“Oh you’re still continuing to mask even though covid is over?” I need it because even a regular cold or cough will severely impact my asthma and covid is much more likely to be fatal for me. Separately my asthma is much better with all the dust and grime of the city blocked out.
“But it’s so uncomfortable and unreasonable?” Yes, to you. Congrats on being abled.
I need to wash my hands everytime I want to take off my earplugs, which is to talk. So a minute before a meeting I will pause my work, go wash hands, take off earplugs, put on the headphones and get ready for the call. “It’s unreasonable to wash your hands everytime you need move your earplugs, why are you even wearing them anyway?” Yes, to you. Congrats on being abled.
Without the earplugs the noise from car horns and people moving themselves and cutlery would be too loud to let me focus. Being ripped from focus is painful and I know I will be reprimanded at work if I repeatedly spend 20-30 minutes in a shutdown after being clobbered with pain from noises.
If I don’t take them off before talking a lot, the sound of my own voice in my head will be so loud it will give me a headache.
“Why do you have two sets of sunglasses? And why are you wearing them at night”
One set is for reducing the pain of fast moving headlights that cars keep on even in the day the other is for being able to stay longer in flourescent lighting at night. If you’ll just didn’t have blinding lights in cars and warm lighting in buildings I wouldn’t need either of them.
“Why do you have a 35k Dyson, 17k AQI monitor and 3k CO2 monitor? That seems very unreasonable”
The dyson cleans the air when people suddenly burn garbage outside and alerts me when the AQI goes bad before it reaches me in the hall.
The dyson is also large and not terribly portable, so if I want to know if the smoke is cleared out of another room I leave the AQI monitor there to check. The AQI monitor also logs CO2 which is important to know when you have all the windows closed to block sound or smoke.
The last CO2 monitor is important because the levels can be very different from room to room and often I’ll need to know it in the hall and the bedroom and if I just carry the AQI device to the other room I’ll forget it there because of my executive dysfunction and will run into pollution and CO2 dizzyness without realising it.
“Dunno man seems like an unreasonable expense to me”
Yeah to you, congrats on being abled.
But it would be an unreasonable accomodation to ask society to make changes that don’t matter to them wouldn’t it? It would be far better to call everything I need to do “unreasonable” as I attempt to explain that yes it takes an unreasonable amount of effort for me to live. Many disabled people see that and end it. I still choose to be unreasonable.
What are you going to do about it?
]]>This scale might help quantify what level of anxiety you’re facing. When your anxiety is too high for too long you’re more likely to engage in maladaptive behaviour.
Anything from social media scrolling for hours on end to eating disorders or substance abuse.
Rather than this, if you find yourself at 4 or higher more than once a month, you might need to make drastic changes in your life to get away from the causes of the anxiety or actual anti-anxiety meds to deal with worry without a cause.
Phase 1 - no anxiety
Phase 2 - worry
Phase 3 - longer term worry
Phase 4 - on the verge of spiralling but still in control
Phase 5 - physical and mental manifestations complete, super anxiety mode on- can’t sit, can’t think
Will shake and stop breathing everytime they stop distracting themselves
Phase 6 - can’t breathe
Phase 7 - can’t stop shaking- emergency
Not being able to form habits is a classic autistic/adhd thing. Everything is on “manual” all the time and this can make it challenging to stick to healthy routines.
Even among us autistics we mostly don’t get to choose routines it just happens haha.
There are ways to deal with this but first I’m going to talk about what happens when you fall out of your routine.
Inevitably you will, and that’s ok. Because whenever you remember, you can just pick up that day.
We’re not going to get anywhere fighting with the way your brain works and holding yourself to a neurotypical standard of trying to “be consistent” is just not going to work the same way.
So if you’re trying to pick up something working out, accept that you will eventually stop without meaning to and whenever you do take a breath, say no thanks to the guilt and get excited that you remembered it again!
That mindset shift is the main point of this article but I’ll also very quickly talk about some techniques that work for neurodivergent people when they’re trying to make habits.
Good luck! Abandon guilt, embrace progress.
The only answer that made sense to me was that a civilisation is a place that keeps the memory of what has happened before to all the people who lived in it. To remember what foods can be eaten, what mushrooms are poisonous, what hobbies you might enjoy, what feelings people have felt and how to make sense of them
We don’t have a collective autistic memory, no civilisation that remembers how things work for us.
So I wanted to make one.
Not the absolute basic things that NTs talk about and never seem to advance out of the stone age from.
Something that’s a modern civilisation. That’s had more thought put into it that surface level things. That has a memory of adults who have gone before. So we can one day look back at our ancestors for wisdom.
It’s why when you discover something that works for you or realise something about yourself, you must write it down and share.
We have too little autistic history.
Write your experiences and be part of what might help someone else someday.
]]>First of all, I’m autistic and if a neurotypical tells you to stop stimming that person deserves to be told off. They hide it for aesthetic reasons, nonsense ones. I’m not here to tell you to do anything of that sort. There is however a good reason to pause a stim under stress sometimes, and I say that as a fully proud autistic person that’s discovered when they can be counterproductive. That’s what this article is about.
Whenever we’re stressed, autistics will subconsciously stim. What exactly this invovles depends on the individual but certain common stims are:
This is ok if you’re in a temporary burst of stress and you just wanted to get out of the feeling for the moment but you will run into more problems if you keep using these stims for a longer time.
If you find yourself finishing snacks and opening new ones, or it’s been 2+ hours and you’re still scrolling then you should know that whatever you’re doing, it’s not enough and you need to try something else even if it’s more uncomfortable in the moment.
You’re bailing yourself out of a sinking ship with a bucket that’s too small, the waters pouring in at the same rate or faster as you’re getting rid of it.
In this case, continuing to use the same stim will be harmful and will prevent you from finding a better way to deal with the issue.
For instance, is your mindset causing you stress? You’re indulging in feelings of worthlessness and it’s causing you to zone out hard? Just stop, cut off the thoughts without engaging in them. No debate no arguing or agreeing with the thought, just disenage with it.
Is your job causing you stress? Just take a break. This is another thing that goes against our instincts (but in this case our instinct is bad for us). If we’re in a stressful situation we feel like we can rest when it’s over. That you want to do all of the bad thing first and get it over with and then just rest.
Unfortunately life doesn’t work that way. Sometimes the bad things last quite a while and if we haven’t rested in between we’ll be too tired to make it out without too much damage.
Forcing yourself to rest instead will help you recover a lot and even help you do the rest of things better.
It might also get you to consider that it’s not the end of the world if you don’t do what you promised. No matter how that might feel. It’s the right choice to make if you’re overwhelmed.
You might also be missing out on solutions like asking for help or dropping the thing entirely if you feel it’s just not worth it, that you wouldn’t have been able to think of if you just tried to power through.
What should you do if your stims aren’t helping and taking you into unhealthy territory? That is something you need to discover. A good therapist can help you with this, giving you options you didn’t think possible but will be obvious in hindsight. Or perhaps you could come up with something as well, if you had a little break to think something different in.
Whatever solution you come up with, I’ll be happy for you and now you know one more way to figure out if you’re stressed.
What’s a good way to practically be able to do this when stuck in a loop?
Just get up.
Whatever you were doing, your laptop, your phone your snacks, leave them wherever they are and get up and walk in any direction, preferably out of the room you were in.
It will give you the change and start you need to think about what you’re doing, why, and what you should really do next.
]]>All my life I told myself I loved travelling. That once I grow up, only thing I wanna do is travel. I want to see the world, experience other cultures, wake up in new cities blah blah. Once I accepted and understood that I may be ND, I sat myself down and asked me, do I really love travelling? As in, do “I” love it, or is it another one of those things that I picked up from my surroundings and taught myself to love because that’s the normal thing? Because who does not like travelling, that sounds absurd.
So for me, the first step was not even why I am the way I am. The first step was, who am I? If I was the last person on this earth tomorrow, there is absolutely no one else left, I don’t need to please anyone, gain anyone’s approval, get anybody’s validation, who would I be then?
To be honest, I know now that I don’t like travelling. I do want to see the world and all of that, but waking up in a new place, not knowing what my day is going to look like, where my next meal is, is my mattress comfortable, is it clean, do I have enough clean clothes, did I get all my essentials, or did I miss something. Holy moly!! Just typing it I can feel my anxiety riling up. I don’t like travelling. And I don’t know why I fooled myself all these years, but thankfully I don’t have to do it anymore.
That doesn’t mean I will never travel again. I most definitely will. But now I also know that travelling worsens my anxiety, and it does that because of my need for order, predictability and control. So when I do decide to travel, I will make accommodations for the way I feel, and will be able to handle myself better and make it a tolerable experience, I hope.
This is why it’s important. Not so that I can label myself a certain way, but simply so that I can be honest with myself, finally.
I kind of look at it as if, all these years, I was picking up a little bit of everyone around me. And by the time I was 27, I felt like all I was, was a collage of these tiny tiny mirrors. I was a reflection of everyone else around me. And then understanding how my brain works finally gave me the permission to shed all those tiny mirrors and just be authentically me. I still absorb a lot from all the people around me, but I have a filter system in place. If it doesn’t align with my values, I don’t want to adopt it. I am no more trying to add another mirror to reflect the person in front of me to gain their approval. Because if they look at me and they see themselves, then they will definitely like me right!!
It’s been a journey back to myself, back to my forever home.
]]>For a very long time, I held myself back from experiencing self love, because I thought it will make me arrogant. But self love and arrogance are as similar as a unicorn and a horse. They may look similar, but they could not be more different. And like a unicorn, self love is magical. But unlike a unicorn, self love exists, and is very achievable.
So what really is the difference between the two? I won’t bore you with theory, but here are some examples that should help you figure out the subtle yet important difference between the two.
Self love: I am awesome! Arrogance: Only I am awesome.
Self love: I am not perfect, and I am ok with that. Arrogance: I am perfect, and only I am perfect.
Self love: I am allowed to go my way, and you are allowed to go yours, even if they are different. Arrogance: my way or high way!
Self love: we are not the same, and yet we are both important and worthy in our own way. Arrogance: I am more important than you, because xyz.
Self love: Your win is your win, let’s celebrate!! Arrogance: Your win is my loss, I will get angry.
This is not an exhaustive list, but I hope you get the gist.
Self love is fueled by individualism, celebrating uniqueness, diversity.
Arrogance on the other hand is fueled by constantly wanting to be the right one, even if it is at the expense of others emotions, and believing there can only be one right. Everything else is wrong.
So when you look deeper, self love and arrogance could not be any more different.
]]>So imagine this, just for the sake of the argument. You wake up in this world for the very first time, as an adult. You are hungry, so you step outside to grab food. You are starving, so you go to the nearest place where you can get something. Once you eat, you feel satisfied and go back home.
You wake up the next day, and to your surprise, find yourself starving again. That’s when you realise that eating once is not going to cut it for the rest of your life. You need food for survival at a regular basis. So you head out once again to eat.
Day after day, you wake up, find yourself starving, rush to the nearest place where you can find anything edible, because it is a question of your survival. If you don’t eat, you will die. You do not have the privilege right now to access the nutritional aspect of your meal.
One day someone mentions to you that you can keep some snacks at home, so that you don’t have to rush out of the door every morning simply to survive. It’s a new concept for you. You buy a bunch of snacks for the first time. The next morning that you wake up, you have some snacks at home. You still step out for your meal, but this time you go farther than you have ever been before, because you are not starving to death. You find a new food joint where the quality is better than your regular spots.
You later start learning more about food that you can keep at home. You start buying fruits, and healthier snacks. Eventually, you tell yourself you are going to learn how to cook. You start with simple things. Now you still go out to eat 5 times a week, but you are discovering new food joints and the quality of the food you take is improving.
Slowly and surely, you put in the hours, you put in the work in the kitchen and now have learnt enough that most days you cook at home. You are no Michelin star chef, but you know enough to help you keep full and satisfied while also nourishing your body.
You still step out to eat every once in a while, but these days, you do it because there is something very specific that you want to try. It’s no more a question of survival.
Now replace food with self love/respect/esteem/validation. We all need it to survive, and to thrive. But if you don’t learn how to cook for yourself, you will be stuck in this cycle of seeking it from outside day after day.
The food example seems unrealistic, because you have seen people around you cooking their meals all your life. But if someone loved themselves, they were tagged arrogant and full of themselves.
But the day you learn how to feed yourself, your life will never be the same again. It won’t happen overnight, you will have to put in the work, things will go wrong, you will have bad days. But the more you do it, the better you will get at it.
And then there will come one day, when you will cook all your meals, and won’t even realise that you did not seek anything from outside. You will realise that consuming food from outside is now totally a choice, and not a need. And that day my friend, you will find peace in your homemade khichadi, more than you would have found in any risotto ever.
]]>Trying to avoid social pain will ruin your life, instead risk going into situations and remove yourself when it doesn’t work. Seeking validation will never fill you, experiences will.
ADHDers and fear have a complicated relationship. As intimate as the one they have with self-esteem.
This manifests in a couple ways:
Through it all, they feel like if only they had enough validation, enough self-esteem that someday it will be enough and they won’t be people pleasers anymore and won’t let small things upset their day.
This is a lie.
Everything you do to focus on your self-esteem or pleasing people better will never be enough because the problem isn’t that don’t you have enough validation.
It’s that growing up without it warped your relationship with confidence to the point it became a destructive hyper focus.
Every time you have a conversation with someone, if you’re focusing on everything they do that shows disapproval, you will find many. This doesn’t mean that overall people don’t like you, though many may indeed not like you. The problem is that you run into a lot of false postives this way with the people who do actually like you.
How many times have you been having a conversation, someone does something to trigger your rejection and now you can’t hear what they’re saying anymore and you’ve disconnected from the conversation to engage in some destructive self-hate hyperfocus? Or a destructive lashing out for the perceived slight?
Again you think someday you might be confident enough to not scan their faces and voices continuously for any hint of disapproval. But haven’t you still done this in relationships where people show you over and over again that they do care?
The scanning is the problem. The checking is eroding your self confidence. And validation won’t fix it. Stopping the scan will.
The animal part of your brain has become convinced that there’s a threat to your life if you don’t keep everyone around you happy. It’s seeing threats that don’t exist and exaggerating ignorable ones into immediate crises.
You can’t make an environment safe enough for that primal part of you that wasn’t loved enough as a kid. And the attempt is killing you.
Trust that your life is not at stake with every social encounter. You will continue to run into invalidating experiences. People will genuinely not like you. You will be rejected for jobs and none of it matters.
Trying to avoid the pain of these experiences will ensure that you have none at all. Go into them, experience them, try and get hurt and remove yourself from the situations when they don’t feel right.
It’s time to close the chapter on seeking validation and open yourself up to seeking experiences and trusting that you will remove yourself from places that hurt so that you can find places that you feel more loved than hurt.
]]>Get them here
Get them here. You have to be careful if getting these off amazon/flipkart because sometimes they send you a random brand that are orange earplugs but don’t have 3M branding on the packaging.
Get them here
Get them searching for “3M PELTOR Optime 105 H10A”.