#singularity.txt

[echthr0s]

also, like... I personally think the reason there's a lot of AuDHD people is because... the whole thing is kind of one big Venn diagram. like the spectrum should probably be an AuDHD spectrum and not just two separate things. I think this is both nature (the baseline presentation of symptoms/traits) and nurture (or uh. lack of nurture; people with ADHD tend to get traumatised by caregivers, society, etc in very similar ways that autistic people do -- so a lot of our trauma-response traits are similar)

but like, you say things like that and people think you're trying to invalidate one or the other as a discrete Thing and like... I understand that people get really attached to these psychological schemas but at one point someone invented them. they're not carved in stone by the finger of God and handed down from the mountaintop as infallible truths about our bodies. hell, at one point Asperger's was a thing, remember that. a lot of people were upset that their label was retired from use, because they thought of themselves as aspies and not autistic people, but like... that's all just fluff. your symptoms and traits and whatnot didn't just magically turn into something else. they always were what they were! the DSM is not the creator of you!

anyway. ANYWAY! what I was going to say was that "I don't have ADHD" is kind of a nothingburger of a statement because if I'm autistic then I'm already in the Venn diagram that is The Spectrum of AuDHD, and I will naturally share traits with others under that spectrum, even if they're considered "strictly ADHD". I feel like our cognition in particular is wired similarly -- I have very little trouble following the thought patterns of people with ADHD or comprehending why they do x or y or z, even in the case of competing access needs ("it's annoying/stressful/whatever, but I get it"). so all things considered, why wouldn't stims also affect me similarly to ADHD people, even if it isn't a 1:1 exact replica of experience

tbh once you remind yourself that The DSM Is A Book Some Guys Wrote (that's a reductive conclusion for the purposes of brevity but I trust that the reader can fill in the nuances themselves), a lot of other shit in the psychological house of cards starts to fall apart too

[foundcarcosa]

I get frustrated on this website a lot because I think most of y’all are fundamentally well-meaning and thoughtful people but some of the stuff that gets put on my dash is............ well

[echthr0s]

I think the most interesting thing about using Persistent Drive for Autonomy as an alternate name for pathological demand avoidance is that it highlights the irony -- having a PDA profile ends up restricting one's autonomy more often than not

here's a flowchart. a kitchen task needs doing -> demand avoidance triggered -> kitchen task doesn't get done -> kitchen is dirty and therefore triggering in its own right -> am multiply dysregulated now and am avoiding kitchen -> cannot make foods I like because dirty kitchen that I now really can't do anything about because of all the dysregulation. the main thing taking a hit here IS my autonomy. I feel powerless and trapped in a negative feedback loop, and I am deprived of experiences I would like to have (making a nice meal).

and like, that's a comparatively reasonable response. but fucking explain this shit: I love playing this video game SO MUCH -> oh god. that's too many feels. feels almost... demanding. -> freeze/inertia -> I do not play the video game that I love playing so much. what the fuck, man. why.

I think a persistent drive for autonomy is a factor in PDA (I definitely feel that specific drive when it comes to social rules, for example, but I also think that's just an autism thing in general, so...??), but I don't think it's the whole of the thing. the main feature of PDA is an easily-triggered anxious response, and anxiety is yet another brutal taskmaster that narrows and darkens our lives and makes it difficult to do what we truly wish to do

[echthr0s]

I know they say self-recovery is a seasonal endeavour and not one that progresses in a straight line (there will always be a new winter to weather just when you think you've left it behind for good, etc) but it's really fucking annoying to have to witness the evidence of that. How can I have made posts like the previous one 6 years ago and then look at it today and think, "I've somehow not learned anything from this and instead have been coasting backwards this whole time, huh." Knowing that "coasting backwards" is an erroneous metaphor (it's not a loop, it's a spiral) doesn't make it feel any less like an obvious failure to launch. A failure to thrive. There is never any upward motion, just going round and round and round, unceasingly, without rest. Rest would be nice. I hear you can get that when you die. Whatever. It's not the Midnight Realm, it's just CPTSD 🙄

[echthr0s]

I am pretty sure I've never actually met a high-affective-empathy person -- everyone I know who has claimed this has turned out to be high-anxiety, and since popular understanding of empathy is... lacking, this always goes unexamined >_> -- but I thought about it and I think I could imagine what an actual high-empathy person would be like. and the answer is... spooky.

they'd be spooky. if this was the olden days, people would call them a witch. hell, people might still do it. they'd seem to have an uncanny intuition. their party trick would be to look at you, take a sip of their drink, take a deep breath, and then tell you something about yourself that would immediately piss you the fuck off and you'd never speak to them again. because they're wrong! they tried to psychoanalyse you like a fucking Crane brother and they were so blatantly wrong! ...a few years and 100 therapy sessions later, you think back and you're like "oh my god. how the fuck did they know."

my blueprint for what an actual high-empathy person is like: Heather Havrilesky ("Ask Polly"). I've been reading her for years and she has told stories like the above -- stories of alienating people with her weirdly invasive commentary, which she offered freely and with great enthusiasm, not always realising how hidden or suppressed the stuff she was revealing actually was. people generally Do Not Like having their inner worlds put on display like that, especially at large-scale social functions, and they found it suspicious and manipulative besides. to Heather, this was just her way of connection-seeking, of saying, "I see you!" fortunately, she figured out how to use this power for good -- she writes an advice column. and she always seems to get to what the Letter Writer is actually saying, which I always thought was... well, spooky.

I also think that most high-empathy people probably aren't announcing it. they've either suppressed it entirely out of social pressure to be less weird and invasive and creepy, or they are grappling with like 5 mental illnesses (due to either people's mistreatment or just the constant overstimulation). I wonder what the combination of high affective and low cognitive empathy is like; I can only imagine the inverse, because that's me, and frankly I think that's the best combination of these traits~ ;)

[echthr0s]

I also didn't like rap for most of my life. there's a tangled web of factors that caused this, which I will outline, but they all boil down to one thing.

was ostracised from my cultural community by the way I was raised (for as much as my father talked about being pro-Black, he sure didn't seem to like or trust most Black people and kept me distant from them, which is something people can definitely sense), by being "weird", and because of the perceived "whiteness" of the things I gravitated towards

social ostracisation leads to a need to feel superior towards the people who shunned you, especially when you're young and particularly vulnerable

holding such mixed messaging -- you're Black! be proud! but also you're not Black enough. Blackness is something you are! but it's also something you perform. -- is stressful especially when you don't have the understanding required to process it

you could -- and I do -- genuinely argue that being anti-rap was a traumatic reflex in this case. but where did I learn that stance in the first place? what fed me all the virtue-signaling, superior-sounding arguments that would support that stance? who benefited from me internalising the hatred that my people had learned to use against each other (which is also by design)?

whiteness. whiteness orchestrates this for its own benefit. sure, white people can hate Black people and culture. easy. but if you can get Black people to hate Black people and culture, well! NOW you're fucking #winning.

[echthr0s]

Funny that this post should come out of my queue now because I was just thinking about this concept; mainly, that certain mental-wellbeing concepts come off the way they do for the exact same reason that the stuff people say after a psychedelic trip does. In both cases, you're attempting to take a deep feeling of truth, a gnosis, that has fundamentally changed how you see the world and yourself, and you're trying to describe it to other people, you're trying to share it so other people can tap into that deep feeling that you had, and all that comes out is "it's all love, man! all of it!" or "you have to know that you're okay the way you are". And you hear how lame it sounds, but you keep saying it anyway, because you're hoping the true message will resonate deep in someone else's gut the way it did in yours.

Sometimes that does happen, but usually people have to fall into that deep feeling on their own, and sometimes that happens because they took a drug or because they did 5 years of therapy or whatever, and sometimes it happens completely at random. And then they try to tell someone else about it, and the cycle starts all over again, lol.

[echthr0s]

either I am weirdly and severely lacking in the imagination department or everyone who makes/reblogs those "when every song is about the Fictional Character/OC" posts listens to way different music than I do. I mean, I think I'm pretty imaginative. but even I cannot imagine The Character to a song like *shuffles* Obscene as Cancer by Anaal Nathrakh

even if I weed out all the metal (I think it's reasonable to assume that yeah, most of the people on those posts aren't metalheads, or at least are more the Sleep Token kind of metalhead as opposed to the Cattle Decapitation kind) I'm left with a lot of songs that are either just About Something Very Specific And Therefore Not Widely Applicable (like modern politics or some specific relationship dynamic or a historical event or the plot of a concept album or well you get the picture) or have lyrics I just cannot make any sense of. although, I guess, if the lyrics don't make sense you have full rein to somehow make those lyrics into something about The Character. I guess that's where the imagination comes in, right

my point is any time I listen to my playlist I think about those posts because it takes me being like 15 tracks in before I get to a single song that I can do the "this is about The Character now" thing with and sometimes that annoys the fuck out of me because I want to play, too >:(