Will increasing internal awareness make things worse?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pclyc4sjV8k&t=3s

Diary of an ASD Squirrel. Day 505 , Sunday 16/03/2025

Sunday started around 07:30 & has been a quiet & relaxed day.

I’ve read a little & we binge watched ‘The Long Shadow’.

We had lasagne for tea & finished the evening with an episode of ‘Poirot’, the TV equivalent of a warm bath.

Final Thoughts.

Some days go really slowly, some in the blink of an eye. Today was one of the latter!

Thank you to all those who are helping me on this journey, in a myriad different ways. I am thankful to each & every one of you!

@actuallyautistic
#TimsASDjourney #ActuallyAutistic #Neurospicy #TheMammutMoves

I've just watched Temple Grandin with a close #ActuallyAutistic friend. It moved us both to tears and brought back memories I'd repressed; but for us both it was an utterly wonderful film.

Any other recommendations of movies for autistic folk?

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1278469/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_7_nm_1_in_0_q_temple%2520grandin

My fear isn’t that it’s not good enough, it’s that it won’t get across what I’m actually intending and therefore no one will get anything out of it at all.

The "Square Hole", but spoons

Today were eating soup with... yay, a spoon!
Then we're eating mash potatoes with... yay, a spoon!
Then we're eating steak with... yay, a spoon!
Then we have a salad and we eat it with... yay, a spoon!
Rotisserie chicken? Yay, a spoon!

As an #ActuallyAutistic person I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed with all the changes going on... In the past few weeks I've...

- Deleted my Facebook account and switched to the Fediverse as my main social media presence.
- Moved from Mastodon to Sharkey within the Fediverse.
- Been asked to manage the Pixelfed account of an event I volunteer at and have started doing that.
- Been asked to take over as admin of the private Mastodon instance of another organisation I volunteer for.
- Moved my primary email service from GMail to Proton Mail.
- Ditched Firefox in favour of Vivaldi.
- Ditched DuckDuckGo in favour of Qwant.
- Ditched WhatsApp while most groups I was in moved to Signal or Discord.
- Started a new TTRPG campaign using Pathfinder 2e instead of D&D 5e.
- And to top it all off, in a few days I'll be trading in my Tesla for a Volvo.

I really feel like I'm gonna need a while to process this all and find my bearings again - the question is, will the world let me? Everything seems to be in flux nowadays... I just want things to calm down for a bit so I can mentally catch up, you understand?

Article about how high ambient noise levels, and the noise types, impact human health.

I found this very reassuring to hear that it’s not just those of us who are hypersensitive to sound (like many #ActuallyAutistic people) who are impacted by high noise levels around us.

Hoping (but not getting hopes too high!) this might lead to quieter places one day for all of us.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crmjdm2m4yjo

New Article! New UK Government Education Hub Now Overtly Discriminates Against Neurodivergent Children

https://emergentdivergence.com/2025/03/16/new-uk-government-education-hub-now-overtly-discriminates-against-neurodivergent-children/

#ActuallyAutistic #Autism #Autistic #ADHD #AuDHD #EHCP #EHCPsupport #SEN #SENreform #SEND #SpecialEducationalNeeds #neurodiversity #neurodivergent @neurodiversity @actuallyautistic @autisticadvocacy.a.gup.pe @adhd @mentalhealth@newsmast.community @mentalhealth@a.gup.pe

Acceptance of autism comes with forgiveness for allistics' inability to empathize. Everyone doesn't hate me; they're not all bad; I'm not so bad… But this also comes with acceptance of the truth of my loneliness: the cause of the existentially threatening trauma. Confirmation that I really have always been so alone and always will be. The obvious reason nobody wants to be #actuallyAutistic.

I'm often at a loss for words for things happening inside my body. Physical things, emotional things. I wish I could express them to you but I've not figured out how. I feel hope and despair at once. I feel alienated and overwhelming compassion for people. The words I use juxtapose them but inside me they are one. What should I call these things?
(We can talk about physical stuff another time.)
@actuallyautistic #actuallyautistic #feelings #mentalhealth #buddhism (?) #alexithymia (?)

Am I the only auDHD person who has very bizarre and nonsensical dreams unlike what others describe their dreams?

@actuallyautistic

Much of the difficulty in realising and accepting that we are autistic much later in life comes, in part, from the fact that we have been exposed to so many ableist stereotypes of it through our lifetime. The rest from the reality that much of the information we may have, is either outdated, or such that we struggle to see ourselves in it. It means that we have to spend a considerable amount of effort both in digging out and dealing with our internalised ableism, a somewhat ongoing process for many of us, and also educating ourselves on the reality of what autism is.

Such education quickly reveals that what it mostly is, is a spectrum of difference. It really is true that no two of us are alike. It may only be in the difference in which something affects us, its intensity, or the degree to which it affects our ability to function or cope. Or it may be in the aspects that we experience that others don't and vice versa. We also have to realise that whilst autism is often described by the way that it manifests, in terms of the various traits associated with it. That doesn't mean that you have to manifest all those traits to be autistic. Nor does it mean that there is one and only one way that those traits can look. Each of us, in this, really are different.

To further muddy these waters. The older we are when we begin this process, the longer we've obviously lived. In other words, the longer we have lived with what being autistic meant for us. Not by name obviously, but in terms of the ways we've learnt, as often as not the hard way, what we can and can't do, how we struggle, when we don't, our strengths and our weaknesses. And we haven't just ignored this, as much as possible we've built our lives around it. Obviously not ideally, we didn't always have the knowledge to be able to set the right boundaries, or the paths we should, or shouldn't walk down, regardless of what others wanted from us or even how we thought we should be. But still, as much as we could, we walked a path that was a reaction to what we were. That meant that over time we could learn to hide and compensate, to try and take advantage of our strengths and fear our weaknesses, adjust and compensate. In fact to continually layer the products of false awareness and understandings, of guess work and trial and error, over our behaviours, like papering over a crack, until the original could hardly be seen any more and we could at least get by.

This is why it can be so difficult to realise that you are autistic and everything about it now. So much of what is described is the cause of our behaviour today, but not the behaviour itself. And seeing past that to the root of the behaviour and the way we are and that it can still be different from how others are, is the reason why it takes so long and why so much of it, is still an ongoing process.

#Autism
#ActuallyAutistic

I'm finding it hard to hear people today and I'm sure it's auditory processing difficulties.
#Autism #autistic #neurodiverse @actuallyautistic #AutisticBurnout #ActuallyAutistic

Diary of an ASD Squirrel. Day 504 , Saturday 15/03/2025

Saturday started around 7am with the sun streaming in thru the blinds in my bedroom.

It’s been a quiet day with not much to differentiate it from most days.

I managed to read some more of my book, this time without any startling revelations so that’s probably a relief to regular readers!

Cleaned some more gravel, but my hands are really not enjoying the whole cold water in cold weather thing so after about 20 minutes I’d had enough.

Played some ‘Ghost of Tsushima’ once my hands had warmed up & the chilblains had passed.

Mrs S got home around 1pm so we had a fairly light lunch then caught up on some TV.

We had a Chinese takeaway for tea - I went for duck in plum sauce but I had forgotten that the takeaway we chose doesn’t do it very well - it was all soggy batter in a gelatinous goo.

While the food was somewhat 2nd rate the movie that accompanied it was rather good, we went for ‘Gladiator 2’ which is a massive homage to the original but wasn’t at all bad as a sequel. It did not move me the way that ‘Gladiator’ did but then that was an awesome movie, one of those that is a true experience not simply a Friday night at the flicks!

Final Thoughts.

I was looking for something uplifting to end with & read that the chairperson of every political party in Greenland had signed a missive to the orange oaf essentially telling him to sod off & keep his pussy groping paws off their homeland! Go Greenland!

Thank you to all those who are helping me on this journey, in a myriad different ways. I am thankful to each & every one of you!

@actuallyautistic
#TimsASDjourney #ActuallyAutistic #Neurospicy #TheMammutMoves

Imagine trying to learn something that requires very precise reproduction of minute visual details and you have like level 4½ aphantasia...