Share this page!

your friend myk Profile picture
Twitter logo
2 Jul, 8 tweets, 2 min read
I think a lot about a guy I used to know. Undx’d adhd, in retrospect. We used to work together, at a college job. I knew him from age 18.

He was handsome and he was charming and he was wildly alcoholic.

He hurt a bunch of my female friends in ways I couldn’t understand at first
Alcohol made him uninhibited, and girls liked him, and he just… used them up. With no regard for their humanity. Serial cheater when in relationship, serial creep when not.
Ultimately he really hurt someone I cared about, and I cut ties with him. But I did it slowly and casually without making a big deal out of it, and I regret that.
Dude just needed someone to tell him he was being a borderline rapey creep and needed to stop, but he was so charming that conversation just never happened.

Everyone enabled him, thought it was funny.
Anyway, I don’t live there anymore or so any of those people anymore. But the OP’s tweet has had me thinking about this guy, who was my best friend for a while.

Alcohol ruined him. He was fine sober.
This is true, sadly.
We used to have long winding conversations about ethics and metaphysics. Then he discovered that he was irresistible to drunk college girls and he was lost forever.

He knew he had a problem, too. He didn’t know how to stop. That was one of the last conversations we had.
Also this. We were in our 20s in Ohio, nobody had a therapist and nobody knew anything about what it meant to be emotionally healthy.

Whole swathes of America are like that from birth to death.

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
　

Keep Current with your friend myk

your friend myk Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @mykola

your friend myk Profile picture
3 Jul
You’re the main character, but you’re also the story.

The story is the main character in a story about itself, which is itself.

See?

What kind of story are you?
This is kind of what therapy helps with. Talk therapy is about telling your story over and over until the contradictions and compromises fall out.

In a very real way, getting your life together is a question of getting your story straight.
We are narrative animals. It’s the fundamental truth of our nature that we exist as characters within stories that exist within the confabulator running on our brain hardware.

No wonder we get confused! Reality is virtual, and those dynamics are non-obvious!
Read 4 tweets
your friend myk Profile picture
3 Jul
Image
Baldwin wrote about how our pain and struggles are universal. How the oppressed, along any axis, share some of the same identity-shaping forces.
But even beyond oppression - suffering is suffering. Oppressors and oppressed alike suffer, because to live is to suffer. And on that axis, we ARE all one.

Our work is to remove our own capacity to oppress, even ourselves.
Read 4 tweets
your friend myk Profile picture
2 Jul
I am disabled and I am proud.

It took me a long time to realize that. I was 34 when I learned I was autistic, 35 when I first considered myself disabled. It took a long time to get comfortable with that word.

Ableism in society means we internalize contempt for the disabled.
So many disabled people don’t know they’re disabled, because they feel like normal human beings and they think “disabled” means something other than that. I was in this camp forever too. It gets programmed into us by society.
Some ways disability manifests:

Do you struggle with things that others have no problem with?

Are you spending more energy than your family or friends or coworkers to achieve the same outcome?

Are you tired all the time from living at your limits?

Huh.
Read 14 tweets
your friend myk Profile picture
29 Jun
ME is one of the most debilitating conditions you've probably never heard of. Learn this today:

Most people with ME consider the CFS part to be dismissive and outdated. "Chronic Fatigue Syndrome" is such a misleading term that the doctor who coined it later apologized. #pwme
ME has always been with us -- some people, after they get a virus or have certain other kinds of trauma, experience ongoing symptoms that disable them for the rest of their lives.

During pandemics, we see waves of ME sweep across populations. Lots of #LongCovid patients have it.
But here's the catch: despite 9000 different biomedical findings in ME patients and despite ME being classified as a neuroimmune condition, there are still tons of doctors who treat it is as psychosomatic. Why?
Read 8 tweets
your friend myk Profile picture
29 Jun
The one we never shipped, where we built a distributed graph database with a built-in compute fabric using event sourcing and immutable delta CRDTs.

The value is in what it taught me, from writing a binary format to wrangling Hadoop to how products can fail.
What if you wrote a database that didn't store state? What if you only tracked changes, via append-only logs of (hypernode) events carrying relational data between different nodes in your hypergraph?
What if state could be derived at any time from those changes? So you could pre-populate a downstream SQL database by parsing the changes and turning them into SQL writes. You could group events by target for quicker queries.
Read 24 tweets
your friend myk Profile picture
26 Jun
This is a good question, what’s the difference between masking and simply using social skills that are maybe harder to learn?

Masking to me involves fear - a fear of being perceived as a fraud, a poser behind social skills, maybe? There’s an edge.
I’m having Interesting Thoughts based on some excellent replies.

What if what we call masking is a response to dealing with shame, and autistic people mask so much because we are taught to literally be ashamed of who we are?

Everyone masks a little, maybe. But we hide so much.
My advice to people who want to stop masking has long been “your shame is a map to those parts of yourself you were taught to hate, and so need more love.”

What if it IS that simple? Autistic trauma leads to toxic shame leads to masking.
Read 11 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!

This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Too expensive? Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal Become our Patreon

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us on Twitter!

Like this author's thread?

Get emails when @mykola has new unrolls!

Check out other threads from @mykola!

Read all threads by @mykola

:(