This was originally supposed to be a reply, but then I thought it would be better as a reblog because of how big it is.
Deadlines aren’t quite as helpful for me.
No offense to you. I actually think it’s pretty cool that some autistics can actually survive that crap, nothing to say of feed off of it like you do.
Still tho, that ain’t me. Deadlines are just not healthy for me. Especially if they’re enforced.
When I set a deadline for myself and not tell anyone, I still don’t get anything done, as if I’ve never set the deadline to begin with, and when I remember there was a deadline, I feel needlessly guilty for it.
When I set a deadline and tell one of my guardians, they apply the kind of pressure that burns me out very quickly and don’t give me enough break time to recover (and they’re pretty exhausting people to begin with and cutting ties is not an option as they’re the only reason I have a roof over my head and not a one-way-ticket to a psycho institution that will probably get me killed as a best case scenario).
When someone else sets a deadline and my guardians are in on it, the pressure is on them too, which hurts them too and in turn makes them act even worse to the point of it being genuinely traumatizing.
(I don’t think I’ll be learning to code for a while because that’s exactly what happened to me in c#llege and the traveling salesman incident still haunts me after all these years)
It is true that I do get things done (that I normally forget to or just don’t) under an externally enforced deadline; but it only works on so many things and only for so long, and even then there is a mighty high price that I am paying for it (and the fact that deadlines as a concept remind me of c#llege does NOT help).
It’s also a big reason why I don’t talk much about my aspirations to my guardians anymore, because when I want to learn how to do a thing (like make music), they try to RUSH RUSH RUSH me into that thing that I just mentioned, which almost immediately burns me out and makes me not want to do the thing I just earlier said wanted to do (and whenever I try to explain that that’s what’s happening to me, I get the whole Gaslight, Gatekeep, Girlboss package™️ and I have no real way of knowing how much of it they’re even aware of because half the time it looks like they genuinely want to care and genuinely think they care but have no clue what the fresh heck they’re doing, and the other half is just “okay they are definitely tormenting me on purpose because their brains apparently cannot function without reducing a person who the hierarchy says is ‘inferior’ to them into a problem that has to be solved”).
I have been looking for healthier ways to make myself not procrastinate on the things I want to learn and do, but without any non-savings money of my own and with guardians who struggle to swallow their ego to understand and respect my needs and in a world where unreasonable subscription payment models are the norm, it’s really hard to even get myself in the zone of looking for things like that.
Ideally, I would like either a web browser game that I could play for free and without having my facecam spied on, or a Minecraft modpack; because those are the kinds of things I have access to (I do have the Little Big Planet games and the PlayStation3 to play them on, but I’ve never found the spoons to hook it up to the Lighthouse servers and I could never figure out the music sequencers back in the day [come to think of it, I don’t think the music sequencer was that well documented in the first place])
(And before anyone asks about Roblox, no. I’ve been there, wanted to do something, and when I found the drive, it was too late because they fell to levels of censorship, AI simping, and general corporate enshittificationism that I have zero intention of funding any further than my splurge during The Takeover [aka the last dying breath of the platform’s ethos of “What will you build?” and “Powering Imagination”] already had)
I’ve found a Minecraft modpack that’s supposed to use ComputerCraft to teach coding in Lua, which I may try when I’m ready (I’ll probably still be haunted by my c#llege days, but that’s probably a bullet I’m gonna have to bite if I’m gonna enable myself in the ultimate art form 🥲).
As for other things like drawing, animation, and music composition; I unfortunately haven’t found anything that can really naturally “hook” me into the process of learning a thing there.
Hm….A “hook”. Yeah, that’s what I need…a natural “hook”…
if video games can keep me hooked like that, what’s to stop someone from slipping in something I can use to actually make stuff, Y’know?
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