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Falconier111 posted:I will always feel somewhat bitter that COVID has directly improved my life; I’ve gone from unemployed, isolated, and lacking prospects to someone with an established internet presence and a job that gives me everything down to dental, both specifically because of the opportunities being trapped at home afforded to me. I know the same didn’t happen for everyone, of course, but I cannot deny it happened to me. I owe my future to pain and suffering on a grand scale and I’ll never be able to forget that. Just curious, what kind of job is it?
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Aug 14, 2021 01:03
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Has anyone here been in any "gifted" programs as kids? My elementary school never had a gifted program as such but me and the other kids that were good at reading got to do a literature circle. Just wondering how many gifted kids were actually neurodivergent.
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Aug 14, 2021 05:33
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Violet_Sky posted:Has anyone here been in any "gifted" programs as kids? My elementary school never had a gifted program as such but me and the other kids that were good at reading got to do a literature circle. Just wondering how many gifted kids were actually neurodivergent. I was in both "gifted" and special ed until they decided I was too much trouble to have a real education All the "gifted" poo poo was dumb as gently caress anyway
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Aug 14, 2021 05:49
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Violet_Sky posted:Has anyone here been in any "gifted" programs as kids? The kids that were my friends left in 5th grade so I buried my head in books instead of socializing. Which served me well through the rest of public Ed by building vocabulary. Was pretty much the weird smart kid ever since, carrying a dictionary in my backpack for when I was bored. (Apparently looking up words you didn't know was super weird poo poo?) Had to transfer tracks in Jr High for the Honors program, which was mostly a more specialized course of study with teachers in a kind of team instead of random assignments to whoever was period 4 humanities and whatnot. Honors in high school, then AP stuff. It was super weird to walk into, like, Biology and hear "The Honors teachers had a meeting yesterday and we kept mentioning you". Probably because I said poo poo like "Stop asking religious questions, unless you can point to biological evidence of a soul" and devoured the books we had in English. World History was way boring, though. Then I pretty much imploded in college until I decided to pursue stuff I enjoyed like Lit. Sorry Ma, your boy ain't that smart after all maybe. Thinking back, public school could have been a wash. I was maybe bored or too shy in 1st grade, and my teacher fycking hated my guts so I never could do the cool science time stuff. I was in advanced reading and when it was my turn to read in a "mouse voice" I quietly said "but I don't know how to do a mouse voice" and she yelled at me for being a lazy, lazy kid. Then my 2nd grade teacher was over the loving moon about me for some reason and I was like "Oh. I'm not a useless fuckup!" FilthyImp fucked around with this message at 07:50 on Aug 14, 2021 |
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Aug 14, 2021 07:46
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Violet_Sky posted:Has anyone here been in any "gifted" programs as kids? My elementary school never had a gifted program as such but me and the other kids that were good at reading got to do a literature circle. Just wondering how many gifted kids were actually neurodivergent. Throughout school I was either in accelerated, gifted courses or remedial courses. Just depended on who decided what was best for me!
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Aug 15, 2021 10:20
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To some degree I have to imagine that some kids with autism in the 90s ended up shoved into some kind of extra school stuff for kids who read good or whatever just because some of us didn't act or talk like the rest of the kids, and without much insight, not outwardly reacting as intensely as others could be seen as something you're not doing involuntarily, like you're actually more "mentally mature" but really they just didn't have the whole picture. I remember when I was in first or second grade, they had me read books to a handful of other kids who were 1 year younger. I also always scored really high on basically any test that was about having a good understanding of concepts in English, even if I didn't know why my answers were right. When I'm tested for stuff about conceptual understanding, like that part of the WAIS where they have you identify connections between things that are totally unrelated, and they're just seeing how far you can reach and not accept that there's no connection, I score high on that stuff. To me, all of that is pattern recognition. By contrast, on the same battery of tests, there's one where the clinician tells you a short story by reading it aloud, and you are supposed to try to remember it and tell it back to them. I don't remember all the numbers for the rest, but on that test, I got a 75, and this is a 75 on a test where the average is 100 on a normal distribution with a standard deviation of 15. 75 is abysmal. I had a course in college for financial statement analysis where the professor was a CPA and the midterm was nothing but math problems where they'd give you some values for variables that were abbreviations like return on investment, return on asset turnover, and so on. The answer would be another variable, and to find the answer, you'd need to remember what the abbreviations meant, which abbreviations could be combined to give you the answer you needed, which abbreviations provided could give you those abbreviations you needed if you combined them, and which operations were needed between those abbreviations. I couldn't do it. It was a 2 hour test and there were only 50 questions, but I had to check the meaning of those abbreviations for every single question because I could not remember them for the life of me. It wasn't even hard math, it was just multiplication and division. On that battery of tests it said my aptitude for math was just average, not bad, but because even though I could understand complex concepts seemingly intuitively, I couldn't cement such a rigid set of variables into my head, I ended up sending the email to the professor during the midterm that I was dropping the class. He was confused because he thought I'd do well on it. There are a lot of facets to what people think of as intelligence, and it's why I don't care much for placing value on "smart". There are tons of people I've met that people would say are slow or even just frustratingly dumb as gently caress, and sometimes people think that about me too. Why place any value on that when I could instead pay attention to whether someone's a good person? Lots of those people that get dismissed as dumb are really good, and lots of people who would be called smart are shitheads who have absolutely nothing to offer.
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Aug 15, 2021 11:43
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I was tested for the gifted program, but my ADHD and general self-destructive behavior kicked in and I bombed the tests.
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Aug 15, 2021 11:47
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Funny thing is I was born in 93. I guess schools take longer to update? In related news, I have a friend who works as a para (I think that's what they call it) in an elementary school. Apparently the teacher writes the day's schedule on the board and the kids can get small breaks if they feel overstimulated. Why didn't they have this when I was in school? 
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Aug 16, 2021 00:41
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I was an above average student who had real trouble doing their homework. I had my share of problems and they weren't ignored by the school, but autism never came up, even when they ordered me to see the school doctor and asked my parents to have me go to a therapist.
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Aug 16, 2021 11:31
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signalnoise posted:There are a lot of facets to what people think of as intelligence, and it's why I don't care much for placing value on "smart". There are tons of people I've met that people would say are slow or even just frustratingly dumb as gently caress, and sometimes people think that about me too. Why place any value on that when I could instead pay attention to whether someone's a good person? Lots of those people that get dismissed as dumb are really good, and lots of people who would be called smart are shitheads who have absolutely nothing to offer. I absolutely agree. Intelligence is overrated. Being a nice person is far and away a more valuable trait. Plus, the popular definition of intelligence doesn't get nearly the whole picture. I once knew a fella who could sculpt rock walls, an infamously difficult structure to build, with ease. Dude could legit read natural rock and make it fit together perfectly. I once watched this dude drop forty rocks in a day, which is an insane amount to fit properly in a rock wall in a day. He had an intuitive understanding of using the terrain to the advantage of the trail builder. He had a fantastic memory for detail. He also probably the most dyslexic person I have ever met. Dude legit could barely read at a 3rd grade level. He was honestly convinced he was a complete moron because he struggled so nightly with reading and reading comprehension. This guy had a mind like a steel trap and a spatial understanding I have never seen since and he thought he was stupid because he couldn't read this idiotic made up language we speak.
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Aug 18, 2021 13:57
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Does anyone else have a social life trajectory that goes something like this? I was largely oblivious to social cues as a younger kid. Didn't know when jokes went too far, didn't know when people didn't give a poo poo about any given topic I was talking about, and other stuff that tends to happen when you're too focused on inward thoughts. One day in like 6th grade or so one of my few friends told me offhand during a walk home (but with complete sincerity), "Dude, everyone thinks you're literally retarded." I'd always had doubts about my intelligence, so this really sent me into a tailspin. I barely said poo poo to anyone outside my small circle of friends for the rest of middle school and I largely squandered my social life in high school and college because I was terrified of saying something awkward or dumb so making friends became even more difficult. I became *extremely* sensitive to any remark that came off as even slightly patronizing and would use those remarks as proof that everyone thought I was loving stupid. It took me until my mid 20's to regain my self confidence and stop giving a gently caress about impressing absolutely everyone. Nowadays, I'm doing just fine. I have a family and a bigger circle of friends than ever. I just sometimes look back at all the wasted social opportunities and wish it all could have gone down differently.
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Aug 22, 2021 04:23
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ProperGanderPusher posted:"Dude, everyone thinks you're literally retarded." In 4th grade, my mother sat me down and very seriously and sincerely explained to me that I was "a little retarded." She attributed this to my delayed motor skill development when I was only a few years younger. Apparently (I have no memory of this) she had a specialist who had to train me how to do simple things like screw a nut on a bolt. So yeah basically until I was uhhhh 34 I just thought I was "a little retarded." I mean, I'm joking a bit... I wouldn't have used that term, and I know there are so many others who have far more struggles than I, in motor skills or academia or whatever. I never thought I was "retarded" but the decades prior to my diagnosis did leave me to believe I was something like retarded?
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Oct 18, 2021 18:29
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Honestly, don't get too excited about suddenly unlocking the understanding of other people. You'll quickly find that most of us, on average, are "a little retarded" and just rolling with it
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Oct 18, 2021 20:39
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It helps a lot to ask questions, especially follow-up questions. People love talking about themselves, their children, their pets, their hobbies, etc.
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Oct 18, 2021 23:27
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Pillow Armadillo posted:Honestly, don't get too excited about suddenly unlocking the understanding of other people. You'll quickly find that most of us, on average, are "a little retarded" and just rolling with it I've come to terms with the poo poo I just can't do(large gatherings or explain myself in a way that helps(there's more)), the things I can only do while drinking(gently caress you paperwork), and the things I do well at. I'm reliable and a pretty good dad, which nets me enough points that ppl cut me slack for being weird or just not often putting effort into talking to ppl. Moths ago 'gifted' classes were mentioned. I was in them for a few years before quitting. It was lame unless we were doing logic/thinking puzzles and I could just check out books of them. But I was also in special education because I didn't do classwork or homework often and was fine coasting on test and quiz scores and just having bad grades that were passing. They had me on a bunch of ritalin, so I spent the school day hyper-focused on whatever I wanted. Mostly working on ideas of how to do things when I was home. I had notebooks with Lego plans or whatever else my brain wanted. But I gave up early in middle school and only tried when tested just to make my point that school was pointless for me.
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Oct 21, 2021 03:05
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I remember in one of the times I was in "gifted" poo poo they had us illustrate a version of "the world is as big as", where you would compare the world to something like one kid used "a cowboy hat in a movie theater" or something. At the time I had so little confidence and understanding of typical poo poo from being in special ed programs that I seriously just said "all the oceans combined" and the teacher apparently was incapable of explaining metaphor. The poo poo you have to learn
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Oct 21, 2021 06:24
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I went to private school: the whole place was a "gifted program." The school didn't provide much in the way of disability services because it didn't legally have to, but they were open to letting my parents claw some accommodations for me. Most notably, they were 1) a paraprofessional my parents found who gave me ABA therapy and helped out in kindergarten (I think ABA was wrong for me on balance, but that's another post), and 2) the right to take notes on a laptop and take tests by typing or circling multiple choice answers on the test paper instead of filling in testing bubbles starting in middle school, because my bad motor coordination made me write and fill in test bubbles so slowly. We also got a math teacher to tutor me in middle school; STEM subjects have always been my worst. Finally, I got an Adderall prescription in high school, which helped me focus then, but it made my insomnia and anxiety worse in college so I don't take it anymore. Schooling was pretty good for me - teachers loved how eager I was to learn the material and follow the rules, and I thrived on the structure and clear feedback. Not at all like trying to make friends with other kids  .
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Oct 21, 2021 18:08
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I found out I was autistic late, and apparently after both my wife and mother 'knew'. I guess it makes sense because they both work(ed) in education and had both a focus on and training on kids with special education needs. Part of that training is spotting signs of ausitsm so kids have a chance of being referred and diagnosed early and can then get any support they need. Their combined reaction was "well duh" (My mum at least didn't get her training until I was grown up) I'm fairly high functioning, as in I can cope alright on my own in society, get a job and don't need much in the way of outside support. But I'm not a part of any autistic communities online or off so don't really communicate with people like me. I think I'd like to change that. One thing I do want to do is share some of my own quirks that don't seem to get mentioned a lot. One of the things I've enjoyed I'm this thread is reading people's experiences and knowing someone else out there has the same thing/experiences. Walking: I tend to walk on the balls of my feet a lot, I find it more natural and comfortable than heel first. Shoes seem to make me to heel first more, but in the house, bare foot or in slippers it's just balls down first. Images: I cannot create images in my head, like if I really try increadibly hard I can maybe summon up a small part of a bigger picture in my head for a few fleeting moments, but that's a stretch. My head exists without pictures. I can't remeber faces well (I recognise people primarily by their hairstyle god I hate it when they change their hair significantly). My dreams are very non-visual. Open plan offices: just lol. Food: I used to be a really picky eater, I'm not bad anymore and happily try things (new food is sometimes really nice who knew!) But that's for outside eating. At home I eat the same lunch every day (which I make and eat for just me) and my family has accommodated me by having the same meal every day most of the week, ie Monday is X, Tuesday is Y and so on Weekend terror: I find weekends harder than weekdays, because my weekdays are predictable, up at 6.30, coffee, sort the dogs out, go to my home office, log in, work, log off, shower, eat dinner, walk dogs, watch an hour or two of TV with my family, bed. I could happily do this every day from now until I die I think. Weekends though, there is no plan, and my family always want to do things apparently at random. I find this really hard. Shops: retail shops break my brain more than anything else. Just total visual and audio overstimulation. There's just so much stuff and it's so bright and loud and there are all these people. Please keep sharing your experiences, if nothing else I really find it helpful and enjoy it.
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Oct 24, 2021 11:09
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The images thing is called aphantasia! I'm not sure if it's linked to autism specifically but non-autistic people can definitely have it. I don't have it but I'm still real bad at faces, I think not bad enough for it to be true face-blindness but it's kind of embarrassing how many times I have to meet a person before I can recognise them reliably, and then it goes away again if it's been too long in between.
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Oct 24, 2021 12:23
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Aphantasia's one of those things that's pretty uncommon except in autistic people. I think it's about 2-4% of the population as a whole that can't see images in their mind, but about 40% of autistic people. I think there are similar numbers regarding being tongue-tied. which I recently found out was an actual, physical thing and also something that I have.
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Oct 24, 2021 20:55
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I don't have problems recognizing faces as long I see then in the context I expect them to see. Meeting people outside the space I am used to meet them can cause some distress and confusion to say the least.
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Oct 25, 2021 14:29
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Klaaz posted:I don't have problems recognizing faces as long I see then in the context I expect them to see. Meeting people outside the space I am used to meet them can cause some distress and confusion to say the least. Yepp, as someone in a relatively small city with a job that involves a lot of direct client contact, I am always worried I'm going to run into a client out in the wild and just absolutely not recognise them.
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Oct 25, 2021 14:31
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I was diagnosed with ADHD inattentive type (what they used to call ADD) two weeks ago. Apparently it's super common for someone with ASD to also have an ADHD type disorder. Getting diagnosed with something like this in your adult hood is weirdly....okay? It's more of a confirmation of a sneaking suspicion than a damning accusation. Getting medical grade amphetamines has been...a loving eyeopener. My mother told me that during my initial diagnosis with ASD, the doctor was convinced I had ADD and wanted to give me ritalin (as was the fashion in the early 00s). Now that I'm actually on Ritalin, gently caress. Is this what normal people feel like? Maybe not, but not being absolutely crippled with decision anxiety has been just peachy.
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Oct 25, 2021 14:40
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A Festivus Miracle posted:I was diagnosed with ADHD inattentive type (what they used to call ADD) two weeks ago. Apparently it's super common for someone with ASD to also have an ADHD type disorder. Getting diagnosed with something like this in your adult hood is weirdly....okay? It's more of a confirmation of a sneaking suspicion than a damning accusation. We have a thread for that. I got the ADD and my brother got the ASD, but of course he got diagnosed as a kid and I didn't until I was 26. He still likes to eye-rollingly gripe about "ugh, neurotypicals" (meaning me) and it's all I can do to not kick him in the shins.
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Oct 25, 2021 15:14
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Ritalin was horrible for me, I only focused on what I wanted so they upped the dose over and over until I didn't bother to pay attention to anything I wasn't interested in. A couple shots of bourbon and I'm set to focus on other things tho.
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Oct 25, 2021 15:19
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Yeah, they suspected I had ADD as a kid, but I didn’t react well to any medication. All it did was kill my appetite. In retrospect I guess it may have just been autistic anxiety that caused me to have trouble focusing? Something like a mix of sensory overload, social anxiety, and plain old immaturity? Most of my attention issues can be managed by diet, exercise, and coffee nowadays, so I doubt my adhd diagnosis was correct. I still have the tendency to struggle with subjects that bore me, and I have a habit of getting caught on a thought and shutting out the world while I ponder on it, causing me to miss whole chunks of an ongoing conversation.
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Oct 25, 2021 20:55
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ProperGanderPusher posted:Most of my attention issues can be managed by ... coffee... I still have the tendency to struggle with subjects that bore me, and I have a habit of getting caught on a thought and shutting out the world while I ponder on it, causing me to miss whole chunks of an ongoing conversation. This sounds extremely ADHD to me
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Oct 26, 2021 20:13
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Cast_No_Shadow posted:But I'm not a part of any autistic communities online or off so don't really communicate with people like me. I think I'd like to change that. Have you tried Autistic Twitter? It has its problems like every community, but I think you will get some good results by searching the #ActuallyAutistic tag. Watch out for the warrior parents! Some autism websites I like: Neuroclastic Thinking Person's Guide to Autism Autistic Science Person The Autistic Self-Advocacy Network's free book, Welcome to the Autistic Community Autism Against Fascism
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Oct 27, 2021 10:17
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Thank you for the information I appreciate it.
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Oct 27, 2021 17:55
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Cast_No_Shadow posted:Thank you for the information I appreciate it. The /r/aspergers subreddit is a decent spot to get info IMO. It's one of the few decent corners on the site and has genuinely helpful people and a threads with good info on how some foundations are hosed up and some aren't.
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Oct 29, 2021 17:53
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the best movie about autism is the blues brothers (1980)
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Nov 6, 2021 01:55
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mahershalalhashbaz posted:the best movie about autism is Beauty and the Beast (1991) 
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Nov 6, 2021 02:18
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_RpBi3W1Eo Watch this with the understanding that the protagonist is autistic and witness it come to life
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Nov 6, 2021 03:57
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impossiboobs posted:Aphantasia's one of those things that's pretty uncommon except in autistic people. I think it's about 2-4% of the population as a whole that can't see images in their mind, but about 40% of autistic people. I think there are similar numbers regarding being tongue-tied. which I recently found out was an actual, physical thing and also something that I have. What the heck, I never thought of any kind of correlation to being tongue tied and autistic, but I guess I'm another example of it being a thing! Mine was bad enough that I got pulled out of class in 2nd grade once and told I had it and had to start taking speech therapy for it. I don't think it helped in any way though rip.
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Nov 26, 2021 18:18
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The stuff that neurotypical people do without really thinking about it is actually surprisingly complicated! Just talking means 1) having a thought 2) working out a good way to express that thought to your audience in words 3) making the correct sounds with your mouth. No wonder so many of us need to script out our conversations in advance!
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Nov 26, 2021 18:27
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Kind of tangential to the conversation, but at least in the United States there's still a lot of work to be done w/r/t autism advocacy and acceptance. As a society, we take our language skills for granted and it blows my mind that there are PhD-havers and otherwise accomplished members of the speech and psychology community who don't presume competence due to expressive language difficulties.
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Nov 26, 2021 19:22
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Anyone have ideas of cool sensory toys for an autistic 3 1/2 year old that aren’t just the usual textured balls/blocks/etc?
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Nov 26, 2021 21:45
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Pththya-lyi posted:The stuff that neurotypical people do without really thinking about it is actually surprisingly complicated! Just talking means 1) having a thought 2) working out a good way to express that thought to your audience in words 3) making the correct sounds with your mouth. No wonder so many of us need to script out our conversations in advance! I recently had a neat interaction with someone who was really into poetry and wanted my view of poetry from the perspective of someone with autism, because their understanding was that people with autism like "denotation and literalism". Keep in mind here, this is all my personal experience, but I'd like to see if it resonates with others here. After explaining first that I don't have all the answers, people are different and I'm not some general autism representative, I went ahead and explained that for me, it's not a problem of understanding metaphor and imagery and stuff like that, it's that denotation and literalism are coping mechanisms for the problem of miscommunication. Basically, if you keep getting misunderstood, it's easy to try to fall back to denotation because that should be a pre-established common ground. We tried an exercise with me writing poetry, but I just couldn't get anything out in that classic poetry style. This changed once I expressed my frustration with the exercise, and was like "this just isn't my style, I can do some other kind of poetry like rap lyrics or something but not this". Finally, they made a very direct request regarding what they were looking for: 3 concise sentences with no wasted words, trying to express as much meaning as possible through those words by using imagery and metaphor, and without making a rhyme or anything like that. Just 3 sentences. With those clear instructions, I made something that they said was beautiful, like really impressive. I am interested to know the thread's thoughts on that. I could see explaining the difficulty with communication as just being this constantly shifting set of rules, and once I know the rules, it's not hard to follow them, but the problem is just in never being told the rules. Explaining it to people as "everyone else got to learn the game before we started, but I have to learn the game as we're playing it" feels somewhat accurate to me. How about you?
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Nov 26, 2021 22:01
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whydirt posted:Anyone have ideas of cool sensory toys for an autistic 3 1/2 year old that aren’t just the usual textured balls/blocks/etc? If you don't mind a mess, shaving cream, body wash, finger paint are all good ones, you can also put stuff in a zip lock baggie, our son found torn up bread pieces in a bag to be pretty interesting. Oh also that hydrophobic sand stuff, put it in a little plastic box or Tupperware, or a cardboard box and go nuts with it. Those plastic bubble fidget toys are another good one. Maybe a fidget cube? I've seen big ones meant for kids, I have some small plastic ones which are also good as long as you can trust your kid to not try to put it in their mouth. Edit: I don't know how practical this is but every time our son has seen an aquarium of any size with fish in it he has been super into it. cinnamon rollout fucked around with this message at 02:17 on Nov 27, 2021 |
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Nov 27, 2021 01:22
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Does he like looking at stuff? When I was a kid I could have stared at one of those little oil bubble maze moving things for hours... let's be honest I probably still would now. poo poo, I'm gonna go buy one now! I'm an adult I can do what I like! ETA: This site looks like it's full of the good poo poo Organza Quiz fucked around with this message at 01:58 on Nov 27, 2021 |
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Nov 27, 2021 01:54
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