At some point, very early on, undiagnosed neurodivergent children are faced with a terrible dilemma.

They will tell someone they're in pain, someone they trust, and that person will say no they're not. That didn't hurt. It can't have. They're being selfish/dramatic/lying. The child has to get their head around it. They feel pain, but a trusted caregiver says they don't and they're being bad for saying so. How can it be true?

There are only two, bad, options.

The reason it takes autistic people forever to get used to something is because often, that's not actually what's happening.

"Getting used to" something is a phenomenon where over time you simply don't notice the thing even though nothing about it has changed. In almost all cases for me personally, when I appeared to get used to something (noise, a new work location, any change) what was actually happening is that I found ways to manage the sensory overwhelm, stress etc so that eventually I could do the thing without visible struggle.

Saddened to learn that eating around icing when you only like the cake is *checks notes* childish and passive aggressive because for years that was just how I ate cake. The icing is too sweet. @SBalveda @DecatHazel @phoenixashes199 The fact that it's a birthday kind of highlights this, because under one set of values a birthday celebration is something people do for you that you can only ever be grateful for, and under the other values, it's a day when your requests matter and should be respected.

It's me, your cranky neighbor who just complained about your kid's totally normal basketball game and said something about being "noise sensitive". Sounds like bullshit, right? Let me explain. I experience noise differently than most people. I know this because for my whole life, when I said something was too loud, everyone else said no it wasn't. But it was so painful and distracting for me that I was willing to go to any lengths to get away from it or make it stop.

I've been working a lot on self care. Not like bubble baths and glasses of wine. Like noticing my needs and wants and doing things that satisfy them. Like loving and accepting myself.

I've made some progress, so now I'm grieving how long this took and how I spent those years. I'm grieving how autism and being autistic in society damaged my relationship with my body. How often I was in pain or uncomfortable with sensory sensitivities, and ignored it, not taking even simple steps to make the situation better.

Thinking about the overfunctioning/underfunctioning dynamic and neurodivergent relationships.
wellandgood.com/overfunctionin… So the idea is, in any relationship (romantic, work, family) you can get an unhealthy dynamic where there's an overfunctioner and an underfunctioner. And it can slowly destroy the relationship. But as a society we tend to reward overfunctioning and eviscerate underfunctioning.

I've been thinking about receiving coaching and mentoring as an autistic employee a Lot and basically I do want mentoring but I want to be very purposeful and specific about it. When I changed fields from office admin to communications, I got the impression that I was expected to learn about my new field slowly, sort of by osmosis. Simply being around all my experienced colleagues would, over time, teach me about my new discipline.

That did not pan out.

I feel like a lot of the discourse around autistic people in the media speaks to the fact that autistic people have a culture and values of our own. Like the Spectrum article about how autistic people are upsetting researchers by speaking up at conferences and on social media.

If you have ever said an incorrect thing in front of an autistic person who understands that subject, you would know this is extremely on brand.

This reaction is why autistic people complain about how pathologized our condition is. You can't write a caption on a tiktok video ~of you~ without someone taking you to task for daring to have a hobby.

https://twitter.com/andee902/status/1621569083182387204

- "that's not an autism thing"
- "that's not one of the diagnostic criteria"
- "people think everything is autism"

No. Autistic people have been so dehumanized that as a society we have a hard time accepting the idea of an autistic person existing outside of the deficits model.

Allistics will be like "hey that was unexpected, is this like an autism thing" and the answer is usually yes but not in the way they're thinking. I was once in a creative team building session where we were asked to invent a hypothetical company or product so that we could go through an exercise to brainstorm its value and benefits.

I chose the same type of company as the one we worked for.

"Why would anyone purposely identify as autistic?"

This question sees autism in its stigmatized form as a series of deficits. Autistic people can experience deficits, but there is also such a thing as an autistic community, and that is an extremely valuable resource. Autistic people are valuable and worth associating with. Asking why anyone would choose this "label" (assuming the alternative is simply to continue passing as an average person, if that's what the individual was doing) assumes the opposite.

Part of the neurodivergent experience is all of the odd theories you come up with pre-diagnosis to explain your ""quirks"".

Not like the mean things people say ("you're just being oversensitive!") but your actual, best guess, working theory as to what your deal was. Years ago I read somewhere that your brain could either be good at reading faces or reading type but not both, and for a long time this was my entire theory of what was different about me.

Neuronormative work culture thinks it has rules. But I'm autistic and I know rules. What they have is more like guidelines.

Once I stopped expecting their rules to work like rules, I started learning much faster about how things really seem to work. At work, when we want something to happen or not happen, someone writes a policy. But who decides what the policy means? Because it's never indisputably clear. Who decides if it applies?

One of the most disappointing ironies of being autistic is that you're told, directly and frequently, that you are worse at communicating than other people - yet, when you ask other people to do literally anything associated with good communication, they flip out. Neuronormative culture doesn't have better communication skills, it just has better PR 😎

Late DX is wild because you have usually encountered at least 1 or 2 episodes of burnout by the time you learn you're autistic.

Late diagnosed autistics have to lean hard into self care and energy management just to have a shot at continuing to live independently long term.

https://twitter.com/autismsupsoc/status/1596907013199785984

People will say "you've changed since your DX" that is correct because now I know I'm not making things up and I have to move fast if I want to stop the anxiety roller coaster and build a sustainable life.

Neurodivergent screening tests will be like "do you struggle with wearing socks" and ND people will be like "nope does not describe me, for you see I have a System" and folks that is what the question is getting at (diagnostic tests don't really ask about socks AFAIK but I think it's a good example because of all of the elaborate sock systems I've seen people develop)

An important gesture in neurotypical culture is that if you know someone is going to have A Reaction to what you're going to tell them, you should take steps to let them process their feelings on the spot, such as allowing them to express their emotions. This might look like pausing after giving the news to allow time for a reaction, quietly assuming that the person's initial reaction is not their final thought on the subject, or choosing not to get defensive or correct the other person when you might do so normally.