g > Recent Status Updates

I have spent my life obsessing about how I think & explaining my experience to others curious as to why so few of them seemed to want to do the same thing.I never dreamed that I was a “type”;rather,I thought I was a one-in-a-billion occurrence,just a guy holding a unique point of view that he couldn’t let go of.That’s how I got started describing autism from the inside, without any of the medical terminology / stigma

Autistics die of suicide at higher rates than nonautistics across every age group and gender.We are overrepresented in the field of mental health issues. It’s not a coincidence but a confluence of problems pushing one another onward. I don’t think that our late-stage capitalism is a great environment for anyone, but for those with an extrasensitive nervous system, the evidence points to it being even more challenging

“You are often creating a mean version of yourself, full of the voices of the people who have tried and failed to socialize you into someone you’re not. They are the chiding voices of parents, teachers, coaches, and preachers coming through in your own voice and telling you who you are.”

“Unmasking means gaining agency in your own life and allowing yourself to control how much of you shows up at any given time. It means letting yourself shine through your circumstances, building on who you are, and no longer imitating who you think you should be”

“Let’s come to this understanding: Your mask was also you. It wasn’t your full self or your chosen self, but it was an aspect of yourself that you selected from a spectrum of selfhood. You didn’t fool anyone into liking you or feeling for you — never, not once. They like you, they feel for you, they chose you, they accept you”

“Spending a life pretending to be someone you’re not has led you to conclude that who you are is not good enough for anyone. You’ve convinced yourself that you’re not worthy of doing what you desire, spending time with the people you want to, and becoming the person you aspire to be.”

“Autistic adults in the thick of burnout will often notice that their skills seem to have declined. Their long-term, short-term, or working memories tend to be impaired. They can’t remember names or numbers, and in some cases, nouns don’t even come to them quickly enough (…) They can’t concentrate on books, and suddenly an avid reader feels like they’ve lost their ability to understand anything at all”

“Restraint collapse happens when you have been asked to hold back your impulses and not be yourself all day long, for days on end. It takes more cognitive energy to restrain and inhibit your thoughts and feelings than it does to express them. When you edit yourself for your surroundings all the time, you lose the habit of connecting with yourself at all”

“Having built our lives on masking, we become the person we are expected to be, which often means stretching ourselves in many directions or working harder than we should. Autistics and ADHDers hear that you’re supposed to “give 100 percent” at your job and take this literally, thinking there is a binary where you are absolutely slaying each and every minute or on the verge of being fired.”

“We can often feel like we have no control in our lives and are just hanging on, white-knuckling every day”

“Autistics spend much of their lives and energy masking, which means hiding great portions of themselves and mimicking neurotypical thinking styles. We can never fully do it, but we can look the part, and in doing so, we edit ourselves so much that our contributions amount to very little”

“There is no way for an autistic person to unconditionally “fit into” a company culture without masking unless that company’s culture is designed by autistic people. I can’t imagine that any minority group would be okay with these standards; as long as fitting into company culture is the top consideration for hiring and retaining employees, diversity doesn’t stand a chance.”

“Could Jamal have protected himself had he been “out” as autistic from the start? The answer is yes, so long as the company is legitimately neuroaffirming and educated enough to know what it means to operate that way. But without neurodivergent people in leadership positions, then it probably wouldn’t have protected him anyway.”

“Ask yourself: What are times in your life when you felt the most alive and in control? What were you doing, and was there something about the activity that would later make it inaccessible or prevent you from feeling “allowed” to do it? Is there an aspect of your identity that you were discouraged from expressing? When you hear your own name, does it sound like you?”

“When you learn how to mask, you learn how to people-please. And “if you’re a high-masking autistic who was also considered “gifted,” you earned a black belt in making your teachers happy long before you knew what you wanted out of life.”

is this play about me

…ways autism shows up and recognizing that this is a broad label that should have never brought shame to anyone doesn’t do a lot for your employment status, but it can certainly alleviate the big ball of shame you’ve been carrying around for your whole life.
That shame isn’t yours anymore.”

“Chances are, if you’re autistic, you’ve gone to therapy to rid yourself of character flaws that were really just...you. If you were diagnosed in school, you had the word autistic thrown at you like a slur. If you told a stranger you were autistic in an offhand way to explain an awkward moment, you were immediately infantilized and told what a “good job” you’re doing. Gaining a better understanding of the diverse…

“We can long for inclusion yet feel uncomfortable when it finds us, as there seems to be a social script we are missing — a handbook of expected behaviors and background subject matter that would make everyday life logical.”

parece que saiu da minha boca

What these people don’t understand is that the version of you they’re looking at is one you have allowed to be in the room. It’s a carefully cultivated, tip-of-the-iceberg aspect of your person.
They miss the disorganisation at home, the tears at the end of a workday, […] the communication errors that have made you an outcast, the intense “oversharing” that was so adorable on a first date and revolting on a third.

“The step right below denial is tacit denial, which is the basic acceptance that, while you might be autistic, autism itself isn’t a big deal. This flattening of the condition can be coupled with a comparison to someone […] who has much higher accommodation needs. Such a comparison attempts to prove that your particular brand of autism is mild, making your disclosure just a waste of breath.”

“What can be easily overlooked about coming out as autistic when you’re an adult is you already were — and always would be — autistic. It didn’t matter whether you described it that way, so far as the condition goes. However, naming the thing gives you access to a tool kit you didn’t have before.”

chapter 42

comenta sobre a proximidade de eros e a morte, de apocalipse e libertação, e sobre como (de forma paradoxa) a proximidade com a morte anima a principal e torna ela liberta das amarras do narcisismo - tornando também mais próxima ao Outro.