NG
I like NG. Reminds me of NRG (“energy”).
I had a friend once who called himself GPZ. (“Guinea Pig Zero.”) Not a friend anymore, but the name is still good.
Are your capital letters an abbreviation for something, NG?
Don’t quite remember, I think it stands for lots of things?
Something like Neurodivergent Genderfluid Parasite Zero? Don’t know really.
Also NG is a homophone of “Engie”, the name of a engineer girl from a gaming comic I read, so it also ties in with my STEM interests!
Also just looks real cool as graffiti!
The graffiti alone is a wonderful reason to pick a nickname. I have a nickname myself I picked for the same reason. (I can’t reveal it — I’ve gotten too close already to revealing my secret identity… 😉
Thanks for sharing this piece of yourself, NG.
Kelly Welly brings me happiness:
https://www.instagram.com/fishdonteven/?hl=en
Get too hooked and I have to “pull a Scully” on myself:
title = “‘Not everything is about you, Mulder.'”> Not everything is about me.
Love it love it love it, Autogatos! Thank you!
“lose hours without knowing it”
*checks clock*
…fuck.
SAME AHHHH I’ve been having a great time reading this wonderful thread but I was meaning to go to bed earlyish AHHHHHH
I had 3 hours of play time in FFXIV before servers went down for maintenance and…I spent all of it on here. I don’t know how this was 3 hours, I thought it’d maybe been ONE at most.
RIP living on ADHD Standard Time.
ADHD Standard Time. I love this.
Right now I’m living on OCD standard time, attempting to finish my work… 8-}
Playing dopamine music for comfort. It really helps me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8M143iRrbgw
ADHD standard time BTDT burned the shirt factory. And several nearby towns.
Music is absolutely crucial to my ability to focus as well (or a show on in the background that I’ve seen a million times). Stuff like Riverdance, trans music, Lindsey Stirling…good depth and high energy music is perfect for when I REALLY need to focus on work: https://youtu.be/49tpIMDy9BE
Oops! Comment got posted in the wrong place.
Love the music, autogatos! Thank you for the rec!
Excellent! Good use of imagery and allegory.
Thank you, Opus! 😀
Are you named for Opus the penguin in Bloom County? Or is it more like an “Opus of work”?
This is quite beautiful.
Thank you, Joe Moose. I appreciate you.
Wow this is incredible. Thank you
That is so sweet of you to say, joe. That warms my heart. Thank you so much for being kind to me.
Does that make Charybdis hyper-focus? Since it’s a huge dopamine whirlpool and you get sucked in (*ba-dum-tss*)?
*Scurries off to look up Charybdis.*
Yes. Correct. ;-D
Ok, so that’s gorgeous bit of phrasing. Wow.
Thank you so much for making the time to read it and say so, Seodra. It’s special, for me, when a peer reads my work. I am grateful to you for it.
I cleaned up the phrasing just a touch, in case anyone wants the final product:
Odysseus
The mind is not the helmsman of the ship.
The mind is Odysseus
crossing the Sirens.
Lashed to the mast.
Screaming the pain of wanting.
His crew toils on.
Wax in their ears.
Hearing nothing.
Tossed on a dopamine sea.
🥹🥹🥹🥹
Beautiful, Laura. Thank you for sharing this, contributing this art, this beautiful reflection of yourself to the Neurodivergence Mosaic.
*plays “The Sea” by Tomas Dvorak on hacked muzak*
Thank you, NG!
“It isn’t the storm that makes the ocean dangerous.”
https://www.asofterworld.com/index.php?id=911
I’ve always been a voracious reader, and had trouble imagining that there are people who actually don’t enjoy it and do it for fun. I know a lot of words that I’ve never actually heard pronounced.
Even with (or because of) my large vocabulary, I sometimes find it hard (especially lately) to pick exactly the right word – so I’ve taken to a shotgun/saturation/bracketing approach, like so. (Also, lots of parentheticals.)
Geez is this a common ND thing? Because I do this A LOT. For me I think it’s anxiety over being misunderstood/being unclear (see there I go).
I’d blame it on just having spent too much time on social media where misinterpretation is so common you get used to overexplaining yourself, but I used to do it in English papers too before Twitter even existed. My teacher would circle a paragraph and write “You just said the same thing 3 different ways. This paragraph can be one sentence.”
I don’t know if it’s common, but it’s a trait I share. I think the large vocabulary combined with aphasia from the brain damage I got from the wreck, plus the PTSD from my life, all contribute to this.
Soooo many parentheses! I don’t know if it’s an ND thing or not but it’s definitely something i have 🙂
Hey you know, I think it would actually be very much better for the whole of humans on the multicultural frontier if we ALL took the shotgun/saturation/bracketing approach, given how much the same word can very much mean different things, and discerning their meanings across different cultures and contexts can get REALLY tricky.
Hey, I notice is very much like the communication equivalent of geolocation, where we use sets words/concepts like circles/ranges to hone in on what we want to express to others from different cultural contexts!!!!!
🌎🛰️ 📚
BRILLIANT!!!! THANK YOU StClair!!!!!
🤩🤩 🧠🧠 🤩🤩
*plays “Adirectional” by Fourth Grade Nothing on hacked muzak
While I have never been properly Diagnosed with Autism itself, as the majority of my family doesn’t “believe” in that or many other mental illnesses or at the very least doesn’t think they are serious, but I do show a ton of signs of being a high functioning autistic person, or at least being somewhere on that spectrum. I have a VERY narrow set of interests, I have several ticks that Im constantly doing and if I don’t do them I get stressed out, I have a hard time with my own emotions and knowing what im feeling a lot of the time so I just got good at pretending the emotions, I prefer to be on my own most of the time, I don’t like physical contact from 95% of people and really don’t like the palms of my hands touching other people for some reason (handshakes are a nightmare when I have to do them), my sleeping patterns are majorly messed up, I almost always speak formally and using slang feels weird (something I have heard is a sign), I have strong Preferences when it comes to some foods and clothes and some clothes like Jeans make me super annoyed and stressed when im wearing them (not sure if I worded that right), I suck at understanding Sarcasm, my brain is filled with millions of small facts from the hundreds of books I read when I was younger, etc….
Since my family would probably disown me if I went and got diagnosed, as they would say im “just trying to get attention”, idk if I should go get the diagnosis or not… but the fact I show so many signs kinda scares me a little but at the same time it would explain so much…
Safe journeys and happy trails!
😭😭😭😭😭😭
Switchchrist24, that’s horrible! I’m so sorry you have to put up with that, you deserve so much better!
That stripe I have as a neurodivergent, those million small facts from the books I read when I was younger, I feel them coming to me less and less, just lots of melancholy these days, and i hate it, I fear I’ve lost the spark!!!! 😭😭😭
Please, spill some of those small facts from the book you read right here! If only for some vicarious enjoyment!
A lot of those small facts are stuff Dina has already mentioned in this comic, I was a huge Dino nerd myself growing up (Jurassic park disappointed me so much), now I work at a movie theater and have to hold myself back from giving out actual dino facts as people flood in to see the new Jurassic World movie this weekend, since those facts tear about that movie.
I also loved Animals growing up and would make Animal Reports for fun that I would take into school and the teacher would let me present them to the class during homeroom.
One of the facts I tend to tell people out of habit when talking about animals is that Butterflies drink blood, and there is a species of them that actively looks for corpses to drink out of.
Koala’s are the most stubborn animal on the planet, as their only food they eat can’t be fully digested and offers so little nutrients that they barely have energy to move, their babies get their nutrients by eatting the Digested food of the parent.
Lemur’s have a Female Dominant Society, so King Julian in the Madagascar is not at all accurate, they would have a Queen if anything. Also interestingly enough, they are the only primates besides humans that can have Blue Eyes.
🥰🥰🥰 Thanks for sharing this, good feelings from learning this.
A blood drinking butterfly? Ooo! Do tell more! An alien parasite myself, that really sounds like my kind of animal 😍
Also, if it’s any consolation, I’m actually making a game right now that features the DOA cast AND dinosaurs I want to make as scientifically accurate as possible!
All Butterflies will drink blood (as well as Poop and Tears) if given the option, they love it. There is a Moth that will actively “bite” you and drink your blood called the Vampire Moth.
Sort of conversely to the butterfly thing, most mosquitoes actually primarily drink nectar and the like – only females are adapted to drink blood, and only do so in order to store up energy for egg-laying.
Indeed, sadly they also spread a ton of diseases.
Just to be fair, anything that lives and breaths and migrates a lot will also spread disease, and moving a lot is necessary for a lot of species to even LIVE to begin with,
and oh well, evolution of all lifeforms and their ecosystems on earth, the product of 4.5 billion years worth of happy accidents, can really only do so much “right” in the eyes of you humans
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Only a handful of mosquito species (about 12 out of 200 in the US) carry diseases that are dangerous to humans. All the others are, at worst, nuisances.
You. I like you.
Those are some sweet animal facts. Half of which were already on my own collection, the other half is now.
Serious thought/question – I wonder how much benefit there really is in getting diagnosed for autism. At least for the ones of us who have already found a fitting niche to exist in. Like, I have always assumed I’m autistic – it just explains a whole lot of things about how I think, and about how most people don’t quite have the same experiences as me. But I’ve never tried to get diagnosed, because I want to keep checking the ‘no’ on the ‘have you everbeen diagnosed with any mental conditions’ question on applications. (and yes, that was there, and I don’t think there are any laws against using that against you, where I live…). But anyway, it’s not an illness in the ‘you need treatment’ sense. Sure, everyone has to figure out how to best live their lives, and understanding you own brain workings is important for that. But does a diagnosis really help with that?
Sorry, just some thinking or loud.
Just getting Diagnosed can cost a shit ton of money, and a good handful of different tests, I looked it up. I don’t have health insurance cause I can’t afford it (cause America’s government doesn’t care about it’s people’s health), and just the process of getting Diagnosed with Autism can cost up to $5000…
Yes there are some Benefits, but its mostly just “Hey, I know this now, it makes sense” and some doctors might point you towards things that could help you.
Its still good to know for a fact if I have it or not though, it might quiet the part of my mind that tries to gaslight me every chance it gets.
Holy sh!t America :O That’s just wrong.
I’m not sure how to say the following to make it sound right, but I’ll try – if it makes sense to you, let it make sense, and get whatever benefits you can from that understanding. [there was an entire paragraph here that I deleted, why is communicating so hard XD]
Oh, that’s exactly where I’m at except for one thing – I have been diagnosed with depression and I still select no on questionnaires, because who the hell is going to stop me or contradict me. Fuck em, I’m not handing that ammunition out to my employers.
THIS RIGHT HERE!
The way I see it, given how little we know about the brain and how it actually works, “autism” is a concept that cannot exist in a vacuum. It has to be observed by others. And ergo its usefulness.
Depending on who you choose to disclose it to, it can either keep you from upward mobility (in case of employers), or it can economically help you (in case of government aid and school accommodations).
So on that level, it’s basically a tool we can use to make things easier in an otherwise broken, fucked up capitalist system which is intrinsically unstable.
In terms of having something you can use to tell friends why you do the awkward things you do, depends on your friendship circle, really. I myself would use “neurodivergent” in my case, or another word like “autism” or more specific and that feels “more” that makes sense.
@Switchchris24, I am so glad it stopped that internal gaslighting for you. For me, “autism” was only ever used to gaslight me, to make me doubt my own senses and memory all the time, and it nearly broke me. 😖
Regarding “”””official”””” diagnosis, the way I see it, the need to have “professionals” confirm it is strictly speaking an unstable attachment, where you you seek to be acknowledged and respected by a system that’s established deliberately to oppress us. Even if they lower one hoop, they’ll just raise another to maintain the social pyramid, or worse yet weaponize self-affirmations like they always do.
I havent gotten the Diagnosis yet, I was saying that if I did it might stop the internal gaslighting. But at the same time, that didn’t work with my depression diagnosis.
my fiance decided to get a diagnosis when the “oh there is a name for this?” ball dropped in his mid 20’s because it basically meant that employers *had* to accommodate for him- specifically things like ear defenders/noise cancelling headphones. because of laws in ontario surrounding disabilities and employment questions about medical history/diagnoses are not allowed so he doesnt have to disclose it before hand.
…. Now I’m just weirded out that people can’t simply have now cancelling headphones if they want them. Surely there are many who could focus better that way, neurodivergent or not?
he had to prove he needed an accommodation to wear ear defenders in an industrial bakery where there was a sign on the wall saying ear defenders were required as protective equipment. employers HATE the idea of people possibly listening music to an illogical degree.
Remember, just because you receive a diagnosis doesn’t mean you have to share that fact with unsupportive family members. If you opt for therapy, tell ’em you’re going to a night class, or a D&D session, or something. If they can’t respect you enough to support your efforts, then they don’t deserve the respect of being told the truth.
I’ve been diagnosed since very young, and most of my life I’ve been trying to fight it because being hot and autistic SUCKS horribly. Because people will show a huge interest in you and everything you say, and then they get tired of you. And it’s like… you never know if people are humoring you or wanting to get in your pants. So you learn to find other autistic people and it feels a lot better to be around them.
My most prevalent symptoms now are hypersensitivity and sensory overload, and I hear things like Dina does. Most of the time, I’m just sort of enduring the noises people make. I thrive in job settings where I don’t have to interact with people and can use my creativity. My social skills are pretty good now, but that might be because I instinctively flirt with everyone because it makes me feel good and I can get away with it.
UGH though I’m not autistic (at least as far as I know??) I feel the “being hot and ND is a pain” thing so hard but, like, in a different way than you. I’m not a very social person and rarely ever interested in people the way they’re interested in me, most of the time I just want to mind my own business and not be perceived at all!!
it let does let me get away with a lot more because society is full of silly double standards like that—if most people perceive you as weird and unattractive you’re just a freak, but if you’re perceived as weird and hot? oh, just lovably quirky!! blgh. I’m not a fan of double standards, lol.
Thank you so much for sharing this, Suitora.
I myself am no stranger to that endurance of noises. 😖 And I also vie for a job, living where I can just have creative hyperfocus overdrivu with minimal interaction. There’s a reason I stay in this alien hoodie all the time. 😥
Not knowing whether or not someone is genuinely into you for your uniqueness like that must really suck. But given what you said about it in that second paragraph about being hot, would you say then that it’s a double-edged sword? I’m genuinely asking, just want clarification, no worries, no harm done just by asking I hope.
My diagnosis is dysgraphia — which is to say the form of dislexia where you can read just fine, thank you, but your handwriting is awful (having a palm pilot and using it religiously for like 6 years actually helped my handwriting a lot because I -had- to be able to consistently block print, even if my letters were definitely not a 1/1 match on the roman alphabet.
That said, basically everyone who knows me and knows from adhd thinks I have adhd. They’re likely not wrong (adhd was called add when I was in college and wasn’t getting diagnosed to college students, and after that I got enough coping mechanisms and rotes that I’ve never bothered getting an actual diagnosis); I hyperfocus hard, and have a lot of problems switching tasks to the ones I “should” be doing.
It did take me a long time to learn effective social skills (basically I learned them from trad SF fandom during college), but I never talked oddly (other than a nasal voice that I learned to recognize during college voice classes and trained out over the course of a year in my 20s; I did have an odd accent while I was working on that due to overcorrection but it was gone by the end of the year) or had difficulty (mostly) understanding other people.
I did tend to rage out a lot as a kid, which basically ended in my 20s when at some point I learned to mostly live in the moment and enjoy what I was doing most of the time (rather than spending too much time focusing on the past or the future). But I think rage moments are the more normal thing, and my current (and for the last decade or so) chill is the odd bit and comes from a lot of stuff, including a bit of self-taught Zen and also a lot of time spent reading.
In answer to your last comment in our thread last night, humans have a tendency to be REALLY cruel to outgroups, and come up with a lot of cognitive dissonance to justify that they DID have a good reason actually because they know deep down it’s shitty to mistreat those who are Different without good reason. Neurodivergence is a marker of Differentness, and if you have a diagnosis people don’t like being reminded that being cruel to the Weird Ones is actually pretty fucked up. Physical disability is also a reminder that the able-bodiedness ableds pride themselves over is inherently temporary and up to chance, and probably eventually comes back to fear of death. People REALLY don’t like that. Better to just… not think about us, if they can. How DARE we demand to make public spaces accessible?! That implies disabled people are PEOPLE. (Aaaaall my hate.)
As to what I like about my brain? (Not quite what you were going for on reflection but eh, want to close this one on a lighter note than THAT paragraph.) It’s FUN to be able to expound on what I like about a thing in detail, or to just use my very analytically-focused skills. I genuinely enjoy my ability to remember incredibly obscure details in a thing I’m passionate about. Special interests, in general, are just something I like having. Audio stimming’s fun, and I have a REALLY sharp ear and while that can get overwhelming it is a DELIGHT listening to music with headphones in. I sing by ear 90% of the time (not that I’ve sung much lately between the pandemic and the recent ‘yeah we’re all SERIOUSLY CONCERNED about your airflow due to Weird Issues’ from my doctors,) which can be a fun trick. Super fast reader and memorizer, too – I was among the first off-book when I did theater. (Once got called in last-minute to join a show on tech weekend from my high school director because a role wasn’t fillable and she knew I could learn the lines and blocking for like three scenes in a week.) Not something I have strong feelings about but hey, useful skills. And I care a lot about justice and doing good when I can, which are apparently negative traits when they’re found to be common in autistic people. (That particular study got a lot of ‘Shit Abled Scientists Say’ mockery when it started making the social media rounds. For obvious reasons. There are many ways to cope with a world that doesn’t accomodate us, but finding other people to look at This Bullshit and mutually go ‘can you fucking believe that?’ helps a lot.) My body might cause a lot of pain, and people may frequently suck about it, but I like being autistic. I like my brain, even when I have to doink it a bit to go to sleep or deal with its depressive-anxiety bullshit. If only out of spite for the people who do suck about it, sometimes.
Most of the people who were the shittiest to me in school are now very performatively inclusive on their social media.
“Oh there’s no excuse for treating a PERSON with AUTISM badly just because they’re different!”
Uh huh. But you’ve got no problem asking the weird kid who talks about the weather too damn much and moves weird out as a cruel prank, huh? Eat your own bullshit and call it cake because I sure won’t.
(I’m a little bitter and also don’t believe most of them have changed at all. With the exception of a few who’ve actually made amends and been accountable to me for past behavior).
They’re also very insistent on separating the person from the autism and I just roll my eyes because nope. I know some people do prefer that phrasing but at least 80% of the time if you actually, you know, talked to an autistic person? We’re gonna say ‘no, this is pretty intrinsic to our experience as humans, and it’s a less clunky phrase anyway.’
(It’s like ‘differently abled.’ Buddy, stop trying to avoid it. You’re just making it clearer you see disability as a negative trait. Pretty sure even the Deaf community, who are a recognized culture that considers deafness a totally valid way of existence and argue it is not a disability except how society does not accommodate for them, doesn’t like ‘differently abled’ as a blanket term. They usually go for Deaf or hard of hearing for themselves, because… you know, deafness is a perfectly valid condition and thus Deaf is a neutral adjective describing those with it. Neurodivergent communities likewise use ‘Neurodivergent’ or a specific diagnosis if necessary because, again, it’s not a dirty word to us. We can recognize that these are valid differences in human experience that should be celebrated and still come together under the disability rights banner when needed because we know society’s not built for us, and that in and of itself is disabling. People who use person-first will usually go for ‘people with disabilities,’ because even if they aren’t defined by it they still recognize it’s the kind of difference society doesn’t account for. Tiptoeing around the disability just annoys us more.)
In my teaching courses in college, in the too-brief time we talked about disability in school, the instructors talked about “the importance of person-first language” and all that, and I thought it was kind of a mess. I sent in several things countering the claim of “always use person-first language.” And then I had to drop out of college for a bit (unrelated), and retook the same course the next year, and it was the same…with a bonus slide thrown in of the sources I had sent in before. It just struck me as “so little work was done here” on the department end.
Also, I went to a college with a very highly rated teaching program, and the amount of attention given to disability in the classroom and the way it was talked about when it was brought up was just such bullshit.
Yeah, this can be REALLY tricky stuff, but realistically speaking, the people out there who we have to inform in order to make a difference for ourselves, the people who we have to spread awareness to en mass to make the world at least a little better for us, don’t have the time or energy to sort through to complex theories like this with lots of nuances and maybes, and depending on how we simplify messages to be more digestible to the neurotypicals so they can actually act on it in helpful ways in their day to day lives, depending on how it’s simplified it ends up helping some of us in some ways and hurting the rest in others.
Regalli, I really appreciate the work you and others do to make the world a more bearable place for disabled people such as myself, even though it might end up hurting me in some ways and helping in others because of my unique circumstances I find myself in, mind, body and otherwise.
I learned the hard way that in this crude world, in an unjust, indifferent universe that doesn’t care about anyone or anything, including itself, imperfect solutions are really all we have. But I definitely wish that those who come after me have it much less rough in the future, however we make that happen.
Sorry if that’s incoherent at all, I’m just really bad at expressing myself sometimes (neurodivergence!!!!!), but I hope you take no personal offense from it, and if you do, I definitely don’t mean it and I’m sorry in advance if anything you read in there causes you any stress. 🙏
God, the “person-first language” crowd are so obnoxious. No one with autism asked those people to speak for us, and if they had actually asked us, they’d know that we actually usually prefer “autistic person” or just don’t care. And as one blog I follow points out, if you need people to mangle the flow of their sentences in order to remind yourself that the person you’re talking about is, in fact, a person, that says a lot more about you than the people you’re correcting.
Sure, who doesn’t love rambling about themselves!
Got an ADD/ADHD diagnosis when I was young (1st grade?) but my parents, as former alcoholics, were and still are kind of against drug use, even prescription, especially any that meddle with the brain. Also, this memory is old enough that I’m not even sure it actually happened or if it’s a story I made up after the fact that fits. Learning how fallible memory is was pretty scary…
Quite likely that I fall somewhere on the spectrum, given things like aversion to bright lights, loud sounds, aversion to eye contact, hyperfixation on any new media series I dig into, poor posture, aversion to certain textures on my hands, etc. Not until high school or even into college that I started to understand how different I was and started looking into how and why. Of course, once I knew the different symptoms it was now impossible to objectively relay my own behavior to a professional without filtering it through that lens and effectively diagnosing myself, which is definitely something I’ve spent waaaaaaaaaaay too much time thinking about. You can chase yourself in circles FOREVER with that kind of thing.
Had a breakdown around junior year of college, when engineering classes actually started to get hard. Struggled through to senior year, rejected my parents nonsense ideas about mental health and treating the brain like it’s magic rather than another organ like a heart or lung, started seeing a psychiatrist, got meds, got a shitty customer service job to pay the bills, put myself through my last few classes with the money from that job, got an actual engineering job, had that for a few years until the company was bought out, passed my Professional Engineering exam recently, and just today had a fantastic interview at a great company!
There’s a lot of things I could say about my brain, such as “it’s a Ferrari, high performance, amazing reactions, breaks down constantly and spends more time in the garage than on the road”, or “(probably) ADHD, autistic, definitely depressed and maybe slightly bipolar/cyclothymic” but ultimately…
I got this one brain, and all of my attempts to return it for a refund/exchange have fallen on deaf ears. So I’ve had to work to make a functional version of myself that knows its own weaknesses and does its best to pave over them. I don’t naturally make eye contact but today during my interview I made TONS of eye contact because I forced myself to! I always have sunglasses in my car because I literally cannot drive on sunny days without them. I try to do work with headphones on and music so familiar to me that it is entirely background and not distracting. I have a Customer Service Face & Voice Package ™ that I developed, and it’s passable enough that I could be a project manager and interact directly with clients. Maybe today’s just one of my good days but I feel fucking awesome, like I took the little clown car I was given and strapped rockets to it and rode that fucker to the moon.
…whew that was a lot, ‘s been a while since I talked about most of that. Feels good to get it out.
Congratulations on your PE! Best of luck and skill with all the interviews. I am happy for you and your awesome day, internet stranger!
Technically not a PE yet, since I’m still short a few months of work experience, but definitely in the cards for this year and the exam is the hard part for sure. I appreciate it though! I like to imagine a happy story is a little like bailing out the overflowing dopamine with a bucket and sharing it with others.
This was a great post. Thanks for sharing your experience, and congratulations/good luck with the job!
Thank you for sharing!!!! Glad that me asking this led to you feeling good like that!!!! 😊😊😊
Re: “Professionals”, I’m so sorry to hear about that trouble you went through!!!! 😞
Regarding psych “professionals”, and their evaluations, they are a bongo and a half to work with a lot of the time, ESPECIALLY in regard to how they do diagnostics.
since there’s no way for a “professional” to test you for absolutely EVERY kind of condition you might have, they use THEIR intuition to narrow it down.
And, SURPRISE SURPRISE, they are often very much afflicted with bias, racial, sexual, gender or otherwise.
Re: Filtering it through THEIR lens, yeah I know very much how you feel, the feedback loop you get yourself into trying to work with the established oligopoly of labels made by “professionals” is just fucking AWFUL. 😖😖😖
I know some pre-built boxes like these work for SOME people, but I REALLY just want to emphasize the importance of having a system of description and exploring yourself that can work for ALL kinds of neurodivergents that can be potentially left out.
If you need a label that you can use to get government subsidies or accommodations in school to help you make ends meet in a broken ass capitalist system, that’s valid too!
RE: Diagnosis for SELF affirmation
But I think I should also mention that if you want a “professional” diagnosis JUST for the sake of having self-affirmation for the way you are and how difficult things went for you and your life in this crude world….
…. considering just how EXPENSIVE a diagnosis can be, and how many times you have to try over and over again to get JUST THE RIGHT ONE(S) in a faulty system, not only could it not even be worth the effort and time and money, but also this kind of cycle of “professional” diagnosis and re-diagnosis in and of itself is very well a kind of UNSTABLE ATTACHMENT.
What we’re trying to do here in this vicious cycle is get acknowledgement and affirmation from a whole system DELIBERATELY designed to oppress us. By valuing their acknowledgement and respect of our identity too much, we give them a hold over us.
TL;DR, “official” diagnosis just for the sake of affirmation from biased “professionals” isn’t worth the money or time, you’re better off getting that affirmation from friends, communities who see you as more than just another checklist they can cash on
Sorry if I wasn’t clear, but actually the professionals I’ve worked with were incredibly helpful and (combined with my states’ medical assistance, which I was on at the time, literally covering 100% of my medical costs) absolutely 100% saved my life during the difficult 5-7 years I glossed over in half a paragraph. I realize I was lucky as hell and a lot of people don’t have the good experiences I did, but it would be a disservice to those professionals if I left the impression otherwise.
“It doesn’t actually matter what I’ve got” was kind of the conclusion I came to in regards to a lot of this stuff, like it’s all just me and I’ve gotta make it work anyway regardless of what you call it. Cognitive behavioral therapy is more or less just that, it was focused on which behaviors *I* wanted to promote or stop, which helped sidestep a lot of the self-diagnostic whirlpool I tended to slip into. I was always a bit worried I could quite easily lead the doctor around by the nose, like hey I know this rubix cube is here for the ADD/ADHD people, I’m not going to pick it up during this appointment even though I want to, I’m going to make eye contact even though I don’t want to…but those behaviors are the kind of thing I would work on anyway if I did get a diagnosis, so if I can successfully control them during the appointment…mission accomplished?
A bit rambling, but it is a pretty sweet comeback to people that start complaining about welfare handouts and I’m just like “free government provided insurance absolutely saved my life”, give em the dead serious stare, no one has a response to that.
Wait, you’re just giving me permission to ramble about myself? Well, I can’t very well miss this opportunity!
*deep breath*
I was diagnosed (sort of, it’s complicated) with Autism when I was 7, so it’s been part of my identity for pretty much as long as I can remember. My parents always went out of their way to assure me that my brain didn’t work worse, just differently, though it’s taken me until the last couple of years to really start believing them.
I have moderate sensory issues, I can’t comfortably make eye contact for more than about a second at a time, I frequently walk on the balls of my feet, and I have a habit of thinking out loud. My communication skills aren’t the best – I frequently struggle to put my thoughts into words during conversation, and reading other people can be particularly difficult – but it’s something I’m working on. I also have pretty severe social anxiety, which makes it very difficult to make friends. Luckily, I have a very loving and supportive family, so I’m not lonely most of the time.
A lot of my special interests are games, I think because they always give me clear rules to follow and systems that can be meaningfully understood, which is especially nice in multiplayer games as the presence of those rules and systems makes the social dynamics much more accessible to me. Games are also one of the best ways to get me to sit still – I’m also ADHD, so trying to keep me in one place focusing on one thing for potentially hours is usually a doomed cause, but sit me down for a board game and I end up being the one corralling everyone else (like, yes, this ongoing conversation is undeniably fascinating, but I’m pretty sure it can wait until AFTER YOUR TURN!) I’m also really into a lot of cartoons and anime, I think at least partially because it’s a lot easier for me to read animated faces than actual live human ones.
I think that about covers the basics of who I am and how I relate to my neurodivergence. Hope this was helpful or enlightening or at least entertaining!
“yes, this ongoing conversation is undeniably fascinating, but I’m pretty sure it can wait until AFTER YOUR TURN!” my god what a mood, I feel that one for sure. That and the joy of games having clear rules and systems is so very me. Love it.
BIG AGREE on the animation thing. reading fiction always bores me and live action has to look REALLY COOL to keep me interested, but even mediocre animation will hold my attention. animation is the only medium that has ever made me cry or really feel anything, probably because the exaggerated expressions make it easier to understand and relate to
I never thought about that, but that might be the reason I mostly watch animated stuff, too!
Agreed, and they tend to take more care in ensuring you can tell people apart by hair color and clothes (especially when so many only have one or two outfits) so it’s way easier than the ‘which of these two similarly-aged blonde women is who?’ game where some live action directors assume face alone will make it distinct enough. But yeah, exaggerated emotions and the knowledge that every possible expression has INTENT behind it is also super helpful in my recognition.
Huh. As someone who’s been having the “wait am i autistic” conversation with itself lately but has never been diagnosed with anything, that sounds… very familiar.
Hello Wellerman! I’m usually a lurker here but come out of the shadows when disability stuff gets discussed because I spend a lot of time dealing with that (I’m ND and have Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome/MCAS).
On the ND front, I have generalized anxiety disorder, pretty well-managed depression, Inattentive Type ADHD, and Dyscalculia. The last 2 I was just diagnosed with last month and it’s made so many things make so much more sense. Looking forward to starting treatment (appointment to discuss medication is this week, fingers crossed!) and hopefully having a less chaotic brain finally.
I’m still learning a lot about this stuff so I don’t know what I’d describe as unique about mine. I generally describe it as having a brain that will not chill out. It’s like there’s a hurricane in my head. Constant static. I have most of the typical inattentive type issues like distractibility and hyper focus depending on the subject and my stress levels. Procrastination. I’m very very scatterbrained. I have trouble keeping accurate track of time (2 hours will pass and I’ll swear it’s been 10 minutes). I joke my brain feels like a pinball machine full of live bees. Sometimes I can spend hours on something, other times it’s like there’s a block and no matter how much I want or need to do something I just…can’t. And I forget things. A lot.
The dyscalculia is a little harder to describe. I don’t know if it’s the same for everyone. A lot of people say it’s like “dyslexia but for numbers” but for me it’s not an issue of mixing numbers up. It’s with processing them. I’ll read a math problem and it’s like I’m reading a foreign language. I recognize the numbers, I know what they mean, but I can’t make sense of how they relate. My husband tried to show me something related to our mortgage once and I literally did not understand what he was saying. It’s like my brain just can’t make sense of math. I can muddle through math with clear step by step visuals, but I’m slow at it. And I hate being asked to rate anything on a scale from 1-10. (1-3 I can do. There you’ve got a clear low, medium, and high.)
Oh I forgot my comfort foods: mashed potatoes and steamed artichokes with lemon garlic butter. Mmmmmm
It’s also been really fascinating to hear people describe their autism symptoms because there seems to be a lot of overlap with ADHD: hyperfixations/hyperfocus, some social struggles (in my case its due to distractibility rather than trouble reading emotional cues), a need for order at times to help soothe anxiety (I have a lot of food weirdness and other quirks), rambling…. XD
That’s really interesting with the math! For me it’s the opposite. I had this ‘advanced math explained for children’ book when I was in elementary school, and for the first time in my life, something *made sense*. Predictably. Although somehow, dealing with numbers rather than abstract concepts isn’t all that much my thing. Which seems to be surprisingly typical for actual mathematicians.
oh shit math not making sense has a name? there has just always been a point in which math stopped making sense and i could not explain why guess i have something to google now.
My autism did not affect my charm at all, so I hope one day to go and speak publically about Autism to groups of people and use myself as an example of, “If you’ve met one person with Autism, you’ve met one person with Autism”
I am both Autistic and ADHD plus several mental illnesses that may or may not be misdiagnoses or the result of growing up as undiagnosed Autistic. I started to realise I was Aut during a 1hr uni class on “childhood disorders” which prompted the reaction of [i]wait… isn’t it like that for everyone?[/i]. Followed by a few years of meeting tonnes of ND folk who were like “SAME HAT!!” and my psychologist telling me to also look into ADHD.
I have a lot of sensory stuff (more so tactile, sound or smell), have trouble picking up on social cues and timing, and big emotion regulation issues. My experience pre-DX was double plus ungood. I was over medicated, pushed into therapies (for trauma/anxiety) that traumatised me further, and was involuntarily hospitalised during what I now know was an Autistic meltdown.
One of the reasons I went so long without diagnosis is that my special interest is *drumroll* PEOPLE. Either specific people (in highschool I bordered on obsessional/stalking) or with people-related things. I studied (social) psychology, linguistics, body language, sociology, gender studies, everything. In school I had a notebook and literally wrote down everything about people, what they said, how they acted, I watched shows like Lie To Me, all so I could understand people and mask better.
I picked my current degree, social work, literally because it involves studying all aspects of being people. I also think Autistic people make great social workers because there’s such a massive emphasis on social justice, evidence based practice, critical thinking and reflexivity, and pattern-finding in the world. Unfortunately, it’s also super unaffirming field of study towards ND people because there’s still heaps of ableism in the content and how we’re taught to interact with people. Too bad for them I take the social justice thing very seriously and have started my unrelenting campaign for neurodiverse affirming practice to be centered.
Same hat re: special interests! I’m exceptionally good at languages and linguistics, dabbled in history and anthropology and psychology and the liberal arts, my obsessions mosttly revolve around creating elaborate worlds and characters… I just sort of assumed I was bad with people until I was a teenager and realized, hey, fuck what everyone else thinks, I can just learn this stuff.
And I did, and I have entered the wonderful if frustrating world of you know how native speakers of a language actually make bad teachers because they don’t know what they don’t know, I’m kind of a half-taught non-native language teacher for allism.
I do not have a diagnosis, but I have years of reading about things that sounded familiar, that I explained away as poor socialization or things like that. The poor socialization was because when people were mean to me I took that as a rejection and left, not knowing about frenemies and pecking order. That may be the best part though, because the people who became friends have been generally great people. Otherwise, fascination with spotting patterns in things like upholstery and ceiling popcorn and tile, kind of going into what I thought of as trances but could probably call disassociation, lots of getting fascinated with topics and especially making lists, and once noticing a numeric pattern and filling a little notebook with number combinations to see if the pattern held up. (It did.) Compulsive reader. Very good with animals.
I don’t have a diagnosis of any sort, so… I don’t really know if it’s my place, but here’s my story. My parents were strongly considering getting me tested for autism as a child. I was doing well enough in school and with friends that they eventually decided not to, since they were pretty sure the ‘accommodations’ would have done more harm than good.
Looking back, I think they were right, but I’m also not sure what the outcome of the testing would have been. My therapist has suggested I go for one. I didn’t want to, because insurance and new things and pandemic and if I don’t get a diagnosis what does that mean and if I do get a diagnosis what does that mean and aaaaaaaaaaaa. But maybe I’ll bring it up again with her.
It’s all about things that I don’t do, or have trouble with, or struggle with, so… I try not to fixate on it. Things like not knowing how to make eye contact – though I’m not sure if that’s innate or learned behavior – not knowing what faces mean what emotions – not wanting to try a new thing that I desperately want to do and know I’m going to enjoy – knowing the script for a new meeting, but never knowing what to do after that or how to get to know someone and make friends – saying things that are statements of fact as I see them and then spending a night figuring out why my SO is upset – having trouble with humor and sarcasm but having learned to play the straight man for long enough until I figure out or someone understands the joke – and it’s never so much that I can let myself think I might be not neurotypical?
I’m pretty lucky though. I was one of the weird kids in grade school. I found the other weird kids, and we became close friends. I had a great school experience, and I have my close friends, and we’ve been figuring out this whole adulting thing together since then.
Also: congee. Made with a chicken, and with a little ginger. Maybe a hundred-year egg if I can get one that I think is safe to eat.
not officially diagnosed, but considering it took 7 years of me not being able to see shit to get glasses and 13 years of crying myself to sleep every night to get a depression diagnosis, I’m not really surprised autism would be missed
I never knew anything about autism at all until I was 18ish. I found out my friend was autistic and decided to look up what it was. took me a very long time to understand because everything I read just made me go “I think that’s just what being normal is like”, BUT I GUESS NOT
I never had any friends until I was 16 and started lying to my parents that I’m totally not talking to people on the internet. I still have never made friends with anyone I didn’t meet online first. I always thought “well at least I don’t get bullied”, but then as an adult I’d hear about the ways other people got bullied and realize those things happened to me too. I didn’t realize they were trying to be mean to me, I just thought everyone at school was kind of weird
for me dating has always been easier than making friends because when you’re dating someone, there’s usually a point where you both verbally agree that you are dating. I have no idea how to tell if I’m friends with someone unless we do things outside of work/school. also the expectations of what’s generally acceptable between partners culturally seems a lot more defined than with friends. I can generally trust that someone I’m dating should be okay to physically touch and share emotions with and stuff, but there are no “general baseline boundaries” with friends. it also helps that I’m cute I guess, otherwise I’d be screwed
food is a big problem because I’m a picky eater and I hate so many textures. veggies are the worst because they combine the worst texture (plants) with a bitter taste that nobody else seems to notice. I’ve had veggies made “the good way”, but they still always just taste gross and bitter, but now with seasonings trying to hide it. I also tend to forget what food I like so I struggle to think of what groceries to buy. then I run out of food and just subsist on milk for a day or two. thank god I work in a grocery store so I have a lot of opportunities to buy food once I think of something. also I keep my nails long so I can use them to do a lot of things instead of having to touch stuff with my finger tips. I HATE modern touch screens that only work with your fingers. I’d much rather have the older style that the DS & 3DS use even if it means no multi-touch input
I used to try very hard to play pretend as a kid because that’s a game you’re “supposed” to play, but I never really got it. how do I know what to say?? how do I know what to do?? my mom says it was always hard trying to play pretend with me because I never really knew what I wanted to do. ultimately just setting up my toys in nice scenes was more fun than acting anything out. I think it finally clicked for me a year ago when I realized that improv is pretend for adults. the rules of improv really made me get it
as a kid I thought there was like an unspoken rulebook on how to be cool and you learned the rules by studying other cool people and learning from them and I was always seeking out ways to learn this information. apparently that’s not a thing most people believe?
I could go on about this stuff for hours but yeah those are some of the main things that stick out in my head
Wait that’s NOT how ppl figure out how to be cool?
I think technically it is but they don’t think it’s like This Whole Thing that you gotta do. like most people just like do it without thinking much about it, rather than thinking “surely there must be a book or something where someone wrote down the unwritten rules”
which is why I took “a girl’s guide to growing up” out from the library long before I otherwise would’ve learned what puberty was
I frequently discuss with my therapist the inadequacy of contemporary mental health and development labels. My slate says depression, ADHD, and agoraphobia, but I strongly suspect that the enormous variability among people who carry these labels w/r/t response to medication (and other things) means these are several disparate conditions, mistakenly lumped together. When our understanding of the human brain grows, future humans will look back at today’s categorizations as being embarrassingly wrong.
But maybe I’m full of it.
No, you’re completely right. A lot of this stuff is still in the “box of symptoms” stage of understanding, where we’re just observing a pattern of things that often occur together without knowing much at all about why.
So the only real value in seeing these patterns is also developing patterns of treatments/skills/coping mechanisms that have high success rates, at least as of yet.
And a lot of these patterns can just look coincidentally the same, with different underlying mechanisms, I think. Pretty sure there are different types of depression, at least, with different neurotransmitters being the issue, and different causes…
@ Hazel, Deathjavu, Masumi,
YES YES YES to ALL of this!!!!! THANK YOU!!!!
🥹🥹🥹 🥹🥹🥹
We understand SO LITTLE about how the brain works, the best many “professionals” can do is little better than a blind guess, ergo finding out how our own brains work is a very personal journey and not an easy one if that.
But frankly, having some better tools for understanding ourselves and ideally for others to understand us would REALLY help.
To add to what you all already said (THANK YOU AGAIN), I can tell from personal experience that this “boxing of symptoms” paradigm is intrinsically flawed because it will either
1. exclude neurodivergent stripes and combinations of them that don’t quite belong in any one of the categories even tho they matter just as much (such as aphantasia, the inabilitiy to form mental pictures), or
2. will have those stripes lumped in with a million other things yourself and others are just too tempted to assume about you.
I guess just writing about our quirkiness like all this and having caring communities take the time to read it works for the time being, at least as aids in our personal journeys to understand ourselves.
I was called “strange” and “too smart for his own good” growing up during the ’60s and ’70s, well before they had diagnoses for things like ADHD or autism. And my life was a nightmare because we moved so often because my dad was military intelligence and we had to go where the radio signals bounced off the ionosphere. It was like a personal warzone because the townies would gang up on the military brats who didn’t know each other and generally couldn’t gang up for self-protection because of that. Add getting caught in a shooting war at one point because the locals couldn’t agree on the form of their government, right before I went through registering for 4 schools but only staying around long enough to attend 2 of them (long story). Somewhere along the line I got PTSD about 20 years before it was a diagnosis, which because they didn’t know what it was or that kids could get it turned into depression about 50 years ago, which turned into something illegal, which got me 5 years in prison about 40 years ago, and it’s a miracle I survived until the ’90s. Then I got killed in ’01 with the brain damage on top of the existing psychological issues, plus what may be hallucinations caused by all the sh*t my brain has been through because I’m not sure what’s real and what my mind has made up to get me through my life.
And now I’m in my 60s and on top of everything else my hips and knees are not functioning to tolerances much less design specifications and it looks like they’ve reached wear limits but I don’t have the $$ to replace them because ‘Merica decided I don’t really need health care. I’m an unkillable badass, but it’s more of the too cranky to die than the T-1000 can’t be killed.
ADHD in particular definitely kinda has this problem, where it’s essentially at least two separate disorders with a few overlapping symptoms, but it all gets lumped under “ADHD” and then given some sub-labels as an afterthought.
Reading today’s comment section is really nice. Makes me feel not alone. Reminds me that, while I might be currently all out of friends, there are lots of people out there who think in similar ways as me.
I wish we could all have a board game party together 😀
We could, theoretically! Table top simulator is a thing that exists.
But yeah, if you couldn’t tell by the dozen or so posts, I agree today’s comment section is pretty great. Thanks Wellerman.
You’re welcome!!!
Also, THANK YOU ALL for your participation in this!
It’s just so affirming to me, seeing that spite people wanting to shove us all under a single umbrella word connected to so much baggage,
that there’s much more than meets the eye
between our personalities and our quirks,
the things we need help with and the things we are extra good at
we’re all just so…. DIVERSE.
In fact I see it as a kind of irony.
The neurotypicals in power give us so few categories to shove ourselves into, giving the ILLUSION that you can expect more or less the same from all of us
when in reality, all our brains, seen alongside each other in this beautiful mosaic, display even MORE diversity than the whole of the human species
🥹🥹🥹
hence, Neuro-DIVERSITY!!!! 😆😆😆
First off, currently recovering from major surgery and having autism is a perfect storm of overstimulation and over-exertion.
I was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, but I got rediagnosed with Autism Proper, and honestly, it’s for the best as Asperger’s has a ton of Nazi connections and it just got to the point where, socially and progressively, nobody really wanted to say they had AS anymore.
Looking people in the eyes for a long-ish period of time is hard. Hugging people is an on-off switch, and it gets incredibly annoying when relatives forgo a handshake in order to hug me.
I like being social but at the same time don’t.
Certain fabrics are better for me than others.
I really, really have a hard time explaining things to others and often don’t understand for days or even years what others mean or why they do what they do.
oooooo! Sorry to hear about that overstim, that must be so hard!!!! 😣😣😣
yeah, I’m very much that way about hugging people too, and I absolutely HATE it when people do it without consent and call me “autistic” and a “mental disorder” and wrong for refusing,
the way I am about hugging is NOT a mental disorder, not always part of “autism” (however you define it), it is NOT part of my neurodivergence, it’s just the way I personally am, and anyone who says otherwise can eat a double-decker manure and battery acid sandwich with plutonium flakes on top
I’ve never been diagnosed. It wouldn’t surprise me if I were, though. I feel like I have to read something half a dozen times to make sure I got the meaning of something correctly. Distressingly, a lot of times when I read or hear something, even after going over it several times, I’ll still get the opposite meaning than intended. When talking to others, I’ve often found myself desperately searching for the right word. Sometimes, my best-fit works, but sometimes it’s the opposite, or, weirdly, completely unrelated. This is a non-insignificant reason I find myself not talking in social situations. This also comes up in written texts, and I used to use asterisks around words to indicate the best-fit, but I’ve realized I use it for emphasis on words, too. I’m unsure what to use in its stead.
If I hear about something I hate, I end up obsessing over it for days at a time. It becomes part of my mental background somewhere around three days, or at least three sleep cycles. It can rear its head again in a different permutation, but *usually* (emphasis), not always, it’s not as strong the next time around. I’ve been learning to mitigate of its effects on me, but sometimes that *results* (best fit) in me simply withdrawing from whatever it was that bothered me.
Not much of a fan of food in general. Having either a very weak sense of smell (dysnosmia) or no sense of smell (anosmia) from birth probably has a hand in that. I only really notice sweet, salty, bitter, sour, savory, and texture. Most food has a deeply unpleasant texture. I’ve never stated it out loud to anyone before now, but any food that doesn’t have a deeply unpleasant texture I call SafeFood.
It didn’t occur to me until reading above that this could be a symptom, but I can’t sleep still to save my life. I’ve found myself in many odd positions when I wake up, without the slightest idea how I got there. At least one of those times made me fall out of the top bunk of a bunkbed.
A hobby I’ve enjoyed for some time is driving, specifically exploring new roads and mapping them to my internal map. If there’s a road that I haven’t driven on, and I pass it by, I can this little twitch in my head that doesn’t like to go away unless I’ve done so. On the positive, my internal map is very developed. On the negative, it needs to be updated periodically, which makes the project effectively endless.
I’m pretty sure there’s more, but as I’m writing this, I’m getting progressively more uncomfortable explaining in greater detail.
Food textures reminded me of mochi. It’s SO GOOD. They don’t even taste like much, but I love touching them and chewing them. So soft. Have you tried those?
I’ve never had it. I’d be willing to try it on a day when my preconceived notion of what its texture is like didn’t overwhelm me.
It’s like boobs, but better XD
You have my attention. 👀
“Safe foods” is actually literally a term the community uses. 😀
Wait, seriously? Used in the same context as well?
Thank you for sharing Chronos!!!! BTW LOVE that name!!! 😊
Re: your unique neurodivergent stripes, I must say I ESPECIALLY relate to your hobby about roads and maps, because the relationship you have with it really reminds me a LOT about my relationship with science. Like, when there’s a new science video on youtube I just pass by, I remind myself that I don’t have the spoons to really absorb it all, even though I want to, so I just add it to my infinite backlog of things I want to learn and have to constantly update, and all in all I hope I get my spoons back for a thing like this one day but in the meantime all those itches in my head persist and it’s AGONY 😖
Re: hate obsession in mental background, I have this too, believe me you are NOT alone
Re: Struggling to find the right words, BRUH, all this, ME TOO.
In fact just a bit earlier StClair actually just introduced a system of bracketing with selections of (words/concepts/ideas) that I think would make communication MUCH better for those of us this these particular language-related stripes, but for ALL kinds of humans living on the multicultrual frontier!
AAAAHHH!!! SO EXCITED!!! Great to meet you!!! 😆😆😆
I’ve never been diagnosed but reading up on aspergers when I was 19 or so gave me some really helpful ways to frame the way I think (and the way I think about other people and they might think about me).
I was the queen of “um actually” as a kid and I still have to fight the tendency if i hear something *wrong*.
Saaaaaame! I can deal with ‘something wrong’ now, but if someone had all the info yet draws an illogical conclusion I implode.
I once met a flat earther. It was… interesting.
adhd/bipolar ii is a fun combo because my hypomanic periods would basically treat my adhd like adderall does now- ie provide enough stimulation to my brain decreasing my executive dysfunction and inattentiveness so every once and a while i would be able to just… do shit. however when the hypomania started to taper off so to then would my ability to do shit which would trigger a depressive episode. a weirdly unexpected side effect of having meds now is my hypomania is more intense, and while it thus far has not progressed into full blown mania when it mixes with hyperfixation i feel like a potoo bird looks BUT i have fewer depressive episodes because the hypomania episodes are more “I have spent 20 of the last 24 hrs writing and i will sleep when i have exhausted mankinds supply of words” and less “oh hey i’m hungry i think i’ll fry an egg” so the come down is more “im very tired good night” and less “i am a worthless lazy toad who cannot be assed to get myself food why do i bother”.
i had a lot of friends as a kid- ive always been super outgoing and charismatic but i didn’t really want to hang out with “normal” kids so often i would just walk up to weird quiet kids i felt a vibe with and ask if they like [insert thing i really liked] here and if they said yes they were my friend now. this is a weirdly effective friendship tactic.
generally speaking i like my brain, its a little wonky sometimes but i wouldn’t give up all the fun weird bits for all the functioning executives in the world.
as a weird quiet kid, I appreciate you so much and also wish that my high school had someone like you
Also my comfort food is currently homemade vegetarian banh mi ( but at a base level it’s a simple vegetable soup with celery, carrots,leeks and tomatoes )
As I’ve said, I’m autistic. I was diagnosed when I was 3 because i was nonverbal(they thought I was deaf before they figured it out) had various language lessons that I feel weird about. I like talking but also don’t know if I like that it was forced I guess?
Anyhoo, I was bullied and isolated yadayada and devoted various mental illnesses. The main stuff is depression, anxiety and a mood disorder. I then realised last year that I was also adhd and have started medication for that.
My autistic experience mostly feels like I have all these thoughts and feelings that are not being listened to, I feel like I’m on one side of a canyon and I can’t reach the other side even when I scream. But also I’ve realised it’s because there are ways I think about the world that not everyone does. I value my interests and know they are a part of what keeps us all alive, I value justice and truth in a way that I see others struggle to state. Autism doesn’t automatically mean morally better but I think the structure of mine at least has helped me get to that place easier.
Although I’m Australian I’ve never felt a deep connection to my culture to the point of my accent being very obviously influenced by my media diet, and while I used to feel embarrassed about it, I now have pride that I don’t sound like I’m from around here.
I also feel like My experience with understanding autism has made understanding other experiences easier.
oh hey, I also have no cares about my local culture. Not Canada as a whole, and especially not the yeehaw pocket of it I was born in. But totally cool with the culture formulated from the games and shows I grew up on
I don’t know if I’ve ever thought about the uniqueness of my neurodiversity before.
Alright, so I’m aphantasic. If you’re not familiar with that term, brain no can imagine picture. (Yes, I struggle to see in dreams, it’s actually resulted in a couple nightmares related to lights not working the way they should). But I do have sound imagination. There is constantly music or dialogue going in my brain. Sometimes I need to toss on youtube videos to drown it out, sometimes I need absolute silence to let it run its course. Despite that, thought buffering still a thing.
I make noises, and I’m highly kinesthetic. Which is to say I stim. Never thought of it until well after I knew about stim toys. Stim toys are garbage for me tho, I need more. I took apart pens in high school. Fidget cubes don’t come apart, they just have a couple of moving parts, my old phones’ battery covers gave more stimulatin than them (rip those covers).
Not diagnosed officially. But in the age of today’s short videos and twitter, I’ve seen many people talking about their experiences with both ADHD and autism. Sometimes it’s nonsense, sometimes I respond with “what do you mean that’s not normal?”
One instagram guy is on point constantly. He’s diagnosed with both. If the effects of one neutralize the effects of the other, me having both would make sense of the times I don’t relate to people’s experiences with either. I mentioned getting a diagnosis appointment with my physician. That hasn’t happened yet.
Identity wise it has manifested in me having no idea what the fuck gender is supposed to be. It’s all made up why are people playing along with it? Just do what you wanna do, what you really really want. You wanna be pretty, be pretty, you wanna be stronk, be stronk, you wanna be an asshole, reconsider your life.
Uhhhhh, hopefully that paints a unique enough picture. Is getting pretty long. Oversharing, y’know?
My comfort foods are pastries. Fucking love fruit danishes. Pastries of any sort are expensive up here. Japan was a blessed ground for that, I miss melonpan.
Oh right I wanted to mention over-stimulation too, I don’t get any like pain or anything like that, I just get majorly fatigued. Malls suck for that. In social gatherings I’ll retreat into my phone, ipod, or handheld gaming for a bit. Arcades also suck but like abrasively. Malls just wear me down, arcades shove cotton into my skull and act like they’re a fun time for it. They’re not
“what the fuck gender is supposed to be, all made up why people playing along, do what you want to do, what you really really want”
😍😍😍 LOVE THAT.
Thank you Kazuma, your contribution to the Neurodivergent Mosaic is very much appreciated!!! 🥹
I have ADD. When i was young I would just stare out the window and then realize the blackboard was full of words that I hadn’t written when the teacher said class was over. My desk was easy to spot. It was the only desk where the teacher just told me to put everything in a neat pile. Dexedrine was eventually the medicine that worked the best. When I was in high school my father said I was taking too much medication and I just needed to deal with it.
My apartment is a dumpster fire and I am constantly losing and forgetting things. My boss is not happythat I am constantly late. But hey, no medication!
I seem to be the opposite of a lot of people here. With the exception of onions I will shove just about anything in my pie-hole.
Thanks Max, for contributing to the Neurodivergent Mosaic!!!!!
I’m sorry to hear that, if you need Dexedrine to make things better, best wishes to you getting it soon!!!!!
Also, LOVE your alias and avatar!!!! Whenever I see Max Tate from Beyblade, I always think about and get hungry for mustard and noodles, mac and cheese. 😋
Thanks for sharing!!!!! Nice to get to know you better!!!!
Autistic with ADHD and dysautonomia (aka neurovegetative dystonia). Being without my stimulant medication frequently feels like my thoughts are made of slippery jello, and my body weighs a ton of very achey and crunchy rocks. My comfort AND same food is pasta with handmade tomate sauce.
I find others tend to word things better than I, so instead of trying to re-say what’s already been said let me link a tweet thread that resonated unexpectedly strongly with me : relationship degradation mechanics relating to the passage of time simply don’t happen very much for me.
https://twitter.com/soy_miruku/status/1461501742420414473?s=21&t=ougacbUFFx8TLad4k95IHw
It’s been suggested by many people, including my family, that I may have autism. Rarely in a derogatory way, at least to my face. It has always been clear that I’m neurodivergent in some way. I guess when I was a kid they tried to get me diagnosed for ADD, but I have never had trouble focusing on tasks. If anything I tend to focus too much on what I’m doing.
People often like me I guess. I picked up a lot of social skills in college. I also used LSD regularly for years which I think may have helped. I have no trouble looking into peoples eyes the normal amount and social situations are rarely overwhelming or anxiety-inducing any more (although crowded/noisy rooms are). Only a few times have people been really cruel to me for my perceived autism.
I like it best when people don’t dance around the topic of my unusual personality. People tend to treat me like a child when they do this, and if I’m accidentally rude it can create static. I’m comfortable with being unusual and it makes for good jokes sometimes.
I am uninterested in trying to get a diagnosis and I don’t identify as autistic. I just don’t see the benefit to it.
Also, when I was a kid/teenager I would sometimes get bullied but it didn’t bother me very much. I think I wasn’t a good target because I would barely react.
Thank you SO MUCH for sharing Bongjovi!!!! 😊
Woah, LSD? Cool, really glad to hear that helped you! 🤩 #LegalizeIt
Re: Treating you like a child, RIGHT??!?!
I might not know much about your “unusual” personality, but I’d LOVE to learn about it.
Whatever it’s like, it definitely DOESN’T make you a child, any more than mine makes me seem like that.
Also, totally on board with you not identifying as “autistic”, I’m a neurodivergent who doesn’t like that label either, wish for better ways to describe my neurodivergent stripes
What would you like people to call you? If you don’t know yet, that’s OK too!
>I might not know much about your “unusual” personality, but I’d LOVE to learn about it.
Well, for sensory things, I definitely stim in a few ways, and if I’m in a crowded room with lots of people talking I have trouble filtering it out. I’m socially capable in most situations, although I often let others do the talking.
I *love* wordplay and I make jokes all the time that are only funny to me. But I also try to develop a patter with my friends, so we can always joke and have conversations. Some people there’s chemistry other people not.
I tend to obsess over mathematics. It’s where I have found the most community too. I think that if you interviewed the professors at a typical research university you would find at least 50% of them are atypical in some way. The office manager at my current university is a real champ for dealing with all the eccentricity in that building LMAO.
>What would you like people to call you?
I don’t know! I don’t have a problem with “autistic” but I almost never hear that word used without a lot of baggage that I could do without. I like “eccentric” because it doesn’t make it sound pathological, and also just feels more descriptive.
*I think that if you interviewed the math professors at a typical research university you would find at least 50% of them are atypical in some way.
The typo may also be true but I have less direct experience with universities at large. It seems to me that the more esoteric and cash-poor a discipline is, the more it’s filled with odd people.
Kk. My brain runs at 1/3rd of average, but thoughts come into it about 1.8 – 2.0 GHz. I cannot get bored; the brain just plays a memory, or a scenario for a story/novel/play/other, and just does that until a person comes along to talk to. I’ll talk to anyone, sometimes if they want me to or not. I have trouble with introverts.
Owing to about 50 years of mantric meditation, and yoga, my physical body is somewhat still and calm in the outside. So I pass for “Average.” I’m not. On my first school eval. in third grade I scored reading/verbal skills 98.2% against my peers. I scored 7.5% on math skills.
My first half a century was, “Look, you’re really really smart. You just need to try harder.” No, just No! I was trying as hard as I could, my brain just doesn’t do complex math or algebra. Geometry, sure, arithmetic yah, maybe; but algebra no, very no, hard no. It’s possibly fetal-alcohol syndrome, or just genetic random, but my brain runs in a linear fashion, at 2 gigHz. and might look at something and go, “Okay; a, b, c, oh! I see. Then x, y, and Z, I got it! I understand this now!
Other times it steps through the whole alphabet one letter at a time with glacial slowness, running out on side thoughts and tangents, but I get it.. eventually, I get it. Y, … Z, I got it! I understand this now!
I really get words, but show me a diagram, and I got the whole thing in the brain at once. For me, my physical world is a map. Second time I drive to a location I have the route and landmarks memorized.
Odd thing: I have trouble knowing which letters come before or after others in the alphabet. I have to use the alphabet song, to be sure. And 8 year old me had to have a high school student tutor me to learn the times tables. Took me FOR EVER. ADHD meds have helped me a LOT with focus and impul … hey! That’s a squirrel! Look! What was the question?
Oh, okay, I actually feel a bit better about the doctor suggesting she might have autism based off personal experience with her own daughter.
Maybe if the daughter is around Joyce’s age we’ll get to meet her someday
We wanna take bets that her daughter is Dina?
I don’t recommend putting money down considering we’ve met Dina’s parents.
Man, I think yesterday someone here gave a personal story that was just like this.
One person gave the exact one, but a couple of us had similar ‘autistics and people close enough to see us unmasked/low-masked-because-the-mask-is-instinctual ping us from a mile away’ stories. There’s a decent number of quirks that are REALLY common but aren’t ‘stereotypical’ as such, and so your gait or vocal cadence or something that’s JUUST shy of infodumping tends to give off Cousin Vibes.
*Almost* exact – unlike Joyce, I’d already known I was autistic at that point for decades. I figured it out when I was 15 and read an article about Darius McCollum. He and I are pretty much nothing alike other than a. living in NYC and b. being autistic, but still – that article rang some pretty loud bells.
Also, how he’s been treated is an absolute travesty.
I haven’t told them yet, but after coming to terms with it myself, I think both of my parents are neurodiverse. Makes me think there’s some form of genetic primers to it because my brother and I seem to have it hella bad in completely different ways, and I think it’s because we inherited a different mix from our parents and then put our own spins on it (y’know, nature /and/ nurture).
But yeah, it’s basically exactly that. They’ll do some sort of quirk that I just ping out and go “aw hell, that’s nd as hell”
Yuuup, patrons reading that yesterday and trying not to give it away, but those people got it in one! I guess it shows that Willis knows his stuff, writing exactly the experience that others have had.
Ayyup.
so wait if Joyce is actually autistic does that apply to Walkyverse Joyce as well?
I mean, Joyce is Joyce.
Sadly, the whole “aliens stole my memories” thing might actually be a bigger deal and prevent her from being properly diagnosed. A lot of strips read very differently now that we have a picture of her horrific homelife.
I mean, Walkyverse Joyce’s parents were a lot less horrible than the ones here, ye?
Ya, Joyce’s sister had actually come out and no one seemed to have an issue with it in that universe
I would assume it crosses over, same as sexuality – Dina listed neurodivergence specifically when she returned at the end of Shortpacked as something to avoid (which she accidentally filled) to prevent excess diversity breaking reality, as quote, ‘she had time to figure things out’ while she was off-camera there.
Wouldn’t autism by itself count as neurodivergence without taking Dina’s sexuality into account as well?
I read as two distinct types of diversity.
1. Orientation
2. Neurodivergence
Dina happens to be in the overlap of those circles in DOA.
Oh, yes, the joke was she fit ALL categories listed (the other two were non-white and non-male, in addition to non-heteronormative and neurodivergent.) ‘Sexuality and gender identity crosses over across universes’ is one of the rules of the Dumbiverse/Walkyverse thing (started with ‘yes, this Ethan is in fact gay, stop asking,’ is now ‘retroactively Walkyverse Danny is bi and Walkyverse Malaya transcends gender’ among other things like Jocelyne getting retconned into the Walkyverse,) which is why I brought it up: No reason to believe neurotype isn’t another factor that’d cross universes.
https://www.shortpacked.com/comic/my-name-is-dina-sarazu
Ah ok.
Speaking of stuff crossing over, I remember Willis saying that character pairings from the walkyverse wouldn’t repeat in DOA but after the end of shortpacked he said that dina and becky get together in the walkyverse too.
Ruth/Billie. Danny/Sal. The Squad 48 polycule. I think it’s not that no pairing will be repeated, but that the ones that were already thoroughly explored in the Walkyverse don’t need to be rehashed here. We’re not going to see Joyce/Walky or Danny/Billie or Joe/Rachel. But Walkyverse Dina/Becky only got a few strips After the End.
Wait did Willis confirm that the Squadron 48 polycule is a thing in DOA too?
Absent Marcie (because I don’t think she knows them) and Guns (because she will not be appearing in this comic), yeah.
I wonder if 2 other girls we’ve seen in DOA replaced them in the polycule.
So that seems to have been basically ‘I won’t repeat a dynamic I already feel I’ve explored as much as I can.’ Jason and Sal hooked up and had that relationship’s dysfunction explored in-depth in early DoA, as did Ruth/Billie, presumably because Willis felt he could do more with them than had been explored in the Walkyverse. Dorothy/Walky was originally a thing in the Walkyverse, it’s just that it was always the ship that wouldn’t sail because Dorothy was created for Joyce & Walky, And of course now Danny/Sal is happening again, but with a RADICALLY different dynamic than they had in the Walkyverse. I think it primarily existed to say ‘no, Joyce/Walky has been explored as a ship as much as it can be, let’s do something else.’ Ditto Billie/Danny, and in the pre-Shortpacked ending days Amber/Mike. I think the idea was just that these people aren’t DESTINED to be together, soul mates aren’t really a thing in the greater Willisverse, because it’s more fun to be able to shake up the box of action figures and see how they play off each other this time. (Note that Joe being totally in love with Joyce has been a thing since It’s Walky. It’s a well-trodden dynamic, but Willis likes playing with it still and they’ve never gotten together for real yet except in the Nowalkyverse. Does that make it endgame? Not necessarily! Endgame isn’t real here.)
So Dina/Becky sailing in the Walkyverse after it ended was fine because it would never be explored in the Walkyverse in detail, DoA will always be the place where their relationship matters. It’s just a really fun idea to play with in an April Fool’s strip or two and some one-off art. It’s not that they CAN’T repeat, it’s that they’ll only repeat if Willis thinks there’s something he wants to do with them, new or not. Same characters, different scenarios.
Dina can’t be *four* things, that’s like Hush and it’s preposterous!
Somehow those shortpacked ending comics still relevant to the handful of people crying about tokenism in yesterday’s comments. Although admittedly it’s funny that the author had already finished dunking on them years before they even posted.
I mean, what was Shortpacked but dunking on entitled nerds like those whining about diversity, and what better ending than an endless horde of identical white vaguely sploogelike entities being fought by a diverse group of nerds carving out a space for themselves in fandom, forever?
I think the message got kind of muddled by the fact that adding the extra diversity did, in fact, fuck up the world by summoning the soggies.
I mean, on one level, yes, but I think the idea that there will always be shitty takes whining about our existence but there’ll always be someone to fight them still works for me.
I mean it’s an apt metaphor. The more visible diversity you have, the more angry bigoted people who hate diversity tend to come loudly out of the woodwork.
“I don’t hate people who are different from me, I just turn into a frothing chimp the second I’m made even vaguely aware of their existence, no matter how fleeting.” – Probably lots of Those Sort
all those clenched sphincters…
I don’t know if it’s a 1-for-1. Walkyverse Joyce had similar issues with personal boundaries, but she also exhibited less obviously neurodivergent behaviour like food touching or fidgeting (Walky got most of the latter).
Her upbringing was also different – she wasn’t as obviously religious, she had five siblings instead of three, she didn’t have Becky, etc.
Last I checked, Other Joyce also was friendly with her mother and said mother was happy she was marrying Walky.
Whereas DoA Mom probably would have freaked the hell out over the fact Walky was one of….[insert description of THEM].
Could just be the passage of time.
Naomi was a LOT more chill about Ethan being gay in the Walkyverse.
I believe Willis said somewhere that Walkyverse Naomi was cooler with it because that version of Ethan didn’t realize he was gay until he was in his late twenties, by which point his parents were already pretty sure anyway.
On the other hand, she also said that after 35 years in which Ethan had never brought anyone home, she would’ve been happy with him bringing home a chihuahua, so there were still some not-so-great undertones to her.
Less the chihuahua and more the decorative pillow.
Dina doing a lot of watching in the background and it makes me wonder if this is a rare glimpse at what she’s up to when people can’t roll a high enough perception check.
Probably.
I’m fairly certain, most people roll a high enough perception check 5% of the time.
…Unless you’re using 3D6 rules instead of D20 rules…
GURPS is always on the table somewhere….
20s aren’t automatic successes on skill checks. I played a rogue for a while where it was literally impossible for our paladin to roll a high enough Perception check to beat my Stealth check. Or a high enough Sense Motive to beat my Bluff.
Help an old guy out. What does “roll a high enough perception check” mean? It doesn’t seem to be standard English.
It’s just a dungeons and dragons reference. Dina naturally goes unnoticed. This translates in dnd to her having a high stealth stat. You can counter those hiding or with high stealth with perception stat which you usually roll for known as a check. Too low and you don’t notice the person. This isn’t just for stealth but essentially any action can have a roll check, strength, wisdom, intelligence, faith, ect.
Thanks for the info.
It’s a game reference – Dungeons and Dragons, usually – where you play a character who has various numbers assigned to various attributes such as perception – and you roll a die to see if your perception value allows you to understand the situation as it actually is, or if you only see/hear/perceive the surface of what’s going on, or miss something entirely.
It’s a reference to tabletop Role Playing Games, such as the classic Dungeons and Dragons, or the less-known GURPS.
You decide on a character, and choose numerical stats for your character. Whenever your character has to do something, you generally roll some dice and determine whether or not you succeed based on how well the die roll. In some games, you add the dice roll to your stat, in others, you roll a number of dice equal to your stat. In DnD, in particular, (to spoil my own joke), a 1, on a D20 is an automatic failure, no matter how good you are, and a 20 is an automatic success, no matter how bad you are.
Oftentimes, these rolls are “contested”. She’s trying to hide, and you roll to find her, you roll D20, add the number for your perception, and hope you get a high enough number, (or a 20), to spot her. She rolls D20, adds the number for her hide skill, and hopes she gets a high enough number to stay hidden.
In some games, to generate a more realistic curve, you roll 3 dice, generally six siders, (hence 3D6), and sum the numbers. You get a pretty decent bell curve that way. A 3, or 18, only comes up about once every 216 times, or less than half a percent, (as opposed to the flat 5% for any D20 roll), while a 10 or 11 are quite common at the top of the curve, at about 12.5% of the time, each. (If you only need to roll a 10 to succeed, then you’re going to succeed about 5 out of 8 rolls).
Incidentally, I did some playing around a few months back, and found that rolling 3 D20’s, and taking the middle, gives a similar bell-like curve, but has the advantage that you can keep using DnD difficulty charts, without modification. D20 still is an automatic success, but you have to get 2 of them, and D1 is an automatic failure, but again, you have to get 2 of them.
DnD already did something similar once, when they had you roll 4 D6’s, and sum the best 3.
Re: perception check.
Imagine a scale of 1-30. At 1, your ability to notice things that might be happening around you is so poor that you could walk into traffic and not notice the truck bearing down on you at 80MPH until your entire body was reduced to spaghetti. At 30, you could be lying in the middle of a forest with your eyes closed, and by simply putting up your ear and listening, you are able to determine whether the kittens in the rabbit warren fifty feet off are ready to leave their burrow for the first time. You are simply that in tune with your surroundings!
Ability checks (such as a perception check) in Dungeons and Dragons are dice-based random rolls, but the outcomes of the dice rolls are stacked on top of existing character stats. A character can have a zero (or even minus) bonus to an ability check, or they can have a very high bonus. High ability bonuses usually mean you win your ability checks, even if you roll badly. (Low ability bonuses are more of a mixed bag, since you can roll very high on a dice roll and still do well, without any help). Under 10 is generally not good; between 10 and 20 is mixed, depending on what your ability is being checked against; if your ability check is over 20 and you fail it, you get to angrily interrogate your DM about what this dude’s spell save is, what the fuck, Gerry! Ability rolls are done with a twenty-sided die, so the minimum you can roll is a 1 (very bad, this actually obliges the dungeon master to give you a horrible outcome, like walking into traffic) and the maximum is 20 (rolling a straight 20 is very good, and obliges the DM to give you a good outcome, as good as they can without wrecking their own adventure). Character ability bonuses get added or subtracted to the dice roll, and generally speaking, the lowest outcome you can get is 0, and the highest is 30.
Note: she’s standing behind the door?
Oh Joyce, the Apostle Paul?
There’s so many other, better Apostles you could be listening to! Except Peter.
Peter was Catholic and no fundamentalist can listen to him now.
How Joyce feels about the Apostle Paul isn’t made clear in this strip, but I don’t think she was saying nice things about him
So am I the only one concerned about how Becky is gonna react to this
She fought against Joyce getting glasses until Dorothy explained why exactly it was a good idea and this feels like a much bigger deal
I wouldn’t be surprised if Becky doesn’t know what autism is or has a highly incorrect view of it (Rainman etcetera).
Like, I fully believe she might not know Dina is on the spectrum or what the spectrum is.
Apparently last he was asked Willis said Dina hasn’t been officially diagnosed but he might have changed his mind since then (or decided it was something that happened over the time skip) so it’s entirely likely none of the cast know
At the same time, Becky doesn’t see your brain working differently as a big deal.
She doesn’t have a problem with Dina’s hyperfixation on dinosaurs. And Dina being asexual has never been a problem with her, she’s more concerned with her own issues.
Are you serious? Dina being asexual is a HUGE, honking, massive problem for Becky and it’s recently been the focus of their storylines. The fact that they had sex yesterday in comic time doesn’t make that not exist. Becky’s acephobia is the most substantial threat to their relationship they’ve ever actually encountered, not that they’ve actually dealt with it at all.
What acephobia? Like, I can’t remember any instance where she was willfully ignorant or discriminatory about that.
The whole thing about “She doesn’t feel the same kind of lust for me that I do for her, so it’s all my fault for not being good enough the relationship is doomed!”
“Willfully ignorant or discriminatory” is not a necessary criteria for stuff that takes the suffix “phobia”.
Okay, then what do you mean?
On the other hand if Dina is aware that Dina’s autistic she’s likely to have discussed it with Becky to help Becky understand her better.
I think that her awareness was the precipitating event that resulted in the event covered in the Slipshine comic with her and Becky.
I think how people are gonna treat Joyce now with the diagnosis is gonna be a dynamic that’s gonna be explored for a while.
Do they give her more slack when she does mean things? Does she give herself more room to make mistakes? Does Joe treat her differently?
I mean, a lot of the mockery they gave Joyce for her quirky habits (like food choices) are now them unwittingly mocking her disorder.
That ascribes a lot more cruelty to it than they were actually doing. Maybe the ‘peanut butter dog food’ thing was mean, but pre time skip Joyce herself said her friends were ‘acceptable losses’ about them seeing her be weird about food.
Even if there’s no intended cruelty, it still does suck. Speaking as someone who has food aversions both for psychological and chronic illness reasons and grew up being mocked for being “weird” about food, it does make you feel bad and like there’s something wrong with you or shameful about your behavior.
I will make fun of my own food weirdness and jokes from friends who I know understand that it’s not necessarily a choice and respect the struggles I have are usually okay, but there’s a fine blurry line there where people can easily accidentally make someone feel bad by poking fun at their “quirks” that may actually be caused by a mental or physical condition.
And also as far as the person themselves saying they’re fine with it, people with disabilities are conditioned from a very young age (even when they don’t know they have a disability) to accept mockery of their symptoms as normal. Often in the same way women may laugh along or play down sexist jokes because they’ve been socially conditioned not to make a fuss about it. We feel like we’re the problem and not allowed to be bothered by people making fun of our “quirks.”
What business is it of Becky’s? Much like her bs sex secret, Joyce can tell her at her own discretion if at all. Now their friend group has two competing secrets neither bestie is aware of! Secret for secret. A battle of secrets. A Secret War if you will.
I think it all depends on whether or not Becky perceives the diagnosis as a “change.”
Like, with the glasses thing, Becky’s going to notice The Thing That Joyce Did Not Have Before every time she sees Joyce (which has me a bit worried about her eventual reaction to Jocelyne coming out, but I digress). That wouldn’t really apply here, though, so it’s possible that she’ll just take it as “I learned a new thing about Joyce that I didn’t know before.”
It kinda depends on what Becky was taught about autism growing up. If she was fed a whole bunch of dehumanizing and/or demonizing stuff– stuff which did not line up with her perception of Joyce– then I can see her perceiving this as a change and reacting potentially very badly.
I mean my prediction is that Becky doesn’t react great, tbh. Historically, Becky tends to not react great about anything different when it comes to Joyce.
Quite frankly I don’t think its going to be along the lines of “HOW DARE YOU BE DIFFERENT???”, and might be more…dismissive, potentially?
Like “I don’t care about this, it doesn’t matter”. Which sure, on the one hand, fine, sometimes it’s better to not make a big deal over something! But on the other hand, it could be like the time Joyce first voiced doubts about her faith, and Becky just went “shut up, this is a stupid phase, get over it”. Maybe not that harsh or anything. Something like ‘ok cool! congrats or whatever, bye’. Not horrendous in of itself, but since their relationship is already strained, it probably wont help.
tl;dr Methinks Becky’s reaction will be sub-optimal in some way and will contribute to a further straining of their relationship.
I feel like there’s an even chance Becky will
a) react badly because change! In Joyce! is unacceptable! Becky was almost as hostile to Joyce getting glasses as Joyce was, with far less justification. (Yes it was kind of silly of Joyce to kick up that much fuss…but it was her actual body, face, and self-image at stake, and that is not nothing. Becky was just being an ass), as there is that Becky will
b) go “huh, I guess this explains a lot about you, same as me being gay explains a lot about me”.
My guess would be that she’d react sympathetically. Not perfectly, of course, it’s still a gaggle of dumbass teenagers in this comic, but potentially being diagnosed as autism is a serious enough situation to break through a lot of Becky’s bad habits.
Will she express some concern that, if Joyce is confirmed as having autism and begins some form of treatment for it, that she’ll lose her a bit more? Yeah, I can see that happening, as a sort of inward thing that she’d recognize is far less important than Joyce’s actual health. But figure there’s no way that she’d so much as imply that Joyce should avoid the referral or any treatment, at least not without it being a moment of weakness thing that she quickly realizes was a shit thing to do.
It’d be like arguing that Becky would flip out that Joyce lost an arm, because that means that Joyce is changing too much, and that’d be horrible. “Needing glasses” and “potentially being autistic” are two very fucking different scales of things, and really shouldn’t be compared.
Well she knows Joyce really well, wouldn’t she just see it as ‘giving a name to some of Joyce’s quirks’?
If Dina was diagnosed during the time skip, I suspect a “You can’t be autistic because you’re nothing like the one autistic person I know!” from Becky.
Because apparently everyone with autism is supposed to be carbon copies of each other? (Seriously. This is something that I have gotten from MANY people. Yes, Karen, my mid-30s grownass adult self is, in fact, nothing like your four year old. Very astute of you. A thought to ponder: is it POSSIBLE that I am not obsessed with mailboxes and screaming for hours if my shirt has a tag not because I am faking, but because I am 30 years older, and also I buy shirts without tags?)
Also I would very much love to see Roz – because let’s be real it’d TOTALLY be Roz – try to enforce person first language because that’s what Autism Speaks says autistic people want (never mind the majority of us prefer identity first and the consensus among the autistic community is use identity first to refer to the community, for individuals follow the person’s lead and if in doubt ask.
Not that I think Roz is bad or anything, I just think her tendency to assume she knows what’s in people’s interest more than them and to steamroll others in her activism could make this a very interesting dynamic, especially if Joyce and or Dina get to be the one teaching her about a progressive issue for a change.
Person first language can just die already.
To be perfectly honest, I’m just hoping this doesn’t completely steamroll over the fact Becky’s a boundary-pushing jerk a lot of the time by blaming Joyce’s diagnosis for their recent unpleasantness.
That’s a real issue I’ve encountered.
Non autistic people have boundaries. Autistic people have “behaviours”.
Yeah, that’s pretty much the way it goes sometimes. You get lucky and someone’s like “you know you/your symptoms remind me of something…”
That’s how my asthma was diagnosed. My autism was more my Mom dumping the information on me that hey btw when you were three they basically said you should’ve been diagnosed but you’re AFAB so they decided they couldn’t, and then my entire social and medical circle going “wait, you don’t have a formal diagnosis??” That was a fun car ride.
You know, I think I technically still don’t have a formal diagnosis, even though I am very clearly autistic and everyone has known that since I was like 3, and I definitely remember having to go through a whole testing gauntlet during second grade, but there was some specific reason that I wasn’t technically given a diagnosis. I think it might have been some particular weirdness with the diagnostic criteria at the time (I think this was still under DSM-IV), or possibly because getting a diagnosis would have meant pulling me out of public school, which wasn’t really a viable option. Which did lead to me having a bit of an identity crisis in high-school about whether or not I was *actually* autistic. (Which itself kinda feels like a prelude to my more recent crises about my queer identity; I wonder what that says about me?)
Yeah, those boxes’ll getcha.
“Little boxes all the same.” As the song goes.
I checked the vending machine, and it was completely out of Ticky Tacky gum.
I guess I’ll have to settle for Dentyne…
I found out I had ADHD thought a conversation about fucking. Wei Wuxian and his school antics. I was liveblogging the book to a friend and went on a tangent about How To Be A Distractable Disaster In Class And Not Get In Trouble and my friend was like “ADHD mood” and I was like “wait what” and she was like “oh wait i forgot ADHD isnt a thing for you sorry” and i was like “no seriously wait what” because it uh. lit a lamp. and i started talking about my middle school experiences and she was like “these are literally criteria for referral of a small child for an ADHD diagnosis” and I went to research more and talk to my mom and yeah that was a fun day.
Yeah, it’s a hard question to answer, but at least now you have a referral to someone who might be able to help you figure it out.
And tbh, if your upbringing is causing you to have similar difficulties or traits to people who are autistic, the same things that help them out might still help you out, so it’s worth a shot.
How good is Dina’s hearing? Can she hear this conversation?
Earthling, Dina’s hearing is exceptionally good. She can hear human heartbeats and breathing from that distance.
The hall has probably emptied out and only Joyce is really talking, the floor is probably tile, the walls are probably either drywall, shower board, or some other “hard” surface, only the ceiling is likely designed for absorbing any amount of noise.
If the air conditioner isn’t running Right This Minute, there is a decent chance she can make out 4 words out of 5, and make a good guess at the fifth.
I think she hears it all. Last strip her head turned to pay attention as soon as she heard Joyce mention autism. The real question is what she will do with this information? My guess would be to have a private chat with Joyce and possibly confirm the long standing theory she is on the spectrun herself.
Dina’s definitely autistic and has hypersensitive hearing. And if anyone’s gonna try and disagree or argue with me, I’m willing to bet that Dina is gonna either try and go up to Joyce and talk to her about it, or that she’s gonna be afraid to because it’s so politically incorrect to talk about autism even though it needs to be talked about.
Dina is autistic and this isn’t debatable. And Becky clearly has a type lol
To be clear, “hypersensitive hearing” doesn’t mean you have, like, Super-Hearing; it has more to do with how you process sound, making you, among other things, more consistently aware of all the noises around you. If anything, it can actually make it harder to pick out specific sounds if there’s a lot of background noise.
People on the spectrum have incredible hearing.
Chekhov’s guns can hear everything.
You know I was actually wondering yesterday “How to go to a clinic to get a walk in check up for minstrel pains and end up walking out with someone giving you a referral to see weather or not you have autism?”
Fortunately today’s update layed out the scenario on how in great detail, A+ there.
Aren’t minstrel pains caused when someone breaks your lute?
Or what happens in the frozen land of Nador.
Nah, minstrel pains is what happens before you run out of food in the winter.
“And there was no food, and they were forced to eat Sir Robin’s minstrels. And there was much rejoicing (YAAAAAAYYYY)”
I specifically said in a comment on the last strip, “I guess I’m never getting an answer to that.” I have never been proven so wrong so quickly.
What does it say about Joyce’s peers that out of her whole home school group her pastor thought that Joyce was the best socialized?
Remember “best socialized” in this context means “least likely to break our fundamentalist brainwashing”
It could also be minor things like not being an overt racist considering some of first day remarks from her mom…
Not much?
Joyce, at least at the start of the comic, was open, energetic, eager to make friends and meet new people, while also being firmly Christian. It’s that whole group of things, and a few others, that would lead to that assessment.
I think it says more about Joyce than her peers. Could also be linked to Autism. My experience as a child was being the friendliest, most helpful, and most keen to please adults. I performed the traits that teachers praised me for (even smiling) because it was part of the social script. She also shows a really strong tendency to follow rules assigned to her or at least to do what is “right”.
I don’t like this wording. Do you really “try for a diagnosis” ?
I mean that phrasing makes sense from the perspective of “something is clearly going on and we live in a society that frequently tells people with chronic illnesses or mental health issues (especially women) that they’re making it up/it’s all in their head.”
My understanding is that it can potentially open the door for oth resources and reasonable accomodations.
If you have autism, yes. Because there’s still a lot of gatekeeping, and most people don’t know that a lot of autistic people are usually really good at masking for survival. Being AMAB, in an entire family unit that was autistic, and being a savant helped me get a diagnosis in 4th or 5th grade, but I also learned how to mask fairly well after the diagnosis. So my symptoms would only show under stress. No one would recognize that I was sinking usually until it was too little, too late.
If you’ve ever watched Atypical, most autistic women don’t act like Sam from Atypical, they usually act like Paige. They never gave her an official diagnosis, but she has so many traits that they should have had her get a diagnosis in the series and find out that she was. It was actually a huge disappointment to me that they never explored the possibility. Especially when she tanked in college from being a social pariah and having a hard time managing everything. That’s what happens when autistic people mask too well and don’t get necessary supports.
ALL THIS IS TRUE. For me, it wasn’t till my son got an ASD diagnosis when he was 10. I look at the things he was doing and said out loud, “Well, I don’t get it he’s not nearly as awkward and isolated as I was……at that…….
Oh.
Ooooooooooooh.
Ooh…
Frankly understanding that I… and he… aren’t just giant assholes sometimes was transformitvely positive for me. Like…. hard to explain how much better it feels to know that it’s not just me.. and him being “wrong” I very much relate to what Joyce is processing here.
And I still say she’s a paladin.
And you are right.
It’s pretty hard to get an autism diagnosis or even evaluation as an adult woman so yeah, you “try for” it
When you didn’t get diagnoses as a kid you need to try really hard to get the diagnosis you actually need to get accommodations at work or school or disability benefits. Because there are a ton of obstacles in the way of getting the diagnosis that even medical professionals are pretty sure you have but they lack the authority to be the one who actually gives it to you.
It’s disturbing that some of the replies you’ve gotten make it sound like the goal is to get diagnosed with something (or make it sound like just because there’s a tendency towards false negatives people should go to a doctor aiming to get a positive diagnosis). Quite the opposite of that, I take it ‘try for a diagnosis’ just means looking to see if you have anything or trying to find out what’s going on, which includes checking for a negative diagnosis (i.e. nothing going on).
I don’t think anyone is saying that? Our replies are very much coming from a place familiar with the medical gaslighting women deal with. It’s not about “wanting to have something wrong with them” it’s about knowing SOMETHING is going on that is causing symptoms or making things difficult and wanting to try to find a clear answer.
Yeah, having had the Zebra Conditions Gamut as well as autism, the thing about a new diagnosis, especially one you have to wait months to pursue because the specialist’s next available appointment is like eleven months out and there’s no one else really qualified in a reasonable distance (though a cancellation came through so I did ultimately see said doctor a couple months ahead of the original appointment, yay,) is that YOU ALREADY KNOW something is wrong or different (autism not being ‘something wrong,’ inherently, though it does present challenges, this particular point I want to emphasize because ‘why would you want something wrong with you’ was the exact phrasing my one shitty psychiatrist who tried to change the diagnosis while I was in outpatient used because he thought I was ‘too social’ to be autistic. So, obvious sore spot which I know you did not intend autogatos, just echoing the attitude abled people usually take here, but still wanted to bring up for the crowd.) It’s immediately apparent. My patient intake form for the EDS assessment asked ‘when did you last feel well?’ I read this out loud to my parents before laughing and saying ‘how do we define well?’ (Ultimately I think we answered somewhere in the 2012 range. This was last fall.)
It’s finding out WHAT is going on that’s the difficult part, and yeah, especially for AFAB types, this is hard. For autism, yes – it is notoriously undiagnosed among AFAB people and people of color, with a high rate of misdiagnosis, and EXTREMELY difficult to get diagnosed as an adult if you flew under the radar, all assuming you can find someone who CAN diagnose you – but also in general, there are horror stories of women, especially women who are otherwise marginalized by society, having very common physical conditions ignored by doctoral bias. (This is especially bad for black women – there have been several studies on the subject – and fat women, ranging from ‘yeah the doctor kept telling me my foot would hurt less if I lost weight, no, turns out I had broken it several months ago and now there’s permanent damage’ to shit like ‘yeah I had my pain ignored in the ER until one doctor actually thought to check me for appendicitis, yeah, THAT WAS THE PROBLEM’ or horror stories where symptoms were dismissed and it was actually a tumor. That had spread significantly in the time they’d been ignored.) But even thin white women will have things dismissed as anxiety fairly frequently, even for acute conditions. Medical gaslighting is a real and pressing concern, particularly in cases like this.
Yeah definitely didn’t mean to imply autism is “something wrong” was sort of speaking to my own experience with this sort of thing where in my case there was something clearly WRONG and it turned out I had a chronic illness.
Or in the case of autism or ADHD (I just learned I have the latter) “something is clearly causing some challenges for me in how I interact with the world.” Basically, you know something is going on that not everyone around you is dealing with, so it’s a relief to finally be told you’re not imagining it and have a clear answer as to what it is.
And yup I sadly have SO MANY stories like you describe, as a woman who has spent 36 years living with a chronic illness, but my favorite story is the time I went to the doctor for chronic leg pain after a table fell on it and the doctor couldn’t immediately find anything wrong after an MRI of my knee and an x-ray, so he asked if I’d been under a lot of stress lately (yes…because I was in constant PAIN) and told me anxiety can sometimes manifest as pain.
So I went about my life for another year thinking I was crazy because it was so weird how my anxiety was manifesting as this very severe and specific pain confined to only my right leg.
Finally I couldn’t take it anymore and my mom suggested I get a second opinion. That doctor believed me thankfully and suggested the first doctor had missed something and that we should check my hip to see if there was referred pain coming from there.
Turns out I had spent a year walking on a MASSIVE labral tear complete with tissue that had torn away from the bone. I had to have hip surgery and have the tissue reattached with a pin.
And I’d been told it was just “anxiety.” I was so mad.
I’m sorry you’re disturbed by your own misinterpretation.
If you don’t know what condition you are dealing with and recognise that diagnosis is difficult and uncertain, certainly. I went to see my GP with a slight persistent cough, suspecting gastro-esophageal reflux and hoping for a prescription for a cox-2 inhibitor. My GP tried about a dozen hypotheses of four months before working out that I have haemochromatosis. About a dozen attempts at a diagnosis before we got one that could be confirmed.
“about a dozen hypotheses of four months”, that is.
Bleargh!
OVER four months, not OF four months.
Oh, for an “edit” button.
Aaah, yes, fun times in medical ambiguity land. It sucks even with a GOOD doctor because you’re both like ‘well, clearly this is an issue, but it’s not any of these so let’s try Bloodwork Order #8.’
A few years ago at age 60 (sixty) I was sent to a neurophysiologist office for testing with a presumptive diagnosis of early onset senility. Turns out that cognitively I’m fine, the diagnosis was ADHD+ASD. The recent notable symptoms (e.g. forgetting family members’ names) were caused by cumulative brain damage from the ADHD reaching a critical point. Stimulant therapy has helped with the worst symptoms, but the diagnosis really only served to get the insurance to pay for meds. Otherwise it’s just the clinical expression for “annoying nerd who could have been something if only they had applied themself.” Yeah, thanks, I already knew that.
Oh, dear god, that hurt my heart to read it. “You’re just Not Trying hard enough!” “You could’a been a contender!” “You just need to pay attention in class.” “Class, if anyone sees Genesee daydreaming you have my permission to call him back to earth.” Did you get that one, too? Or just me?
All the time. From every teacher/parental unit/group leader I ever had.
Interesting replies all around. To clarify, I think it’s more apt to say you want to be evaluated with a presumptive diagnosis. Maybe things are different for autism spectrum diagnosis, idk.
I’m a day late but just wanted to say I kind feel vindicated when Joyce didn’t freak out about the birth control pills in the way everyone in-comic said she would. Kinda want to rub it in Becky’s and Dorothy’s faces actually
Keep in mind that:
– Joyce has freaked out in the past (eg over glasses)
– she herself had admitted a little… Concern over taking birth control
– whatever reaction she might have had over the birth control is probably overshadowed by the autism referral
Yeah, the second thing is my bet. Any issues that she might have about the birth control pills are being buried under an avalanche of concern about if she’s autistic…
All of this is such a mood. I don’t even have autism but very late-diagnosed ADHD and gosh the experiences both in terms of struggles and in terms of it being missed for so long especially in women and the ways we overcompensate have so much in common.
yes, exactly, I’m loving this storyline bc of how relatable it is!! I was diagnosed with ADHD at age 29 because YEP, AFAB and exceptionally good at masking/bullshitting
Hey Rambling Girl why don’t you settle down?
Bloomington can’t be your kind of town…
“Here’s to you, my rambling boy…”
I misread the last panel to say they overcompensate by gambling, which, I guess that’d also change the topic pretty quickly.
I will neither confirm nor deny the gambling allegations.
What about if we bet on it?
If you wouldn’t wager against a loaf of bread, I’d advise you not to pick me as a gambling opponent/partner/idk gambling jargon. I only ever lose and wallow in anticlimax or win in a way that actually causes somebody distress and can therefore not celebrate with any amount of tact.
Huh! I remember years ago Willis said something to the effect that Dina (who I have always read as autistic because she is shockingly similar to me (an autistic person) and I therefore relate to her a great deal) was never canonically autistic because they didn’t think they were knowledgeable enough to confidently portray an autistic character accurately. Maybe that’s changed! I never thought that Joyce would be suggested as autistic in the comic before Dina.
Judging by the last strip, might be that Joyce and Dina’s being presented as autistic may basically coincide.
I’m pretty sure Willis has autism, though. I’ve seen some comments on here to that effect, and it would make sense because I get like none of his Transformers references.
(I’m guessing that went down something like this:)
c. 2010: “… because I, myself, am not autistic.”
c. 2020: “well, dang.“
IIRC he has OCD and it’s a comorbidity with autism so I think it was exactly that. He got meds for his OCD but still couldn’t handle certain tastes and sorted his food and misread social cues and then a few years later, “Oh…Well. Shit.”
I’m not aware of having any OCD and I don’t take any medication. Perhaps you’re thinking of somebody else!
i definitely haven’t sorted out food issues, though i guess i do eat cheese on more things
Dang, Willis. I read the above comments and thought, “woah, commenters shouldn’t be trying to armchair-diagnose the comic author, that ain’t cool, if that were me I’d be pretty peeved.” Then I scrolled further down to your comment and saw that not only did you reply, but you were just clarifying which parts of the diagnosis were incorrect so you don’t misrepresent yourself. Respect.
Eating cheese on more things is the right amount of things to have cheese on, cheese is a building block of any meal.
I’d argue that point, but you’re absolutely correct. I say;
“Hompk! And add more cheese!”
Oh oops looks like we only had to wait 24 hours for an explanation. Guess some people jumped the gun. What an unimaginable thing, not having 200% of the information within the first strip of a character mentioning a complex subject.
I have never seen such a thing in my life; not getting all the answers the second something is introduced.
it really is funny watching people process and judge this comic a few panels at a time
Some days it’s unbearable, especially when the particular subject hits close to home, but this time it’s pretty funny for me. Especially with the advantage of seeing tomorrow’s strip on Patreon, since there were a few people basically saying “Hey, where’s the information I’m gonna get tomorrow night???”
True, but it was also heartwarmingly funny to see people relating exactly the experience they were going to hear about in tomorrow’s strip.
I don’t know why, but I love it when Dorothy slip into her completely non-engaging mode. Supportive, active listener and gives enough prompts for the person she’s talking to to keep talking, but she does her best not to steer the conversation.
Yeah, plus I imagine she’s also processing it since yeah, it’s making sense of a lot of things.
I suspect she was also just plain caught off guard by it, Joyce went in for help menstrual pain and came put with a referral for an possible autism diagnosis
That’s quite a swerve even if the explanation provided makes perfect sense
I’m really proud of Joyce for not being hostile to the suggestion. Like, it does seem she is genuinely giving it a lot of thought. Additionally, really speaks to her trust and comfort level with Dorothy and Sarah that she’s talking about it with them. Glad Dorothy and Sarah are listening along and not derailing her, since she’s got a lot to unpack.
You can see the gears turning in her head, and that little bit at the end makes me feel like she’s already being open to this, likely because suddenly a lot of pieces are falling into place. That weird emotional duality of being scared and upset because “omg this is overwhelming what do you mean I have this, this is just me??” vs. “Wait…this explains everything?’
The confusion and conflict about wait, what’s *me*, what part of my behavior comes from my brain, and and what’s the product of my upbringing….like fucking OUCH. I am at the point in my life where I think will never be able to unravel certain aspects of my personality from trauma, because they’ve been intertwined for decades. I can make some guesses, but I can’t go back and time to put my child-self under a microscope and do controlled experiments. I can only work with what I have now.
There’s some real fantasy catharsis in seeing a character get a chance to explore that kind of thing when they’re still young enough to have a shot at disentangling their brain from their background. (Although even if they can’t? Still so goddamn relatable, and it moves me to see someone try.)
I was about Joyce’s age when I found out (no less than 5 people who either were autistic or knew autistic people asked if I was sure I wasn’t autistic so I mentioned it offhand to my sibling who was a psych student who was all, “Wait, you don’t know? I thought you knew!” So I mentioned it to my parents who were all yeah they thought you might have that in school but you were just gifted (not exactly mom and dad, you chose not to pursue evaluation after I got the gifted label to avoid our shitty sped track there’s a difference) and screened positive at university counseling services before they told me it’d be like $7K for the evaluation and oh by the way it’s not covered because you’re 19 not 17 so that’s where it sits. and eventually I threw my hands up and decided that was a knot I don’t feel like detangling.
Still kinda pissed my folks didn’t tell me when I was a teen and could have got it covered because like *I* knew there was something else back when I was like 9. And everyone just told me to quit being a little weirdo and fit in more.
Hm, there you have it
This is going well. I am hopeful. Willis, please don’t break my heart.
I am pretty sure I was diagnosed as a child (can school diagnose you, in America?) Because one time at school I was evaluated and my parents were furious, angry I answered in ways that apparently made them think something was “wrong” with me,angry I cooperated with being evaluated (which consisted of going to a different classroom and answering questions), just freaking out and screaming at me over this. But my friend who in retrospect is just as obviously autistic as me was there too; it was a different class thing she went to regularly.
Later I was homeschooled, but this was public school.
I mean as far as I know for sure, I’m self diagnosed. But I know the school said something after that evaluation that made my parents angry at me and maybe it was that I was autistic.
As far as I know, if the school as a psychologist (which some do) then yes? But even if not, a teacher or nurse might recognize symptoms and then suggest to the parents the kid be tested.
The latter happened to me with ADHD when I was in 1st or 2nd grade (teacher suggested my parents have me tested) but my mom didn’t agree soooo I never was until this year…at 35. oops
It’s wild how many parents are afraid of their children for being Different.
Yeah, in my mom’s case I think a lot of it was a product of the time…ADHD was not portrayed favorably. The general (harmful) attitude was that too many kids were being diagnosed and put on meds and there was this stigma that it was the troublemakers who were disruptive in class, and that the teachers wanted them on meds so they didn’t have to deal with their behavior. So to her, being told that her quiet, polite, but daydreaming daughter was like THOSE kids was offensive and made no sense.
Obviously all that was wrapped in tons of harmful social bias/ableism but I don’t begrudge her for her reaction. It is what it is and I’m just glad I’m getting help for it now.
But yeah in general it’s a common issue in society for parents to bristle at the idea that there could be anything atypical about their kids. Especially as we live in a society rife with ableism that treats “disabled” as a dirty word and disabled people as lesser. It’s a sad problem.
I will say to the credit of both my parents, they are trying. They’ve always been supportive and I think it’s just taken them some time to unlearn their own biases and preconceived notions that are common among boomer-aged parents.
Sadly, a lot of it is because those types of parents don’t view their kids as individuals, but rather as extensions of themselves.
I know someone who would rather institutionalize their daughter than confront that they have behavioral issues due to autism.
It’s entirely out of fear. These creeps are so afraid that their kid is gonna make them look bad, that it’s safer in their mind to do anything except help them, up to and including murder. But we’re not allowed to call them wild animals and be so much as relieved when misfortune hits them, because it’s “not polite”, even though they laugh and toast and celebrate every time one of us dies.
In the USA, the public schools are supposed to have an evaluation done upon parental request, even if the child is not enrolled in the public school system.
Oh, hey, I called it! Doctor has an autistic kid, check!
Sometimes, a doctor, teacher, manager, or even coworker having an autistic kid can make life so much easier for the occasional ND person who crosses their path.
Yeah that was my guess too! Much easier to spot if you know someone with the thing you’re spotting. I got on the EDS dx path because an ortho PA I saw happened to have it herself.
Oh Joyce. I have never more wanted to offer a fictional character a hug, just because she’s in such distress and I wish I could offer her comfort. That is SO MUCH for her to suddenly have to think about, given the upheaval of her life, and her immediate physical pain, which is not going to go away right away, new meds or no.
It’s not the Joyce-perhaps-grappling-with-her-sexuality-as-an-ex-Christian-on-birth-control material I’d hoped this storyline was heading towards….but this is equally as big a deal for her as that would be, and I’m SO interested to see where it goes.
Also, I’m trying real hard to withhold judgement on Dorothy, but, Dorothy, are you actually *that* surprised? I promise you that autistic people can be social butterflies. (My best friend is autistic and also extroverted and significantly more social than I am.)
Tbh, I don’t read Dorothy as shocked, more processing. Like, “I am now taking inventory of our past interactions and reexamining them under the lens of this new information and it tracks.”
But I am also shit at reading people and Willis’s alt text seems to indicate she’s shocked.
(That kind of jaw dropped expression is my deep concentration face so I am probably projecting? People tend to assume I am confused or surprised when I am concentrating on stuff.
I read the alt-text as Joyce’s processing of it, not Dorothy’s.
This would make more sense
That’s a fair alternate reading! I might, in fact, be pre-judging Dorothy’s reaction here, when we haven’t gotten much actual reaction to clue us in how she’s taking this or what she’s thinking.
I think I was just thinking “Joyce has a whole pile of neuroses that are very compatible with some flavor of autism, some of which you were making fun of her for earlier this morning, so yeah you’re very aware of those?” Joyce certainly doesn’t fit the stock autistic stereotype of how autistic follow socialize, though, and I was perhaps unfairly jumping to the conclusion that this was the course of Dorothy’s seeming surprise.
I am shocked, SHOCKED at this sudden development.
I had no idea Joyce was a “women”.
Dude, where have you been? At least half of the cast of DoA is “womens”.
last panel typo – austism
also glad to see autism awareness being done in a positive way here
Austism is when your Special Interest is kangaroos and boomerangs.
How’s it going down under, mate? 😛 🪃 🇦🇺
*plays “Pikmin Main Theme” on hacked muzak*
See, when it comes to Australia and music, my biggest association is The Wiggles.
Mine is Men at Work.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfR9iY5y94s
And then thye hand you a vegemite sandwich.
Which band would win in a fight to the death, I wonder…
Or when you’re all tuckered out and don’t want to neurodiverge anymore. That’s ex-austism. (Exhaustism.)
When you remake a movie as closely bas possible for fun, that’s shot-for-shottism
Possibly Autism, but will wait for an official strip diagnosis. At the very least I’d say that Joyce very likely has OCD (which can be common in the spectrum).
Glad to see this being explored! but gosh the comments of people wildly jumping to conclusions about what happened and such. I mean that happens a lot but really. chill. stuff gets explained through time in the comics. if it doesnt then you can be like uhhhh hey wait a gosh dang minute
am hopeful tho her friends arent awful about it. I know we need story and character drama but 😭
Oh, also? Fair warning? If you don’t have actual knowledge of this particular subject, now is the time to shut the fuck up and listen. Plenty of others are being tactful and restrained, and sharing their experiences, and might be too polite to tell you off if you say something incredibly stupid. I, on the other hand, am already pre-emptively exhausted from dealing with you for almost three decades and will only mock and belittle your willful ignorance and stupidity. If that’s not okay, I’m sure somebody can explain why.
Well-meaning folks asking questions and paying attention to answers are neat though.
Yup.
Talking to people about how their autism isn’t real or any of that is when a normally nice and accomodating person tells you to fuck off.
See, you say “talking to”, I figure it’s actually just “making noises at”.
It’s both, as they usually don’t actually give a shit beyond telling you how well you’re doing.
To them, being right is more important than being correct. (And more important than your being at all.)
When I was a kid, some (not all) doctors thought I was autistic. I was a late talker, developmentally, not talking until I was 5.I bounced between some speech therapists. It should be mentioned that I am a middle child, with an older sibling and a twin, in a religious home, with a Meyers-Briggs mother who had us profiled as babies. This would’ve happened in the late 80’s, early 90’s. It’s possible I was/am autistic, it’s also possible that I was misdiagnosed. Doctors are a lot better about this stuff now than they were 30 years ago. I don’t have a couch diagnosis for Joyce, to me it could go either way.
I probably would never even have started to suspect I might be autistic if I hadn’t learned early last year that my nephew was diagnosed, and my sister had told me he acts kinda like me sometimes before that. I’m definitely convinced that autism is under-diagnosed, both in women and also in adults of my age (early 30s) and older in general.
Probably still under-diagnosed in children too, as long as they mask well enough.
I’ve been wrestling with whether or not I should get diagnosed for a while now. On the one hand, I’ve made it to my 30s without knowing and I’m doing relatively ok but on the other hand I can’t so much as go through a checkout at the supermarket or order fastfood without having an anxiety attack/sensory overload. I have a small friend group as I don’t people too well and I’m practically a hermit as the aforementioned sensory overload makes hanging out at crowded venues an ordeal. I have two nephews on the autism spectrum so I know it runs in the family, plus my dad now suspects he also has it as he has struggles very similar to mine. I think this current storyline is hoing to hit me hard haha…😅
Even if it’s not autism causing sensitivity to crowds, you might be able to get some help to make that less stressful by talking to an expert about it. Perhaps there’s a first step you can take remotely, before setting up an in person chat? This storyline is giving me more motivation too, to push for a diagnosis even though I’m mature enough to have developed coping strategies for all the little things.
Overcompensate by Rambling is a valid DoA book title.
Not nearly long enough
Overcompensate by Rambling is a great name for a band, though.
Overcompensate by rambling is an interesting way to describe the tendency for ND ppl I know to kind of preemptively verbal wall of text at people when anxious or nervous or worried about perceived or anticipated impending rejection.
I
Hi. You seem to have left part of what you wanted to say out? There’s an “I” there that seems like it’d be the start of a new paragraph. 🙂
No, my motor dysgraphia just adds or substitutes random words sometimes. Sorry. I am better typing than writing but not perfect.
(handwriting I will sometimes forget or add entire phrases that shouldn’t be there. :/
Annnd I forgot a close bracket.
Case in point!
(I also had an A and an extra line break one line above case in point that I inserted needlessly but caught. Today’s a bad day for it apparently.)
There’s nothing to apologise for. Just wandering if there was something else you had wanted to add – you wouldn’t be the first person here to have their posts cut in half. 🙂
Sorry to hear that your dysgraphia is acting particularly up today. 🙁 I hope it doesn’t affect your day too much.
This is such a great storyline! Feels like it’s been really well planned and researched too.
When I was a kid I was flagged on 2 different occasions as possibly autistic. First in first grade (I reminded my very awesome teacher of his kid who was autistic, but I wasn’t at the time having too much social trouble or behavior problems so they decided to wait and see) and again in third grade (my abusive POS teacher had me in several times a day meltdowns & parents took me to a child psychologist thinking I was having emotional issues related to the military lifestyle or our family history of mental illness but this was the 90s and at the time a developmental disability diagnosis with significant behavior issues – which I was exhibiting – would have meant the school would have basically shoved me in a room to be ignored with the other SpED kids and possibly tied me down to a desk all day if I was prone to meltdowns or self injury (it was pretty common practice in my region).
The child psychologist found I had a high IQ and smacked a gifted sticker on me to try to get accommodation (since at the time giftedness wasn’t something that could get you SpED tracked) and suggested to my parents they not “pursue a label” of autism to avoid limiting my potential. It was probably the correct call, and also I was deeply upset when I found the referral paperwork as an adult. I did get a “you probably have autism” from a psychologist in grad school but a formal diagnosis would have cost 60% of my salary & not be covered by insurance, so. I am extremely similar to a nibling and a cousin both who do have formal diagnoses so we just say I’m autistic at this point.
I could pursue a diagnosis now, but I find it hard to see the point. I muddled through schooling without accommodation and I’ve found disclosing my diagnosed ADHD only ever harms my career so why would I want to disclose autism, which is even more stigmatized?
Right on the money with your summary. Because of the idiotic stigma, you’re better off keeping that information (semi)private, and just using the life strategies you’ve developed over the years.
Thanks for sharing (I’m an ADD diagnosed dreamer prone to anxiety).
Yeah…the other day someone at my work was talking about a person who quit a while back that was a huge jerk and was like “I think they were autistic”
I’m just like, wow, yeah, never mentioning that I have it to anyone there ever
As somebody who is diagnosed as Autistic, at most it can grant you some government assistance to be diagnosed
If you’re doing fine, then it’s just peace of mind. You do you, and don’t let haters call you a faker or any crap like that
In my area, government assistance isn’t granted unless you’re too disabled to work and there’s no disability protection laws to speak of (Fun fact: disability is not recognized as a vulnerable class in need of protection by Canadian national human rights laws. Unless a provincial law says otherwise it is not illegal to discriminate against someone for being disabled, and my province doesn’t say otherwise so I keep shit buttoned down nowadays after discovering that the hard way).
Goddammit. And here in Finland we tend to think Canada is nice and civilized, like a gigantic Nordic country north of the US.
A Bible hyperfixation is possibly the funniest thing I’ve ever heard of.
And also one of the most dangerous.
She has one on that cartoon too! But that results in her wearing cute but nerdy clothes so I encourage it for more Joyce in cute themed hats.
Dina still staring
… and homeschooling is getting approved at Congress in my country. I’m afraid how much undiagnosed cases will escalate, beyond other things…
Could be both Joyce! I mean the food thing I think lays credence to the possibility of a diagnosis but like: you could have had special interest in something else entirely with different parents (Imagine a world where Dina and Joyce were switched at birth).
Personally I have a form of dyslexia which means my memory is garbage and I also have auditory processing issues. Mostly I have to have notes or a list to refer back through at work or take notes if my manage says something because it’s not happening otherwise.
Granted sometimes people talk about both autism and adhd in ways that seem pretty relatable but honestly kind of hard to say.
I’ve never been officially diagnosed or tested for autism, but aside from the fact that I’m a man and wasn’t raised with biblical literalism or home schooling this comic describes me pretty well
I’m surprised Dorothy seems speechless, and Sarah too… Thy never thought about that possibility?
I mean, she masks pretty well plus Dina is right there masking alot of Joyce’s symptoms with her lack of masking
Dorothy will never forgive herself for have not though about this possibility.
2nd bonus strip for May is Joyce during her appointment, if anyone needed another reason to become a patron 😁
shit, bad time to be unemployed…
Man, it’s just hitting me- bible history seems to be a big special interest of hers, it must be EXTRA difficult dealing with doubting her faith
I know an atheist who had biblical history as a special interest – he just got VERY interested in the politics around the early bible like how they decided what would be included and how that one early figure in the church basically invented a lot of the misogyny in Christianity nowadays and how what counted as the supposed divine revelation of God was decided at a old timey convention vote basically?
I’d be very interested in seeing Joyce’s thoughts on that stuff btw.
(oh also how a lot of the verses the charismatic branches base their worship styles on were added to Mark several hundred years later by someone else and are basically forgeries.)
To be fair, it’s kind of a fascinating topic, with a lot of misunderstandings and a lot of influence on how the world is today.
Probably the first YouTube video where I went ‘this is fucking fascinating ‘ is about how the Abrahamic god may have come from a polytheistic pantheon and grew from monolatrist polytheism. I honestly never got to do my own research into its accuracy as a proposal but I could imagine Joyce being interested into who put what together and who wrote what. (Like I remember that Genesis 2 was written first and way before Genesis 1 by a different author).
As a possible fellow undiagnosed member of the Autism Spectrum club, I’m here for this storyline.
It’s been a lot to unpack the older I get and the more I learn about people who are very clearly a lot like me.
Timely for me as two years ago my (clinical psychiatrist) sister told me she suspected I may have Asperger’s. I asked her last time I talked to her how one would find that out. So, yesterday I talked to my personal doctor and have a referral. So we’ll see how that pans out.
(I’m in my 40s, so I’m not looking for “treatment” or anything. I’d just like to know, you know?)
I’m in the same boat—I have a kid on the spectrum and it got me wondering about myself since I had never felt “right” around people as a kid (which was chalked up to shyness or being “gifted” causing me to be bored in class or some such.) At 40+ and otherwise holding down a job and otherwise “adulting” tolerably well, I wasn’t looking for treatment or special assistance, just a chance to understand myself better, I think.
I find it interesting, Willis, is she saying there actually ARE differences between how men and women process neurlogical distress?
Probably just different social expectations. You know, women just talk so much.
Chicks be stimmin’
There are known and well documented gender based differences in autism presentation. Because the diagnosis standards were written with boys in mind this means girls generally have to be more affected to get a diagnosis and are largely under-diagnosed.
Girls on average tend to:
* Be more social
* Mask more and more effectively
* Be more likely to have co-occuring emotional disorders like anxiety and depression
* Have special interests that are less odd but no less deep than boys, (so a girl would be relatively more likely to have an unusually intense special interest in barbie dolls than in gnat biology, for example)
Note that despite masking more effectively, girls with it are no less disabled. Which is to say: they’re better at pretending everything’s fine and hiding their suffering. This means girls with autism are at high risk of stress related illness and death by suicide.
The jury’s out as to why girls present differently (gender based differences in brain structure, or social conditioning from early infancy that’s less tolerant of deviations from the norm?), but it’s well known they do.
could it be BOTH? both actual structural differences, AND social conditioning? I know, heresy to think that a problem can have more than one cause simultaneously, right? Especially given society’s tendency to pidgeon-hole and seek a single ‘magic bullet’ explanation for anything that might be a touch complex…
My money is definitely on both.
Getting a diagnostic is like getting a permission or a justification. I don’t particularly care for it. “Yes, he does that, but that’s because he’s *autistic* you know”. You don’t need a permission to be you, and I don’t like entrusting doctors the power to categorize someone like that. We don’t need more high priests or sorting hats.
“lol” said the scorpion “lmao”
This is a touchy subject and I don’t want to speak for anyone else, but I got “diagnosed” with a mental disorder and I felt like it was an excuse to write me off and say I was exactly the same as everyone else with this diagnosis. God forbid the medical field treat me as an individual. I don’t care for it and I never describe myself this way. I don’t need permission to be me, exactly like you said.
I think the point is less “You have permission to be you” and more like one of those medical bracelets people wear so you can find their heart medication. It’s a semi-loose baseline to help form an understanding of a very broad category of the human experience, not a brand of sausage.
I know it’s just a metaphor but those bracelets are for situations where the patient can’t communicate with you. I feel like doctors would rather check my bracelet than talk to me about what I think, feel, and experience. The diagnosis was also forced on me against my will, rather than being something I sought out. Like I said everyone’s different but I don’t care for it.
Well put, James!
They do say “if you’ve met one autistic person, you’ve met one autistic person“ for a reason. Being autistic can be just another adjective describing a part of your experience and possibly also a part of your identity… but it’s only one part and there’s an individual identity beyond diagnoses… let people be themselves and the expert on their own experience 🙂
<>
No, a diagnosis is a precursor to treatment. It’s the first step toward receiving whatever assistance, accommodations, or tools you might need and want to live your best life. If it turns out you’re already living your best life, and there’s nothing you want or nothing that can be reasonably done to improve your quality of life, then the diagnosis is benign.
i hope this isn’t a case of overdiagnosing to correct for underdiagnosing.
i get rather concerned when doctors try to diagnose or take guesses based on incidental behavior, especially without proper patient history.
and now, a tale from my childhood.
Picture it, New York city, early 2000’s.
a young boy enjoys his like, he is energetic, he is happy, he is a child.
one day his teacher informs his parents that this young boy is too energetic, and that something needed to be done about it.
so the parents take the boy to a doctor, on the request of the school.
the boy doesn’t really know what is going on, but he does what his parents tell him.
then they diagnose him with adhd.
the prescription? the hard stuff.
so they give him the drugs and the boy’s energy seems to have died down.
of course, that’s not actually what was happening.
the boy still had energy, but he just couldn’t bring himself to move.
the boy lost all his energy, all his enjoyment in doing things.
he once loved going to the park with grandma to play on the swings and the slides and the monkey bars. after the pills, he just kinda sat there in the living room, doing not much of anything.
a teacher’s wet dream: a quiet child that only sits there and does what he is told without any trouble.
i was told that i was too energetic, then i was drugged. all for the convenience of a teacher that didn’t want to deal with kids being kids.
now you may be wondering, “Jighole, what does this have to do with dumbing of age and autism?”
the answer is simple. i was a child that acted like a child would, and was punished/poisoned for it.
Joyce is a woman that is acting as she was taught to act as a child. certain foods, certain methods of talking, kept ignorant of sexual this and that, so she doesn’t know how to really approach these things. and now some doctor that has known her for all of 5 minutes thinks it’s a mental disorder, rather than just conditioning that needs to be dealt with.
what joyce needs is a psychiatrist, or psychologist… i get the two mixed up.
basically she needs someone to talk to so she can sort through and throw out the harmful shit she was taught as fact.
her entire character recently seems to be someone that has lost their way, and needs some kind of guidance so she can find herself and who she is as a person. rather than grabbing onto every strong personality within 10 feet of herself to try and get the slightest grip on where she is going and what she is doing.
Psychologist is the one that can’t prescribe you medicine. And yeah, she definitely needs one – but also, a diagnosis will help with the untangling of all her trauma and her relationship to religion, and help find her tools to manage her everything going forward.
ooof, sucks that this happened to you 🙁
Anyways, diagnoses can be wrong, and in any case it’s good that Joyce might get help this way. Worst that can happen is either a false positive autism diagnosis, but whether she has autism or not, she might benefit from autism coping strategies. or a negative diagnosis result but them still pointing her in the direction of therapy. I sure hope so. And at least she’s an adult (for a given value of adult) and she can decide whether she’ll take medications or not.
Totally agreed with you that no doctor is supposed to assume any mental illness and/or neurodivergence within 5 minutes of knowing you.
Been there. According to a random GP i only went to once (gee, i wonder why) and an art teacher (!!!) i have borderline. Weird how there’s a standardized catalogue of 9 different symptoms and needing 5 of them to “qualify”, a gp can simply look at my (non-self harm) scars, and an art teacher(!!!) sees me taking notes on my arm and equating it to self harm….. teenage me was just like…. lol what? i just didn’t have paper 😛
Thanks for the assumptions, jeez.
The misdiagnosis isn’t the fault of having a diagnosis. I was misdiagnosed with about half a dozen mental and physical diseases growing up. Fed medicine i didn’t need that wrecked my body and mental health.
I actually have autism, and getting a real diagnosis helped me understand myself and help me explain the behaviors that were already happening to others. No i can’t watch that movie. Before i would be pressured and censured for what i couldn’t handle. I’d have to give some awkward explanation for why i couldn’t handle something. Now i can say, i have to go i’m getting overstimulated.
Getting a diagnosis isn’t evil. We don’t need to vilify it for people who need the help. Even if others used medicine to harm you, medicine itself isn’t evil. If someone hits you with a hammer, don’t blame the hammer and blame others who want to build houses.
I’m so sorry to hear that Jighole, how your childhood was just ripped away from you like that, that must have been AWFUL!!!
😭😭😭😭
The same thing actually happened to me, except it was “autism”. Whether or not I was ever “autistic” (depending on your definition), the label was basically used to hold me back from all the things that would enrich my life, gaslight me, abuse me physically and emotionally, it basically took my childhood away, nearly fucking broke me.
😖😖😖😖😖😖 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭
But now I’m doing my best to work through this, sorting myself out just like Joyce is now, and even though the place the comic is going from this point re: neurodivergence might seriously re-activate my traumas, I REALLY want to be able to enjoy it, and interact with it’s community, who I have learned so much from.
Much like you, I had my childhood, my identity, ripped away by this kind of system, and I too fear that the comic and its community I have engaged with in order to compensate for my trauma, might just come to downplay or even venerate the very thing that ruined our lives. 😩😩😩
Basically, Jighole, please know that YOU ARE NOT ALONE in how you feel.
If it’s any consolation, I too really wish for the acceptance of better ways do describe how our brains our different from each other, not only to stop people and “professionals” from making hurtful assumptions about us and acting on those assumptions, but also to make it easier for us to understand ourselves and for others to understand us.
Your view on the issue matters as much as anyone else’s here, and we need to here from everyone and discuss these kind of things to make real progress regarding how we’re treated, given the historically AWFUL place we came out of. Thank you for sharing. 🥹🥹🥹🥹
Worth pointing out the doctor didn’t DIAGNOSE anything. She gave Joyce a referral, which is exactly what a doctor should do when they suspect something but don’t have sufficient data to make a diagnosis.
gotcha Joyce.
is it me being neurodivergent, or me just having christianity-brainwash to deal with, or me being neurodivergent AND brainwashed?! hard to tell, hard to tell.
Please get therapy, either way! <3
Huh. I didn’t twig on Joyce as being autistic; I definitely just assumed the first option. Defo agree with Felian that therapy is called for either way.
All of these kids need fucking therapy, in fact. I’m kind of aghast that no adult adults have insistently offered them some, what with the kidnapping. Kind of surprised Dorothy hasn’t insisted at least Joyce and Becky get therapy after the attempted rape, the rapist’s mutilation at the hands of Amber, TWO gunpoint kidnappings for Becky, the death of her father in front of her and resultant orphaning, I mean it’s been pretty Titus Andronicus around campus this year, jfc. Dina’s the only emotionally healthy person in the main cast, and the lonely weight of that is going to be a strain if this Gotham City shit keeps up
To be fair, it’s implied that, at the very least, Walky and Amber attended therapy, but that they weren’t very good therapists: it’s possible that the rest of the cast attended, but had the same problem.
I think I remember Jennifer saying she was in therapy. Ruth was definitely in there, too.
As someone on the road to ADHD diagnosis and probable autism, thank you for the awareness of adult diagnosis- it’s a hard road!
Well
That’s a twist.
Can’t say i expected it
I’ve worked with more than 300 autistic children in my secondary education years. I know very well from experience that diagnosing most girls is more difficult to get correct than diagnosing most boys. Masking alone can defeat ill-trained observation frequently.
While it’s possible that Joyce is on the autism spectrum, it’s also possible that she was just EXTREMELY NERVOUS about seeing a doctor for the particular reasons she was, and this nervousness manifested, in that moment, as the kind of atypical social behaviors that are more generally associated with autism. If you’re meeting someone for the first time and they are extremely confused or uncomfortable, they can quite easily manifest the same behaviors that often form the basis of an autism diagnosis, but they’re acute rather than chronic.
My answer to the doubters in the comments is that being autistic is not a bad thing and to stop focusing on over diagnosis which is an that prevents people from accessing necessary services. I know this cause there never seems to be a movement to actually increase funding in therapy for example, just denying people access to diagnosis and the drugs that might help them regulate their brain. Funny how that works.
I say this from a mood disorder and adhd perspective in particular, there’s not enough empowerment in health care in general, to trust the person asking for help is a rare thing.
So much more focus on will powering your way through life.
Also apologies for dramatics, but I only recently got a little healthier after a lifetime of struggle, and I would’ve gotten there sooner if I was trusted and informed about my health
I understand where you’re coming from, Florence.
but on the other hand I really don’t automatically blame any of them for being touchy about this, because some of them have actually suffered greatly as a result of a misdiagnosis, or watched it happen to someone they love.
I mean that in no way to invalidate what you’re saying, we DEFINITELY need to take the fucking hoops out of this system that stops people from getting the care they need, which might entail removing the requirement of diagnosis in the first place and instead focusing on individual patients with individualized problems that need individualized solutions
One of the most important things here though is that we never subject people to any treatment or put any label on them without their consent.
By the way thanks above for sharing what your autism is like for you, really appreciate your contribution to the Neurodivergence Mosaic!
I’m fully on board with empowering people to be valued individually, I just wish the energy was in that direction instead of fearmongering about over diagnosis.
Absolutely informed consent always
ya know i can’t say i saw this coming but it is not at all surprising once you lay joyce’s character all out. also now i understand why i found her so relatable despite actually being very different 🙂 lmao
shout out to my fellow undiagnosed adults who just barely missed the needed amount of markers to get an actual diagnosis as a child !!!!