You know, reflecting on how I used to feel before I knew I was autistic and had reasonable but different limits, I think about how often I felt like "I don't want to do X" but did it anyway.

And I think about how "I don't want to" is a box that could hold one of many things.
Now it's never "I don't want to X", it's often "I don't have the energy for X" or "I'd prefer not to have to do X if Y is going to be there" or "Doing X is really loud and therefore painful".

And how before I started getting to know myself I just thought I didn't want to do X.
I used to think "I don't feel good" or "I feel good". Now I think "I'm proud of the work I did today but bothered by my friend's comment and a little bit anxious about that family thing next weekend" etc.

These things can be learned - it's just sometimes we don't learn them.
What I'm describing is something called "alexithymia", or the inability to label one's own feelings. It's common in autistic people, and also in men steeped in toxic masculinity.

What do these groups have in common?
They're both situations where someone experiences emotions that are then not reflected back at them by others.

If you're in toxic masculine culture having feelings other than anger you won't see those feelings validated.

Same if you grow up having autistic emotional responses.
Being autistic means being delighted by some beautiful observation and being mocked for your joy. It means being hurt badly by something that other people have deemed harmless. It means your internal state is rarely reflected in how people treat you.
Growing up like that means you don't learn to associate complex inner states with these things called "emotions" that other people seem to have with so much nuance, kind of.

You never map your inner states to the linguistic model everyone else is using for discussing emotion.
But with time and attention you can learn, as an adult, to start to interrogate your inner state for more and more details. It turns out those details are there, you just have to kinda figure out how to learn to listen to them -- and unlearning the walls you built against them.

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More from @mykola

11 May
A hundred years ago the modernist era in literature was thriving.

The entire social order of western civilization had just been burned away in a senseless war. Identity had to be created from scratch. You couldn’t just go on being the person you’d been, the world had ended!
Writers like Virginia Woolf and James Joyce and Ford Madox Ford took as their themes this deep into identity, but crucially into identity as defined in opposition or contrast to society at large.

Put bluntly: these people wrote about ND experiences suddenly being valid.
Here in 2021 we are in a similar cultural moment. The old world, where media decides truth, is over. We’re in a post-truth postmodern future, and we are once again in a place where identity itself is broken.
Read 8 tweets
9 May
I still think sometimes about the therapist who didn’t believe I was autistic but was down with me having aspergers. She argued that collapsing the distinction was purely “political” and I didn’t understand enough at the time to see the red flags.
This was in the US.

So yes, medical professionals are still using “aspergers” here, and there are parts of the world where “aspergers” is still diagnosed.

That doesn’t make it ok. We are working to remove it for a reason. It just means “this autistic could speak as a kid.”
If you personally received an aspergers diagnosis that’s great, I’m not saying you’re a nazi.

I’m saying consider the reasons why that phrase was phased out and consider adjusting accordingly.
Read 4 tweets

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