BeautifulMind ♾️

Late-diagnosed autistic, special interest-haver, dad, cyclist, software professional

  • 10 Posts
  • 16 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • I usually use the name of the drug when there are multiple brands with trade names for it, or when there are trade-name drugs that use multiple formulations with different ingredients.

    For example, famotodine is the active agent in Pepcid and Zantac. Omeprazole is sold as Prilosec and Losec. Acetaminophen is in Tylenol, Tempra, and Panadol

    When I want Pseudoephedrine and not phenylephrine, they’re both branded under the trade name ‘Sudafed’ but only one of them really works for sinus pressure.

    When I want Dextromethorphan or Guaifenesin (active ingredients in Robitussin) there are lots of other brands (Nyquil, dayquil, etc) that deliver them and knowing which drug is which and what part they do means I can pick which one to use if I don’t want the other one’s shitty side effects.









  • Most of the things in the list above are just circumstances where misunderstandings arise and it’s not uncommon for autistic self-care (like withdrawing, not paying attention, etc) to be mistaken for disrespect.

    When I was a kid, these misunderstandings sometimes led to me getting beat up. Now that I’m a larger-than-average adult man, the bullying and schoolyard nonsense doesn’t happen but the misunderstandings and ensuing anger can take the form of grievances that have a way of turning into career-limiting drama. It’ still bullying, it’s just done the way adults bully.

    These are all deeply frustrating, circumstantially stupid, and they all arise from an ignorant mistake in which me being inattentive or low on social energy or just having a hard time turns into them ‘feeling disrespected’.

    It can be exhausting when people take offense when none was honestly on offer- and the resulting dominance nonsense that sometimes ensues when they’re petty about it has me a little convinced that too many adult people out there really don’t distinguish between respect and submission to their weird dominance games




  • Sorry if this seems stupid.

    It’s not stupid. It’s where I was for a while (I’m in my 50s now) figuring a d/x would tell me what I probably already knew but would also carry a bit of a stigma with it. Like you, I’d learned to adapt, but the thing I didn’t see for myself was how hard I’d been working to hide that there was anything to adapt to.

    At my wife’s urging, I sought an evaluation and in retrospect I’m very glad I did. The results came back mostly telling me things I already knew (I’m super-smart in specific ways, distinctly average in particular ways) but the thing I didn’t see coming was that a d/x would put my marriage in the context of my Autism, and that means my wife gives me grace she didn’t before when it comes to my hyperfocus and attention deficits, for when I need to leave social situations because I’m out of my social-energy budget, stuff like that.

    Things that used to annoy or embarrass my wife (that when a social situation became too much for me I’d ghost, that I’d struggle in circumstances where unfairness feels intolerable, etc.) now show up to her as me responsibly doing self-care, or as me living my values as my identity- and instead of bending herself to fixing those broken parts of me, she understands that these are just me doing my best job of peopling in the face of how my brain works. Long story short, being understood in this light gets me better understood, I’ll never regret it. Not feeling like I’m an imposter with broken parts that must be hidden is sooooo good.

    After recognizing the value of this dynamic in my marriage (and in my relationships with my wife’s friends) I made it a project to recreate it in my workplace- and it happens that as my co-workers re-contextualized my foibles and eccentricities into that light, it became a lot easier for me to ask the kinds of questions I’ve long not asked for fear of looking dumb- and they’re more than happy to answer and so much has gotten so much easier. Not feeling like I have to mask is a great big relief.

    Along the way, freeing myself up in the contexts of my marriage and in my career, I’ve found ways to be a better parent as well as be a husband and co-worker. It’s as if masking doesn’t work.

    Of course, like any good denizen of the spectrum™, I’ve made unpacking my own neurodiversity into a special interest. It explains soooo much. (there’s too much to pithily explain, I’ll spare you the info dumping in this thread)

    Perhaps non-intuitively, recognizing all the ways I’ve been living life the hard way (masking, avoiding social interactions I’ve been thirsty to participate in for fear of being too weird) brings quite a bit of grief with it- why did I do all that the hard way when it’s easier not to? Processing all of that is quite a bit of work, but it’s oh so liberating.


  • There’s so much.

    • My sports- all of them are things I got into and hard- They became my special interests. I’d get so deeply into whitewater kayaking that eventually I would paddle with professionals and other experts, become an instructor and influencer myself- and then, move on to other so-called ‘extreme’ sports like backcountry skiing and rock climbing- and today, competitive cycling.

    • My ability to disappear into writing code for hours without awareness of time elapsing.

    • That I’ve figured out I need a place to retreat to in social situations when I’m out of social energy, but didn’t understand that was a thing for neuro-spicy folk. When attending social occasions with my wife, we’ve figured out it’s best to take 2 cars so I can bail on the scene when doing that becomes a matter of self-care.

    • The experience, when trying to explain my experiences, of my brain opening multiple browser-tabs as mental placeholders for tangents the conversation has taken or might take

    • The experience of understanding an idea or dynamic in terms that aren’t language-bound (like it might have a shape, or play out as a dialectic, or have tensors representing oppositional vectors in its space), then having to translate it into language regular people find accessible

    • The constant concern about being misunderstood because it seems to happen so often

    • The white-hot sense of justice and how not living up to my own standards can be intolerable



  • Isn’t that in the Torah?

    Yes, it’s in Exodus. Exodus is part of the Torah, as well as the Old Testament, along with Leviticus. The Torah is the first 5 books (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy)

    Leviticus (11:9-12) is where shellfish are banned, mixed seed or fabrics (19:19) It is where modern Christians cherry-pick their justifications on being anti-LGBTQ. (Lev. 18:22, 20:13)

    Point is, they cherry-pick from the Old Testament when it suits them, and if you look at the rest of the rules in the books they reference that they ignore (e.g. tattoos, touching pig skin, eating pork, shellfish, etc. etc. ) it’s totally fair game to point out the rules they ignore in the same books as the ones they cite.







  • I think it’s probably helpful to put words like ‘normal’ into their proper context- it’s a statistics term, not a baseline from whence deviation is morally fraught or anything.

    We’re different, not worse.

    Consider, if you will, the hypothetical in which you, a normal healthy human, visit Krypton and discover that the doors to their buildings are all high up, no need for stairs because *normal *people there can fly. In this sense, you are not accommodated in exactly the same way that a wheelchair-bound person is not accommodated when the stairs into our buildings aren’t accompanied by a ramp.

    On Krypton, you are handicapped not because of how you are, but because they don’t accommodate that. On Earth, the wheelchair-bound person is handicapped because we don’t always accommodate their needs. In neurotypical culture, being different only becomes a handicap when the people around you are unable or unwilling to accommodate you being you.

    We didn’t get the same degree of neural pruning when it was time for neurotypicals to get that, and it means we tend to process substantially more information- and the things our brain picks out as interesting aren’t always the normal, expected ones.

    The ‘disorder’ arises only when other people can’t meet you halfway, it’s not you.