This was ingrained into me. When I needed some form of help but was interpreted as not needing it for whatever reason I’d get a “do you know what x person went through for you??” Style lecture, especially if I had the audacity to still be experiencing a problem after

Stop saying you know if you haven’t done it. If you knew you would have done it.

Edit: /s, was supposed to jokingly drop one of the canned responses we all receive from dumb people

A different set of strengths can form the illusion of “powers” if the majority of the people with those strengths are gatekept by ableist systems. I think part of this is just a massive filtration of neurodivergent people who make it into the professional world at every level followed by the observation that we are rare afterward. Well, we aren’t, just the ones that succeeded with no systemic backing are rare.

Discovery did emotional payoff for characters it never used all the time. Or like, emotional payoff was a sign that they were about to get used the first time. Discovery really wore it’s emotional payoff on its sleeve.

I totally understand the difficulty of this. I’d say it took years for the frustration of not finishing things to override the resistance to picking up the old save.

I started picking up old saves instead of restarting and now I finish them eventually. So then when you abandon the game you can say you’ll get to it on a future iteration of this cycle.

Yes, and I used to get right to it and do it guilt free, but the negative association with having those things punished as a child and teen made it harder to enjoy things permanently. I think paradigms for raising kids right now kind of do this to kids that get fixated on stuff. There’s gotta be a way to nurture the deep enjoyment of things and still get the kid to eat and sleep and go to school (which is also broken and might make the whole thing harder to fix).

Being the autistic person on the receiving end of this sort of communication can be kind of frustrating ngl

Those little classroom assignments were definitely not all spelled out from the start and that’s what I didn’t have the capacity to participate in all the time. But say I started off at like 70% capacity. Getting hounded and called lazy and sometimes actually punished during that extra 30% causes my capacity to go down to say 60%. Then I’m being hounded and punished 40% of the time which has an even bigger effect and basically keeps my burnout at 100% and my ability to participate suppressed to 0. The lower my total capacity for participation is the more severe consequences start to be too. Punishments become more likely for sure. This starts to turn into a really wide scope of trauma.

When I reach level 2 I feel like I’ve ascended, but I often get stuck on 1.

To add to this point slightly, I also did literally say out loud many times that the school work is dumb and I refused, if that makes me sound more like your brother. That is because at even younger ages, I’d been punished and abused out of using the phrase “I can’t” for things they’ve seen me do at least one time before. Things escalated and got much more harsh when I tried to say it, so I was forced to switch to lies, elitist posturing, emotional manipulation, anything that would end the interaction without “I can’t.” Eventually I forgot that I can’t and started believing a subset of my lies.

I am a firm believer that the phenomenon of “just a lazy fuck” doesn’t exist. I don’t know your brother, but I know the terms in which you refer to him were used on me pretty much just like that. And the reasons why those things were happening didn’t come to light until long after the era in which the terms were used. Even after the first couple diagnoses, my IEP (sheet teachers have that says what they have to accommodate for you) didn’t say anything that really related to any of the problems I was actually literally having. The cruel irony is that it said I needed longer on tests, which I never needed and was the only thing I was even successful at. Lazy is just a way to stereotype people who’s problems you’ve given up on.

In most cases the more aggressive forms of force came from well meaning people that started out with the type you describe, with a very gradual escalation. The problem is that my burnout was compounding, not reducing, over time when I tried to comply which would lead to this increasing dread over time and eventually would lead to just a total failure. When I reach total failure, they just keep on pressing until it’s a more overt form of abuse. The more overt forms only came out initially a very small number of times. So I really was talking about the sort of force you’re describing, but on a sort of spectrum that leads to the sort you were inferring.

Sorry to reply to two of your comments, but to specifically address “people like us need to be forced to do things”, but people trying to force me and belittling me when I just could not in the end, is what gave me cptsd. There definitely are other ways than force, and for me force just isn’t even a way. For me, seeking out that sort of force would be a form of self harm that would only serve to drive and reinforce my (now dissipating) self hatred. Maybe for others it is a form of self harm that also gets results, or maybe for others it just isn’t harmful, I can’t be sure, but we can’t be forcing it on every kid.

I am a 100% work from home worker and have gotten more work done that way than ever before. Of course, all in person management leads to me shutting down and eventually losing my ability to do anything once I’m done with my reserve of will to push through the burnout.

I will admit there was a learning curve. I had to learn how to arrange my tasks so that it works for me. I don’t “sit down” for a 9-5 work day any more than I have a dedicated session to do any personal task. I wake up and I’m kind of on a cooldown management system. From the moment I get out of bed, and I don’t get out of bed until I’m rested and have a plan, I just pick what the best priority task would be to do, cool down from the picking, do any amount of work on that task that moves the needle, only ever pushing into potential burnout territory if I’ve fallen short of moving the needle at all. If it’s a rough day I’ll go back into cooldown after any needle movement at all. If it’s a great day I’ll get it and the next thing done. I cool down and task pick all day until I’m pretty much out of gas for the day.

Sometimes I’m netting a loss of ground on tasks but never go into free fall. Over the broader course of my life id say I’m netting a gain, but time will tell, and this lifestyle is really only possible as a remote working software developer. The only real exception to that is setting alarms for meetings, which are my only “schedule” requirement, and my alarm happens just in time to grab my laptop and get on.

Actually I’ve got diagnoses of autism, ADHD, and cptsd. Cptsd is the newest diagnosis that explains a lot. But my current therapist seems to be the only person I’ve met (including previous therapists) who affirms the ND sort of view of the world to the point where theyd likely agree with the post. That also includes friends with ADHD diagnoses who definitely accept my ND talk in regards to autism but seem to be hard rooted in the institutional view of their own (and my) adhd. So I sort of didn’t take it for granted that an ADHD community would see eye to eye on this stuff, but I am really glad that ADHD people who see it exist in some number because it seems like proof I might not be just a stubborn hold out jerk who refuses to participate.

Sorry just to clarify, I wasn’t involved in education at that time, but given that the only solution that’s ever worked for my task management (asynchronous, self directed) was rushed through during a life or death emergency, then that example used to prove it can’t happen is pretty rough for potential future me like people out there.

I think that sort of learning was rushed through during the pandemic and has never been given a real shot.

I agree that this was a great episode. The relationship between the leader and his backward aide was done beautifully and it was really poignant how the aide got his way by proving he’s a jackass.

For me it helped to address why I made them in the first place. When I was younger (and now), the real reason was always that my executive function just needed more cooldown time or at least a different sort of activity than the one that I was lying about. That wasn’t language I had access to at the time. The closest thing I had was “I can’t”, which adults never let me say because it was always in relation to things they’d seen me do before, so they couldn’t fathom that I couldn’t do it then. So I had to make something up. But in my current adult life, actually, people recognize what my struggles are and understand if I just say what really did happen (executive function misfire). Or if I don’t know them that well I just say something personal came up, which is what an executive function misfire is, no lie, they just aren’t privy to stuff that personal.