The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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I am in my late 30s and I have discovered that I may be somewhat neurodivergent. I am suspicious of fad disorders, dislike therapy culture, and am skeptical of psychology, so I'm not your average self-diagnoser. I'm also one of the last people folks would suspect of being ND, as I am apparently "high-masking," and I successfully present as normal and likeable to other people 100% of the time--I've never had "social burnout" in front of others (though the crash does come hard afterwards when I am finally alone). While I'm still skeptical of this self-diagnosis, the explanatory and predictive power seems too specific and consistently correct for it to be cold-reading/horoscope style fluff.
I also have to laugh at myself a bit here, because I can recall more than once thinking thoughts along the lines of "how unusually open-minded I am, I can appreciate even the manifestos and effortposts of those loveable turbo-autists in the ratsphere and on The Motte." Welp.
In the grand scheme of things, this discovery is not a big deal because I'm no different than I was before I discovered this. I'm still a husband, son, father, friend, the same guy everyone has known and liked all along. It is a useful framework for understanding my own feelings and actions more clearly, though. It has made me feel less guilty about needing a lot of decompression time, and it has made me feel less pressure to socially "perform" in front of my wife (who I'm quite sure is even more ND than I am, though in different ways -- birds of a feather). It has been a weird but overall positive experience. Though I would be lying if I said there wasn't a tiny part of me that is sad that I'm not as "normal" as I once believed.
Have any of you realized this later in life? What was your experience?
The way I would describe myself (having been armchair diagnosed with autism by multiple acquaintances, much to my irritation) is that there's a difference between "kind of an autist" (guilty as charged) and "diagnosable as autistic" (The shrink I saw never brought it up, so if that's the case it isn't that obvious, and the guy was otherwise fairly dramatic with his assessments.). Whatever happened to being a bit weird, anyway?
If anything (I've always been something of a motormouth.), after getting a job at a bar I discovered that I am a lot more extroverted than I thought I was. It's still not perfect, runs hot and cold, and I'm not the best at approaching strangers, but I get bored sitting at home alone after awhile.
Mind you, there are other problems like pathological aversion to conflict and/or a screwed up attachment style, but I don't think those are an autism thing, more of a fucked up mommy issues thing (gag!).
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