impossiblepen
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User ID: 3555
impossiblepen
1mo ago
It really depends. As a female political science major who actually wanted to nerd out about "deep topics", my dating value skyrocketed because this was a rare find even with the department. You will probably need to accept a bit of tomboyish/masculine personality or some "neurodivergence" or both if this is something you want in your partner.
impossiblepen
1mo ago
That's interesting. I'm very timid about anything GABA-based after issues both taking and getting off of gabapentin (for restless legs syndrome) some years ago. I have been experimenting with intranasal oxytocin recently, which I think is good to experiment with, but the juxtaposition between connecting with people more vs less easily is pretty jarring. Honestly I can't tell if it has a slightly addictive or unhealthy quality for me as result. It does have the affect of making me feel suddenly very aware that the unnaturalness and second-guessing that comes from my anxiety is about half of my off-puttingness on its own and people would probably rather me be relaxed and open even if that means some peculiarness showing. Hard to convince myself of that without the oxytocin in my system though, as you said state-dependent memory can be a bitch.
impossiblepen
1mo ago
Okay, that's VERY interesting because in my area meetups are skewed enough to the social skilled, extroverted people that's there's specifically a group advertising itself as the "introvert's" meetup group. To be fully honest though I haven't attended many. My limited experience suggested that the other social anxious people like myself were more likely to stay home.
impossiblepen
1mo ago
I get frustrated sometimes that I have so much social drive considering my social difficulty. I think I need to remember to pace myself and keep a good amount of my "social" craving getting met online, via podcasts, etc. even when I'm feeling more up to attempting charm. I definitely have the same experience at meetup type groups where the best case scenario is to be tolerated and maybe find one person who partly likes partly tolerates me. Though I'm sometimes reminded when interacting with people IRL for other reasons that there is a bias to the type of person likely to show up at a Meetup group, so that they're more likely to be people I have a hard time clicking with. Throw me in with a group of gamers and I have a fighting chance, though again, that is online...
I'd be curious to hear more about your exposure therapy if you're inclined (I'm moderately into nootropic/biohacking stuff), but no stress if not.
I was just thinking earlier about how much of an easier time I had in college, where socializing meant going deeper into conversation about the day's class discussion for a couple hours with the other biggest nerd in the class before heading back home into a homework hole.
impossiblepen
1mo ago
I appreciate you saying that.
In my mind, the purpose of diagnoses is to match symptoms to treatments. Even if the treatment is just lifestyle changes. So if you don't struggle significantly to function more-or-less like a regular adult, across multiple domains of life, on a consistent, long-term basis (or you don't but it's better accounted for by some other issue) than I think it's fair to not consider yourself autistic, whether or not you have some reminiscent personality traits. If you don't need treatment or special accommodation in order to live life, then you probably shouldn't be diagnosed with anything.
impossiblepen
1mo ago
Thank you, I didn't know that. It's back, with some chunks cut out to bring it down to a saner length and readability.
impossiblepen
1mo ago
Okay, I deleted my post before any comments showed up for me because I decided it was too long for anyone to engage with and I would try again when I had time to make it shorter. Whoops.
I am curious how social you are in your current life, and what portion of your social interaction is in-person vs online?
The first time I googled the phrase "autistic burnout", one of the top results was an article titled "Help, I'm getting more autistic!" I was kind of pleasantly surprised to see that other people experienced it this way--as literally "getting more autistic" when burnt out--because perceiving it as such but not thinking that was possible or typical had me kind of feeling like I was just going crazy. This was in ~2019, shortly after the scales first fell from my eyes and I realized that relating to my (long-diagnosed Asperger's) brother but being able to route around the same inclinations so that I didn't act quite like he does was not the same thing as not being autistic. It's funny to me though, that the common opinion chalks burnout up to psychological factors. As someone with co-occurring chronic fatigue etc. type of issues, it's long been obvious to me that my social function worsens when my physical health worsens, even before the autism possibility had entered my brain. Burnout, in my opinion, is as much an energy or at least medical issue as it is a psychological one.
I live in vicious merry-go-round cycles like this: I overextend myself, live inauthentically to fit in, don't take care of myself because my needs (both in terms of health issues and in terms of autism) are weird, fake, made-up, just be normal bro--and I ruin my health, burn out, withdraw, and struggle to recover until I burn every bridge so I can start over finally listening to my own instincts/intuition again about what my needs are. However, as I get older, I seem to maybe be making strides at leveraging smaller epicycles to lessen the dramatic swings of the mega cycles. The net result, at the moment, is that I have made good strides on my physical health recently* without having indulged in the formerly-prerequisite "complete social withdrawal" step. And I'm feeling pretty rapidly quite a bit more socially functional. And feeling quite a bit of whiplash.
Anyway, the reason I bring this to The Motte: I'm curious if anyone else goes through times in your lives where you are more socio-culturally-politically more "normie" and times when you are more "extreme", outlier, believe things that could get you cancelled, etc? I feel like the one-way-street is the default: you start out normie and something "radicalizes" you (lol). Has anyone else swung back and forth?
We're not in COVID times anymore: I leave my house and interact with a variety of people. I can't maintain the same psychological/social quarantine I used to that made it less stressful to hold would-make-everyone-think-I'm-a-bad-person opinions. As a result, I can feel this go-along-to-get-along opinion-normifying happening to me, and I think most people would tell me that's normal and good for me. I know for myself it is not. I will think it's fine while the dissonance eats at my subconscious until it wrecks me again at some later date. Does anyone else experience this? What do you do to hold onto things? Is this why everyone is going to church now? I would love to talk to anyone who relates at all to being in this boat.
impossiblepen
2mo ago
This is half-facetious but... is there any way to address how bad Nampa sometimes smells? We have casually considered moving there from Boise but we're afraid we'll accidentally end up somewhere that reeks when the wind comes from the right direction.
impossiblepen
2mo ago
I'll be driving from Boise proper to Nampa this evening. I have to arrive at 5:30, which means I need to leave at 4:20, though it would be a 25 minute drive with no traffic. Whether or not that constitutes "that bad" likely depends on where you are from, but for an Idahoan, it feels outrageous!
impossiblepen
3mo ago
I haven't heard from anyone who liked their "SSRI" that it wasn't actually an SNRI. After years of complete failure of several SSRIs and a mixed effect but finally some benefit from an SNRI, I wish someone would have told me much, much sooner to try Wellbutrin (though I wish they offered it in lower doses).
impossiblepen
3mo ago
Not sure how the labeling differs in other countries but in the U.S. plenty of frozen food still says you need to cook it to 165F for safety even though it's definitely not raw. I feel like it's more likely that it's an ass-covering situation than that the fried chicken was raw. Like, the breading wouldn't even be proper breading if it hadn't been cooked. It would taste and look like raw flour paste.
impossiblepen
7mo ago
You've saved me, thank you. I have the same-aged Pixel 4 and would've taken the same Pixel 10 deal, but I didn't think of the size and know a bigger phone would bother me. Although the info that it's apparently impossible to get a sane-sized phone is tempting me to ditch the smartphone life altogether (a perennial temptation.)
impossiblepen
7mo ago
This movie vaguely traumatized me as a 15-year-old girl who saw it in theatre (with my much-cooler sister, even!). You have articulated why better than I was ever able to myself. Well, the feminist aspect at least. There's also some degree of a message of "no one will ever like you if you aren't laid-back and cool; being uptight and tone-deaf is the worst thing you could ever possibly be." Like, the Stone family isn't portrayed as actually being wrong! They just were maybe insufficiently coy about it, in the movie's eyes, I think.
Weirdly I also kind of liked it, at the time, and also liked it when I recently re-watched it, twenty years later. It's very rare to find media that lays these messages so bare so honestly. I do view it as much closer to a black comedy or a family drama with comedic relief elements than an actual comedy or rom-com though.
impossiblepen
8mo ago
The CS building on my college campus genuinely smelled of unwashed nerds, and was semi-infamous for it. This is "a thing" if ever there was a thing.
impossiblepen
8mo ago
I suspect women who like to hang around a place like this aren't too likely to be offended either way.
impossiblepen
8mo ago
I do like having an angled clipper as well, mostly for hangnails.
impossiblepen
8mo ago
All this BG3 talk is giving me a craving, but I can't bring myself to embark on a new solo playthrough while I'm paused a bit into Act 3 with one friend and at the start of Act 2 with him and another friend, who are both too busy to play recently.
My husband and I just finished playing through Strange Antiquities together and really enjoyed it. Nice relaxing fare while I'm more-or-less on break from my usual semi-tryhard WoW gaming.
I've dabbled in Satisfactory for the first time recently, but think I might not be the right kind of nerd for this game. The technical aspect doesn't grab me enough; I find I'd rather just explore the world.
I'm as terrible at Marvel Rivals as ever but like it enough that I've swallowed my pride and re-downloaded it just to run AI matches to wind down late at night. That game was fun when all the other casual noobs were also still playing and just became painful once that population dropped off. If anyone knows how to get good at this kind of game, feel free to send me a link or something, since I apparently can't just move on lol.
It's about the time of year for my annual Minecraft spurt but I may try to get back into Enshrouded to semi-fill that niche instead. Or I may succeed in logging off and reading a book instead. We'll see.
impossiblepen
9mo ago
If you ever desire to dig really deep into the realm of medical treatment of autism, I highly recommend you check out a blog called EpiphanyASD, written by a German father of a severely autistic boy whom he has been able to treat to the point of being moderately functional.
I recently got a device called a Brick which allows you to block a list of apps and websites (of your choice) on your phone and you must physically swipe your phone in front of the Brick (NFC) to "un-brick" it. I have mine on my fridge which is very near the door to my garage so I can free up my phone to be limitless as I leave the house if I want.
I'm also using an app called StayFree to completely block all shorts, TikToks, Reels etc across all of my devices. It hurts a little but it has very quickly (in the span of a few weeks) reset my habits to where I spend much less time on any kind of scrolling feed website even when they are unlocked.
The phone lock box idea sounds interesting to get some time periods of fully disengaging. I can set up a mode for the Brick to block everything but the literal phone function but I dislike the feeling of picking up my phone only to remember that the dopamine things aren't in there at the moment so having it physically quarantined sounds kind of appealing for occasional use.
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