I hate the way neurotypicals labelled me gifted just because I had a hungry learning style, then completely neglected my functioning needs and mental health once I started deteriorating in secondary school. It bolstered my ego for a while but that actually endangered me more because it led me to expose myself to NT life pathways that burned me out & traumatized me.

I resent the concept of giftedness now. It's a way for NTs to commoditize the useful bits of neurodivergent brains.

Still investigating what it means to be semi-speaking and why it is that way.

A little thread. #ActuallyAutistic It's not being able to produce enough words to satisfy allistic standards.

It's not being able to put a sentence together internally and speak it in time.

It's not being able to pass the internal quality filter.

It's being blank despite the pressure or necessity to speak.

Just realized that nuclear fusion is an accurate metaphor for #ActuallyAutistic school refusal/non-attendance.

I exerted vast amounts of energy, designing my whole life around this routine, only for a miniscule amount of learning to be generated in return. The morning routine, the journey to school, being in school, the journey home, and the long recovery period took an obscene amount of time and energy from me.

All of it, in fact.

And the required recovery time was longer than the time available to me.

💔 I keep feeling this heartbreak that allistics want to eradicate me. They only want an allistic planet. They consider me to be deficient, broken, sub-human and requiring "prevention" from existing.

#ActuallyAutistic Allistics' sense of supremacy is so ironic. They exhibit deficits in so many things, like tolerance, imagination, empathy, rationality, sensory joy, systematizing.

And yet they consider me the deficient one. They're foolish and arrogant.

Verbal instructions from me to myself : absolutely necessary for overcoming ADHD inattention and Autistic inertia

Verbal instructions from other people : huh?

#ActuallyAutistic #adhdtwitter Sometimes I'm oblivious while doing a task because I'm busy fixating on a thought stream, then realize I've finished a task but can't remember what I just did.

So I have to look around me and declare to myself what I just did.

"I just ate dinner."

#adhdtwitter

Centenarians/supercentenarians are one of my special interests but the recommendations for a long life are always frustrating.

It's basically, "be neurotypical, abled and don't be a marginalized person". Many autistics are introverted (either naturally or exogenic due to trauma), awkward, multiply & repeatedly traumatized, terrified in social situations, and unable to adapt to a hostile, rigid and inaccessible allistic society.

We are passionate, goal oriented & creative though.

If my age 14 burnout, in which I "regressed" and lost all of my functioning skills, had happened when I was 4 years old, I would have been diagnosed as #ActuallyAutistic in a heartbeat.

In my case, the only difference between "high functioning" and "profound" Autism, is age. A seemingly functional 14 year old girl with an advanced reading age, doing well in all her subjects, previously a "delight to have" etc ...

... gradually became a non-verbal school refuser who didn't bathe, barely ate, had no friends.

This was something neurotypical schooling just didn't get. I couldn't wake up twenty minutes before school like other people, even if it had been across the road (it wasn't).

I needed 2 hours to process the sensory discomfort of every morning task & mentally prepare for school.

https://twitter.com/JoanneLimburg/status/1488844655030644738

I'd wake up at 4am, after just a couple of hours sleep due to delayed sleep phase; spend two hours getting ready; leave at 6am.

I needed to get there early before it got too busy. I needed to be at my quiet spot in the library before 8am.

"Learned helplessness" was really one of the most damaging psychiatric concepts for me as an unknowingly Autistic person.

Being told that systemic inaccessibility, hidden disability, alienation & burnout was just a figment of my imagination was unhelpful. It was basically the "problem" my Sixth Form CAMHS interventionists tried to address. If I could just remind myself of all the nice abled things other people believed about me, my grades & mental health would magically fix themselves.

Don't know whether my executive functioning has got worse or I've just underestimated it until now, but these days I find myself having to verbally narrate every aspect of a task in order to get anything done. "Open the oven. Okay, now tray. Put tray in oven. Close oven. Mitts. Knife in wash. Grater. Now we fetch carrot ..."

I go on and on like this, otherwise I will just stare into space and daydream, forgetting the task or be unable to initiate it.

#adhdautism

It regularly shocks me that there are no official resources or recognition of Autistic-specific cPTSD. We are just expected to be okay with the way we are treated.

Eihter because they don't see anything wrong with it, or we're not human, or both. When I'm in a spiral I find myself googling for help even though I know it's just gonna make me feel worse. "Disorder"/deficit language is everywhere & recognition of Autistic PTSD is only in relation to specific events unrelated to neurotype that could traumatize anyone.

Going through all my childhood books filled with #ActuallyAutistic drawings and writing (I have dozens of books), and there are some striking themes that repeat themselves.

So, a thread on hypergraphic Autistic play! 1) Lists. So many lists. 📃

Lists of books, artists, shows, movies, people, food, vocabulary.
Information sorted into categories from memory.
Imaginary budgets with items listed from catalogues.

I used 100s of notebooks & did this for years. Notepads/paper was my main "toy".

Constantly thinking about how capitalist society structurally excludes and harms me as a neurominority, and how Westerners spent 500 years systematically eradicating societies that could have taught us how to *not* structurally exclude neurominorities.

💔 Heartbreak. It's annoying to see Conservative and centrist types who believe that this is just how things always have been and the only way to live. That only *wage* labour is valuable. The individualist bootstrapper mentality is a symptom of urbanisation and white supremacy.

I usually avoid the subject because it's triggering and enraging but I just took a BPD quiz to compare the symptoms with #ActuallyAutistic/ND experiences and it's horrifyingly similar. No wonder there are so many neurodivergents misdiagnosed with this offensive label 😔 BPD "intense emotions".
Actually: Hyperempathy and the pain of daily allistic microaggressions. Very reasonable.

BPD "unreasonable anger".
Actually: Meltdowns from sensory or information overload, pain of being gaslit, insulted or misunderstood constantly. Very reasonable.

I feel like even the cognitive empathy deficit of Autism is wrong for me. I have plenty of cognitive empathy, in fact I think I consider multiple perspectives more than allistics do. I can hypothesize other people's suffering just fine, it's the empathic part that I feel less. But when I do feel the empathic part, I feel it intensely because it's a situation that would deeply hurt me too if it was me. But there are certain types of suffering that I just don't feel because it's not driven by the same value system as allistics.